Test Manager

Testing a game console isn’t all fun and games. However, with more than 50 million Xbox 360 consoles sold, and the amazing success of the Kinect sensor, it’s certainly a hotbed of excitement for software developers and testers alike. Veteran tester Alan Page is having a blast on the Xbox console team and shares an insider’s view of what it’s like to test one of the most popular entertainment systems ever created. Learn the details of testing the Xbox from the guts of the operating system to the latest applications—and everything in between.

And now for something completely different...Monty Python's Flying Circus revolutionized comedy and brought zany British humor to a worldwide audience. However, buried deep in the hilarity and camouflaged in its twisted wit lie many important testing lessons—tips and techniques you can apply to real world problems to deal with turbulent projects, changing requirements, and stubborn project stakeholders.

If you've worked on an agile project, delivering to production on a regular basis, then you've struggled with the challenge of fitting in all the big tasks—performance, security, usability, and compatibility testing. To make matters worse, over time it becomes more and more challenging just to fit in all the functional testing that needs to take place, and that's even with rigorous unit and acceptance test automation. So how do you fit all that testing into the backlog when it doesn't tie nicely to one specific feature?

Sometime in your career as a test manager, you’ll be assigned to lead the effort for a program so large that the CEO and board of directors monitor it. These are programs that bet the organization’s future and come with a high degree of risk, visibility, pressure, and fixed deadlines. Internal audit and external third-party reviews become de rigueur. Your upstream partners—analysis, design, development, and suppliers—all appear (at least to you) to miss their deadlines with no apparent consequences.

Model-based testing can be a powerful alternative to just writing test cases. However, modeling tools are specialized and not suitable for everyone. On the other hand, keyword-driven test automation has gained wide acceptance as a powerful way to create maintainable automated tests, and, unlike models, keywords are simple to use. Hans Buwalda demonstrates different ways that keyword testing and models can be combined to make model-based testing more readily accessible. Learn how you can use keywords to create the models directly.

Historically, performance tests are run long after the code has been checked in, making performance issues time consuming to resolve and thus not a good fit in the agile process. Ivan Kreslin presents a solution that he’s implemented to address this problem. Learn how Ivan integrates the functionality in Microsoft Performance Profiling tools into a test automation framework to capture performance-related issues during continuous integration.

For decades, software development tools and methods have evolved with an emphasis on modeling. Standards like UML and SysML are now used to develop some of the most complex systems in the world. However, test design remains a largely manual, intuitive process. Now, a significant opportunity exists for testing organizations to realize the benefits of modeling. Adam Richards describes how to leverage model-based testing to dramatically improve both test coverage and efficiency—and lower the overall cost of quality.

Many development organizations are experimenting—but getting mixed results—with lean development techniques. As a test or development manager, you have the power to help eliminate defects—the largest source of waste in development—and the enormous rework costs they incur. Bill Curtis discusses Jidoka, another pillar of lean, which uses automation to help developers detect and eliminate defects during development.

As organizations implement their mobile strategy, testing teams must support new technologies while still maintaining existing systems. Melissa Tondi describes the major trends and innovations in mobile technology, usage, and equipment that you should consider when transitioning existing test teams or starting new ones.

Test status reporting is a key factor in the success of test projects. Stephan Obbeck shares some ideas on how to communicate more than just a red-yellow-green status report to executive management and discusses how the right information can influence their decisions. Testers often create reports that are too technical, losing crucial information in a mountain of detailed data. Management needs to make decisions—based on data they do understand—that support the test project.

Today, consumers spend more time on mobile apps than on the web. With this increased demand and paradigm shift toward mobile devices, the role of the software tester is evolving and becoming more complex. Since mobile testing is a relatively new domain, software testers face the challenge of understanding not only what to test but how to test. Clint Sprauve focuses on real world strategies and techniques for mobile app testing including device provisioning, mobile network virtualization, multi-OS platform coverage, and hybrid app testing.

The practice of agile software development requires a clear understanding of business needs. Misunderstanding requirements causes waste, slipped schedules, and mistrust within the organization. Developers implement their perceived interpretation of requirements; testers test against their perceptions. Disagreement can arise about implementation defects, when the cause is really a disagreement about the requirement. Ken Pugh shows how acceptance tests decrease requirements misunderstandings by both developers and testers.

Feeling fatigued, frustrated, and stressed at work? Wondering how you can stay relevant and highly valued in this fast-changing software development domain? David Rosskopf shares how you can become more productive through a non-traditional approach for automating testing—and much more. David, a self-admitted automation addict, confesses he is easily bored with repetitive tasks and frustrated with inefficiencies. Learn from David how to identify inefficiencies in your workplace and how to develop the right tool to fit each need.

Crowdsourcing has become widely acknowledged as a productivity solution across numerous industries. However, for companies incorporating crowdsourcing into existing business practices, specific issues must be addressed: What problem are we trying to solve? How do we control the process? How do we incentivize people to achieve our goals? Ultimately, the key to successfully employing a crowdsourcing model is to move beyond the realm of the “mob” to create an engaged, interactive community of diverse and skilled professionals.

If you work in a large-scale environment, you know how difficult it is to have all the systems “code complete” and ready for testing at the same time. In order to fully test end-to-end scenarios, you must be able to validate results in numerous systems. But what if all those systems are not available for you to begin testing? Chris Reites describes “decoupled testing,” an enterprise-level solution for managing interface data for capture, injection, simulation, and comparison all along your testing paths.

We all know the power of Google—or do we? Two types of people use Google: normal users like you and me, and the not-so-normal users—the hackers. What types of information can hackers collect from Google? How severe is the damage they can cause? Is there a way to circumvent this hacking? As  a security tester, Kiran Karnad uses the GHDB (Google Hacking Database) to ensure their product will not be the next target for hackers.