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Test Design

Tutorials

Large-scale and complex testing projects can stress the testing and automation practices we have learned through the years, resulting in less than optimal outcomes. However, a number of innovative ideas and concepts are emerging to better support industrial-strength testing for big projects. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and presents strategies for organizing and managing testing on large projects. Learn how to design tests specifically for automation, including how to incorporate keyword testing and other techniques.

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MB A Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing
Michael Bolton, DevelopSense
Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

You're under tight time pressure and have barely enough information to proceed with testing. How do you test quickly and inexpensively, yet still produce informative, credible, and accountable results? Rapid Software Testing, adopted by context-driven testers worldwide, offers a field-proven answer to this all-too-common dilemma. In this one-day sampler of the approach, Michael Bolton introduces you to the skills and practice of Rapid Software Testing through stories, discussions, and "minds-on" exercises that simulate important aspects of real testing problems.

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MC Getting Started with Risk-Based Testing
Dale Perry, Software Quality Engineering
Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

Whether you are new to testing or looking for a better way to organize your test practices, understanding risk is essential to successful testing. Dale Perry describes a general risk-based framework—applicable to any development lifecycle model—to help you make critical testing decisions earlier and with more confidence. Learn how to focus your testing effort, what elements to test, and how to organize test designs and documentation. Review the fundamentals of risk identification, analysis, and the role testing plays in risk mitigation.

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MD Introduction to Selenium and WebDriver NEW
Alan Richardson, Compendium Developments
Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

Selenium is an open source automation tool for test driving browser-based applications. WebDriver, the newly-introduced API for Selenium against which tests are written in Java, contains classes including ChromeDriver, AndroidDriver, and iPhoneDriver. Sometimes test authors find the API daunting and their initial automation code brittle and poorly structured. In this introduction, Alan Richardson provides hints and tips gained from his years of experience both using WebDriver and helping others improve their use of the tool.

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MF Application Performance Testing: A Simplified Universal Approach SOLD OUT
Scott Barber, SmartBear
Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

In response to increasing market demand for high performance applications, many organizations implement performance testing projects, often at great expense. Sadly, these solutions alone are often insufficient to keep pace with emerging expectations and competitive pressures. With specific examples from recent client implementations, Scott Barber shares the fundamentals of implementing T4APM™, a simple and universal approach that is valuable independently or as an extension of existing performance testing programs.

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MH Take a Test Drive: Acceptance Test-Driven Development NEW
Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans
Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

The practice of agile software development requires a clear understanding of business needs. Misunderstanding requirements causes waste, slipped schedules, and mistrust within the organization. Jared Richardson shows how good acceptance tests can reduce misunderstanding of requirements. A testable requirement provides a single source that serves as the analysis document, acceptance criteria, regression test suite, and progress-tracker for any given feature. Jared explores the creation, evaluation, and use of testable requirements by the business and developers.

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MK Being Creative: A Visual Testing Workshop SOLD OUT NEW
Andy Glover, Exco InTouch
Mon, 10/13/2014 - 1:00pm

The reality is that technology is complicated. As testers, we are challenged with complicated problems that need solving. Andy Glover presents a hands-on workshop that describes a new way of looking at testing problems and ideas. Andy demonstrates how thinking with pictures can help testers discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve their ability to share their insights with others.

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MN Test Automation Patterns: Issues and Solutions SOLD OUT
Seretta Gamba, Steria Mummert ISS GmbH
Mark Fewster, Grove Software Testing Ltd.
Mon, 10/13/2014 - 1:00pm

Automating system level test execution can result in many problems. It is surprising to find that many people encounter the same problems yet are unaware of common solutions that worked well for others. These problem/solution pairs are called “patterns.” Seretta Gamba recognized the commonality of these test automation issues and their solutions and, together with Mark Fewster, has organized them into Test Automation Patterns. Although unit test patterns are well known, Seretta’s and Mark’s patterns address more general issues.

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MO Exploratory Testing Explained SOLD OUT
Paul Holland, Doran Jones, Inc.
Mon, 10/13/2014 - 1:00pm

Exploratory testing is an approach to testing that emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of testers to continually optimize the value of their work. Exploratory testing is the process of three mutually supportive activities—learning, test design, and test execution—done in parallel. With skill and practice, exploratory testers typically uncover an order of magnitude more problems than when the same amount of effort is spent on procedurally-scripted testing.

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MP Jon Bach: On Testing NEW
Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.
Mon, 10/13/2014 - 1:00pm

Jon Bach has been in testing for twenty years. Is testing in 2014 different from testing in 1994? If you’ve been in the business that long, maybe you’ve seen it move from a little bit of automation and tooling to almost total automation and tooling. Maybe you’ve seen lab setups go from hours of loading OS images on “boat anchor” boxes to virtual, on-demand, scalable cloud provisioning in seconds. Maybe you think testing is dead because we live in a DevOps world where it’s good enough to run a happy path checklist.

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TA Critical Thinking for Software Testers
Michael Bolton, DevelopSense
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker. Critically thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master.

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TB Successful Test Automation: A Manager’s View SOLD OUT
Mark Fewster, Grove Software Testing Ltd.
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

Many organizations invest substantial time and effort in test automation but do not achieve the significant returns they expected. Some blame the tool they used; others conclude test automation just doesn't work in their situation. The truth, however, is often very different. These organizations are typically doing many of the right things but they are not addressing key issues that are vital to long term test automation success.

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TC Fundamental Test Design Techniques NEW
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

As testers, we know that we can define many more test cases than we will ever have time to design, execute, and report. The key problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset from the almost infinite number of tests available that will find a large percentage of the defects. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class testing, boundary value testing, decision tables, and state-transition diagrams. Explore examples of each of these techniques in action. Don’t just pick test cases at random.

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TD Exploratory Testing Is Now in Session
Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

The nature of exploration, coupled with the ability of testers to rapidly apply their skills and experience, make exploratory testing a widely used test approach—especially when time is short. Unfortunately, exploratory testing often is dismissed by project managers who assume that it is not reproducible, measurable, or accountable. If you have these concerns, you may find a solution in a technique called session-based test management (SBTM), developed by Jon Bach and his brother James to specifically address these issues.

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TE Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps SOLD OUT NEW
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices called DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, and rapid deployments. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected.

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TG Testing Cloud Services SOLD OUT NEW
Martin Pol, Polteq Testing Services BV
Jeroen Mengerink, Polteq Testing Services B.V.
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

Cloud computing is rapidly changing the way systems are developed, tested, and deployed. New system hosting capabilities—software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—are forcing us to review and revise our testing processes. At the same time, cloud computing is affording us opportunities to employ new test tooling solutions, which we call testing as a service (TaaS). In this technical session, Martin Pol and Jeroen Mengerink focus on testing SaaS systems, describing relevant IaaS and PaaS capabilities along the way.

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TH Planning, Architecting, Implementing, and Measuring Automation SOLD OUT NEW
Mike Sowers, Software Quality Engineering
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

In automation, we often use several different tools that are not well integrated. These tools have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture, and without considering the need for integration. As a result, both efficiency and effectiveness suffer, and additional time and money are spent. Ensuring that tools we currently have, or the tools we develop or acquire in the future, work well with other application lifecycle tools is critical to our testing team’s success.

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TK Pairwise Testing Explained NEW
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 1:00pm

Many software systems are required to process huge combinations of input data, all of which deserve to be tested. Since we rarely have time to create and execute test cases for all combinations, the fundamental problem in testing is how to choose a reasonably-sized subset that will find a large percentage of the defects and can be performed within the limited time and budget available. Pairwise testing, the most effective test design technique to deal with this problem, is unfortunately not understood by many testers.

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TL Security Testing for Test Professionals
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 1:00pm

Today’s software applications are often security critical, making security testing an essential part of a software quality program. Unfortunately, most testers have not been taught how to effectively test the security of the software applications they validate. Join Jeff Payne as he shares what you need to know to integrate effective security testing into your everyday software testing activities. Learn how software vulnerabilities are introduced into code and exploited by hackers. Discover how to define and validate security requirements.

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TM End-to-End Testing with the Heuristic Software Test Model NEW
Paul Holland, Doran Jones, Inc.
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 1:00pm

You have just been assigned a new testing project. Where do you start? How do you develop a plan and begin testing? How will you report on your progress? Paul Holland shares new test project approaches that enable you to plan, test, and report effectively. Paul demonstrates ideas, based on the Heuristic Software Test Model from Rapid Software Testing, that can be directly applied or adapted to your environment. In this hands-on tutorial, you’ll be given a product to test.

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TP Introducing Keyword-Driven Test Automation SOLD OUT
Hans Buwalda, LogiGear
Tue, 10/14/2014 - 1:00pm

In both agile and traditional projects, keyword-driven testing—when done correctly—has proven to be a powerful way to attain a high level of automation. Many testing organizations use keyword-driven testing but aren't realizing the full benefits of scalability and maintainability that are essential to keep up with the demands of testing today's software. Hans Buwalda describes the keyword approach, and how you use it to can meet the very aggressive goal that he calls the "5 percent challenge"―automate 95 percent of your tests with no more than 5 percent of your total testing effort.

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Keynotes

K2 Balancing the Crusty and Old with the Shiny and New
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Wed, 10/15/2014 - 10:00am

In his journeys, Bob Galen has discovered that testing takes on many forms. Some organizations have no automated tests and struggle to run massive manual regression tests within very short iterative releases. Other organizations are going “all in”―writing thousands of acceptance tests in Gherkin. The resulting imbalance in their testing approaches undermines an organization’s efficiency, effectiveness, and delivery nimbleness. Bob shares ideas to bring balance to testing. He explores the choices: manual vs. automated testing, designed and scripted test cases vs.

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K3 Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
Wed, 10/15/2014 - 4:30pm

Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes. 

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K5 Softwarts: Security Testing for Muggles
Paco Hope, Cigital
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 4:15pm

Security testing is often shrouded in jargon and mystique. Security conjurers perform arcane rites using supposed “black hat” techniques and would have us believe that we cannot do the same. The fact is that security testing “magic” is little more than specialized application of exploratory test techniques we already understand. In this Defense against the Black Hats, Paco Hope dispels the myth that security testing is a magical art. By deconstructing security activities into techniques we already know well, we expand our testing.

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Concurrent Sessions

W2 Testing Lessons Learned from Sesame Street
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Wed, 10/15/2014 - 11:30am

Rob Sabourin has discovered testing lessons in the Simpsons, the Looney Tunes gang, Great Detectives, Dr. Seuss, and other unlikely places, but this year he journeys to Sesame Street. Sesame Street teaches basic life skills in a safe, entertaining, memorable style. Rob uses them to solve stubborn technical, management, and people-related testing problems. Oscar the Grouch guides us through failure mode analysis. Ernie and Bert help us tackle problems from different perspectives. Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus teach about persistence, rhetoric, and bug advocacy.

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W6 Testing Compliance with Accessibility Guidelines
Anish Krishnan, Hexaware Technologies, Ltd
Wed, 10/15/2014 - 11:30am

Currently, 2.4 billion people use the Internet, and about 10 percent of the world’s population has some form of disability. This means millions of potential users will have difficulty accessing the Internet. Thus, accessibility testing should not be ignored. Anish Krishnan discusses the importance of accessibility testing, reasons for considering accessibility issues while designing, and international Web accessibility laws.

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W8 Virtualization: Improve Speed and Increase Quality
Clint Sprauve, HP
Wed, 10/15/2014 - 1:45pm

Many development and test organizations must work within the confines of compressed release cycles, various agile methodologies, and cloud and mobile environments for their business applications. So, how can test organizations keep up with the pace of development and increase the quality of their applications under test? Clint Sprauve describes how service virtualization and network virtualization can help your team improve speed and increase quality.

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W9 Functional Testing with Domain-Specific Languages
Tariq King, Ultimate Software
Wed, 10/15/2014 - 1:45pm

Developing high-quality software requires effective communication among various project stakeholders. Business analysts must elicit customer needs and capture them as requirements, which developers then transform into working software. Software test engineers collaborate with business analysts, domain experts, developers, and other testers to validate whether the software meets the customer’s expectations. Misunderstandings between different stakeholders can introduce defects into software, reducing its overall quality and threatening the project’s success.

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W10 Agile Development and Testing in a Regulated Environment
John Pasko, Karl Storz Imaging
Wed, 10/15/2014 - 1:45pm

One of the Agile Principles states that working software is the primary measurement of success―generally measured by the level of customer satisfaction. So, how do you measure “customer satisfaction” when it is based on successful surgical outcomes? Join John Pasko as he takes you through a case study of the design, development, testing, and release of a complex system—integrating embedded software with hardware—for a surgical product which met stringent FDA standards and regulations.

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W15 End-to-End Test Automation with Open Source Technologies
Ramandeep Singh, QA InfoTech
Wed, 10/15/2014 - 3:00pm

As organizations continue to adopt agile methodologies, testers are getting involved earlier in product testing. They need tools that empower them to manage varied test automation needs for web services, web APIs, and web and mobile applications. Open source solutions are available in abundance. However, most of these solutions are independent and not integrated, significantly increasing the tester’s work around test automation development. Ongoing test automation suite evolution and building a robust regression test suite have become cumbersome.

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T2 Release the Monkeys: Testing Using the Netflix Simian Army
Gareth Bowles, Netflix
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 9:45am

The cloud is all about redundancy and fault tolerance. Since no single component can guarantee 100 percent uptime, we have to design architectures where individual components can fail without affecting the availability of the entire system. But just designing a fault tolerant architecture is not enough. We have to constantly test our ability to actually survive these “once in a blue moon” failures. And the best way is to test in an environment that matches production as closely as possible or, ideally, actually in production.

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T4 Top Ten Attacks to Break Mobile Apps
Jon Hagar, Grand Software Testing
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 9:45am

To aid development in the mobile and smartphone app world, testers must do more than simply test against requirements; they should include attack-based testing to find common errors. In the tradition of James Whittaker’s How to Break Software books, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to mobile app software, defines the domain of mobile app software, and examines common industry patterns of product failures. Jon then shares a set of ten software test attacks, based on the most common modes of failure in native, web-based, and hybrid apps.

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T8 Career and Organizational Development Within a Software Testing Environment
Nate Shapiro, Blizzard Entertainment
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 11:15am

Being a software tester has its own unique set of challenges. To help testers overcome these challenges, it is vital to set up a system where employees have available a number of development opportunities, including on-the-job mentorship, coaching, classroom training, and a defined career path. Nate Shapiro outlines how the quality assurance department at Blizzard Entertainment is investing in its employees by implementing a program to help create and sustain long-term careers in software testing.

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T9 Automation Abstractions: Page Objects and Beyond
Alan Richardson, Compendium Developments
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 11:15am

When you start writing automation for your projects, you quickly realize that you need to organize and design the code. You will write far more than “test” code; you also will write abstraction code because you want to make tests easier to read and maintain. But how do you design all this code? How do you organize and structure it? Should you use a domain specific language? Should you go keyword driven or use Gherkin? Should you use page objects with POJO or Factories? Do you create DOM level abstractions? Where do domain models fit in?

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T10 Bridging the Gap in Mobile App Quality
Costa Avradopoulos, Capgemini Consulting
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 11:15am

Today, an alarming 65 percent of mobile apps—more than 1.3 million—have a 1-star rating or less. Why? The majority of development organizations have neither the right processes nor access to the devices required to properly test mobile applications. If not addressed, these deficiencies will have a major impact on the quality of the apps the organization develops. In addition, users are intolerant of problems and quick to switch to competing apps. Costa Avradopoulos explores how to address the unique challenges of mobile testing, starting with adopting the right test strategy.

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T14 Speed Up Testing with Monitoring Tools
Jim Hirschauer, AppDynamics
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 1:30pm

The software development lifecycle is a pretty complex process in many organizations. However, by using monitoring tools and methodologies, you can accelerate testing and release higher quality code―the cornerstone of rapid software delivery. These tools provide immediate feedback with actionable information so you can address problems as they are detected instead of waiting until the end of a testing cycle. Earlier detection, combined with tests that are a better representation of production workloads, are key to releasing better code, faster.

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T15 Making Your Test Automation Transparent
Subodh Parulekar, AFour Technologies, Inc.
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 1:30pm

Business analysts, developers, and testers are sometimes not on the same page when it comes to test automation. When there is no transparency in test cases, execution, coverage, and data, review of automation by all stakeholders is difficult. Making automation scripts easily readable and writable allows stakeholders to better participate. Subodh Parulekar describes how his team dealt with these issues.

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T16 Ensuring the Performance of Mobile Apps—on Every Device and Network
Steve Weisfeldt, Neotys
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 1:30pm

Applications today are accessed over myriad network configurations—wired, wireless, and mobile networks. Deployed applications may deliver different content and functionality depending on whether the user is accessing it via a browser, smartphone, or tablet. Steve Weisfeldt explains how these combinations significantly impact the performance of applications, creating a previously unseen set of testing challenges.

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T17 Build Your Custom Performance Testing Framework
Prashant Suri, Rackspace
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 1:30pm

Performance testing requires knowledge of systems architecture, techniques to simulate the load equivalent of sometimes millions of transactions per day, and tools to monitor/report runtime statistics. With the evolution from desktop to web and now the cloud, performance testing involves an unparalleled combination of different workloads and technologies. There is no one tool available—either commercial or open source—that meets all performance testing needs.

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T19 Before You Test Your System, Test Your Assumptions
Aaron Sanders, Agile Coach
Thu, 10/16/2014 - 3:00pm

Do you find yourself discussing with your peers what you think the system you’re building should do? Do you argue over what the users want? Do discussions wind up in a heated debate? This result indicates that no shared understanding exists about the system. With a lack of shared understanding, it’s easy to fall into the trap of making assumptions about system functionality, who the users will be, and how to build the system. These assumptions introduce errors into the requirements and design—long before a single line of code is written.

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