Software Testing

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.

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them.

You’ve “gone agile” and have been relatively successful. So, how do you know how well your team is really doing? And how do you continuously improve your practices? When things get rocky, how do you handle the challenges without reverting to old habits? You realize that the path to high-performance agile testing isn’t easy or quick. It also helps to have a guide. So consider this workshop your guide to ongoing, improved, and sustained high-performance. Join Bob Galen and Mary Thorn as they share lessons from their most successful agile testing transitions.

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.

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.

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.