STARWEST 2017 - User Experience (UX) Testing

The skill to self-manage our testing work and our learning—making learning and reflection a habit—is what differentiates skilled exploratory testing from simply putting random testing activities together. Maaret Pyhäjärvi says that exploratory testing treats test design, test execution, and learning as parallel, mutually supportive activities—with the goal of discovering things that we don’t know we don’t know. Exploratory testing frames our thinking about the system and engulfs the idea of creating artifacts to support testing. Join Maaret to experience exploratory testing hands-on and...

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. Start by creating three raw lists—product coverage outline, potential risks, and test ideas—that help ensure...

Substantial confusion exists about the roles and responsibilities of test managers in an agile software development process. Agile seeks to streamline project management and leadership under the role of a ScrumMaster. So, what does this mean for test managers? How do they stay involved in the process? What role do they fill? Is it possible that test managers are no longer needed? Join Jeffery Payne for a collaborative dialog on the challenges test managers face in an agile model. Learn the pros and cons of a variety of test management models he has seen used by organizations that have...

Modern software products tend to have a rich UI that supports many user workflows, all of which need to be covered in testing. Agile organizations quickly discover that manual end-to-end testing neither supports their velocity nor provides respectable regression coverage. A common progression is to move from fully manual testing to record/replay, then to Selenium IDE style tests, then to automation based on Selenium WebDriver, perhaps with a BDD overlay. Daria Mehra has practiced this approach and shares her experience. She compares the Selenium style of automation to an...

Although requirements provide valuable information that informs and shapes testing, sometimes the information provided is incomplete or unclear. Join Julie Lebo as she shares her experience with requirements engineering and how she has integrated her testing group into the requirement process. She believes testers are a valuable asset to the requirement process, and their involvement can improve quality in many ways including finding bugs earlier in the lifecycle, gaining a deeper understanding of their project and product, and writing tests that provide more value to the...

The concept of “shifting testing left” in the software development lifecycle is not new. Shifting testing from manual to automated and then upstream into engineering is a driving factor in DevOps and agile software development. However, Michael Nauman wonders why test automation, DevOps, and agile software development still frequently fail to deliver on their promises? Aligning and hardening your DevOps and test automation—along with streamlining your agile processes—is critical to your project. Michael shares how AutoCAD’s shifting testing left enabled improvements within their...

Your company has decided to move into the 21st century and is developing a shiny new mobile app. But you don’t know where to start. How many devices do you need to test? Can you take existing tests and modify them? How do you account for conditions such as loss of connectivity, a virtual keyboard, and new user interactions? What about the questions you don’t even know to ask? Join Bambi Rands as she introduces you to the world of mobile testing. Learn from Bambi’s first-hand experience testing mobile apps and building a mobile test strategy. Discuss the shift from testing web...

Every year, VMware has hundreds of releases for its virtualization products that cover data centers, networking, storage, cloud management, and digital workspace. Testing many different products while adapting to their development lifecycle introduces some special challenges for the product globalization team. Vincent Truong describes the processes and testing techniques a large-size software company needs to correctly support the globalization of its products. Vincent examines the agile process of globalization—internationalization and localization—testing and how the test...

Traditionally, test management has focused on two areas—test planning and test execution. Test planning creates the test strategy and prepares test cases. Test execution focuses on who is responsible for and assigned to executing the respective test cases and logging defects. These views, however, are not inclusive of everything a tester does. For example, the work of team members must be coordinated, environments made ready, and test data prepared. For this reason, Jim Trentadue says the testing effort should be managed by dependencies—not activities. Jim shares logical models for...