STARWEST 2010 - Software Testing Conference

PRESENTATIONS

The Power of the Crowd: Mobile Testing for Scale and Global Coverage

Crowdsourced testing of mobile applications, a middle ground between in-house and outsourced testing, has many advantages: scale, speed, coverage, lower capital costs, reduced staffing costs, and no long-term commitments. However, crowdsourced testing of any application-mobile or not-should augment your professional testing resources, not replace them. Most importantly, crowdsourced testing has to be done well or it’s a waste of time and money. John Carpenter reviews the applications and ways he’s outsourced testing to the crowd.

John Carpenter, Mob4Hire, Inc.
The Test Manager's Dashboard: Making It Accurate and Relevant

Gathering and presenting clear information about quality-both product and process-may be the most important part of the test manager's job. Join Lloyd Roden as he challenges your current progress reports-probably full of lots of difficult-to-understand numbers-and asks you to replace the reports with a custom Test Manager's Dashboard containing a series of graphs and charts with clear visual displays. Your dashboard needs to report quality and progress status that is accurate, useful, easily understood, predictive, and relevant.

Lloyd Roden, Grove Consultants

Transform Your Lifecycle-Virtualize the Test Lab

Every tester has heard "it works on my machine" from a developer, referring to a defect deemed to be non-reproducible. We all know the back-and-forth conversations and have yearned for ways to easily replicate test environment failures in the development environment. Test organizations often struggle with access to test environments that closely match production while the operations department struggles to keep up with the demand for provisioned environments.

Theresa Lanowitz, voke, Inc.

Using the Amazon Cloud to Accelerate Testing

Virtualization technologies have been a great boon to test labs everywhere. With the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), these same benefits are available to everyone-without the need to purchase and maintain your own hardware. Once you master the tricks and tools of this new technology, you too can instantly have limitless capacity at your disposal.

Randy Hayes, Capacity Calibration, Inc.
Variations on a Theme: Performance Testing and Functional Unit Testing

The right types of performance tests can reveal functionality problems that would not usually be detected during unit testing. For example, concurrency and thread safety problems can manifest themselves in poor performance or deadlocks, leading to incorrect output. Because unit tests inherently lack concurrent activity, these problems rarely manifest themselves in functional tests. André Bondi describes test structures based on rudimentary models that reveal valuable insights about system scalability, performance, and system function.

Andre Bondi, Siemens Corporate Research
You're Either On the Train or On the Tracks: Radical Realities Shaping Our Future

Because the number of applications and environments are exploding, the rate of change is increasing exponentially, and the scope of risk has never been wider or deeper. Collectively, these forces are creating a flood of transformations within software development that will not stop or slow down for testing. Test practices as we know them today must evolve quickly-or die.

Linda Hayes, Worksoft, Inc.

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