test methodologies

Conference Presentations

STAREAST 2012 Keynote: Testing Trends: Cloud, Virtualization, and Mobility
Video

Almost daily, we see reports of software failures that harm enterprises and impact the brand, putting testing organizations and their efforts in the spotlight. Fortunately, testers are now in one of the most exciting times in the software industry’s history!
Theresa Lanowitz, voke, inc.
Focusing Test Efforts with System Usage Patterns

Faced with the reality of tight deadlines and limited resources, many software delivery teams turn to risk-based test planning to ensure that the most critical components of the software are production ready. Although this strategy can prove effective, it is only as good as your underlying risk analysis. Unfortunately, understanding where risk lies within a product is difficult with the analysis often resulting in little more than an “educated guess.” These risk-based testing exercises can lead to uneven test coverage and the uneasy feeling that the team has neglected to test what is really important. Dan Craig describes how to employ system usage patterns and production defect reports to identify the real risks in a system.
Dan Craig, Coveros, Inc.
Using Test Automation Frameworks

As you embark on implementing or improving automation within your testing process, you'll want to avoid the "Just Do It" attitude some have taken. Perhaps you've heard the term "test automation framework" and wondered what it means, what it does for testing, and if you need one. Andrew Pollner, who has developed automated testing frameworks for more than fifteen years, outlines how frameworks have grown up around test automation tools. Regardless of which automation tool you use, the concepts of a framework are similar. Andrew answers many of your questions: Why build a framework? What benefit does it provide? What does it cost to build a framework? What ROI can I expect when using a framework? Explore the different approaches to framework development and identify problems to watch out for to ensure the approach you take will provide years of productivity.
Andrew Pollner, ALP International Corp
Agile Testing: Uncertainty, Risk, and How It All Works

Teams that succeed with agile methods reliably deliver releasable software at frequent intervals and at a sustainable pace. At the same time, they can readily adapt to the changing needs and requirements of the business. Unfortunately, not all teams are successful in their attempt to transition to agile and, instead, end up with a "frAgile" process. The difference between an agile and a frAgile process is usually in the degree to which the organization embraces the disciplined engineering practices that support agility. Teams that succeed are often the ones adopting specific practices: acceptance test-driven development, automated regression testing, continuous integration, and more. Why do these practices make such a big difference? Elisabeth Hendrickson details essential agile testing practices and explains how they mitigate common project risks related to uncertainty, ambiguity, assumptions, dependencies, and capacity.
Elisabeth Hendrickson, Quality Tree Software, Inc.
Large-scale Exploratory Testing at Microsoft: Let's Take a Tour

Manual testing is the best way to find the bugs most likely to bite users badly after a product ships. However, manual testing remains a very ad hoc, aimless process. At a number of companies across the globe, groups of test innovators gathered in think tank settings to create a better way to do manual testing—a way that is more prescriptive, repeatable, and capable of finding the highest quality bugs. The result is a new methodology for exploratory testing based on the concept of tours through the application under test. In short, tours represent a more purposeful way to plan and execute exploratory tests. James Whittaker describes the tourist metaphor for this novel approach and demonstrates tours taken by test teams from various companies including Microsoft and Google. He presents results from numerous projects where the tours were used in critical-path production environments.
James Whittaker, Google
Challenges and Benefits of Test Process Assessments

When you need to make improvements in your test practices, a formal test process assessment can help you understand your current situation and direct you toward better testing. One assessment model is Test Process Improvement (TPI®). Gopinath Mandala reports that the TPI® model was successfully used to achieve distinct benefits for his customers. He explains the difference between a model and a methodology. He further describes the assessment methodology-the process of identifying stakeholders, interviewing, analyzing the results, and preparing and presenting recommendations-he uses to conduct assessments. Gopinath discusses the need to set the expectations of the clients before the assessment begins and suggests ways to empower them to implement recommendations after the assessment.

  • Benefits of performing a test process assessment
  • Test Process Assessment methodology
Gopinath Mandala, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.
Modular Test Case Design:The Building Blocks of Reusable Tests

The use of modular design in programming has been a common technique in software development for years. However, the same principles that make modular designs useful for programming-increased reusability and reduced maintenance time-are equally applicable to test case development. Shaun Bradshaw describes the key differences between procedural and modular test case development and explains the benefits of the modular approach. He demonstrates how to analyze requirements, designs, and the application under test to generate modular and reusable test cases. Join Shaun as he constructs and executes test scenarios using skeleton scripts that invoke the modular tests. Learn how you can design and create a few self-contained scripts (building blocks) that then can be assembled to create many different test scenarios.
Shaun Bradshaw, Questcon Technologies, A Division of Howard Systems Intl.
Software Security Testing: It's Not Just for Functions Anymore

What makes security testing different from classical software testing? Part of the answer lies in expertise, experience, and attitude. Security testing comes in two flavors and involves standard functional security testing (making sure that the security apparatus works as advertised), as well as risk-based testing (malicious testing that simulates attacks). Risk-based security testing should be driven by architectural risk analysis, abuse and misuse cases, and attack patterns. Unfortunately,
first generation "application security" testing misses the mark on all fronts. That's because canned black-box probes-at best-can show you that things are broken, but say very little about the total security posture. Join Gary McGraw to learn what software security testing should look like, what kinds of knowledge testers must have to carry out such testing, and what the results may say about security.
Gary McGraw, Cigital Inc
STARWEST 2006: Positioning your Test Automation Team as a Product

Test automation teams are typically created with the expectation of facilitating faster testing and higher product quality. To achieve these goals, the test
automation team must overcome many challenges--stale test data, burdensome test script maintenance, too-frequent product upgrades, insufficient resources, and unfamiliarity with the systems under test. Satya Mantena describes a creative approach to test automation that overcomes
these challenges. The first step is implementing keyword-driven testing. Satya demonstrates how the keyword testing approach is implemented proving this approach is not just theory but has been "proven in action." Satya concludes
by showing how positioning the test automation team as a "product" rather than as a central service, or embedded within each testing team, results in better testing.

  • Examine the difference between a service and a product
Satya Mantena, Nielsen Media Research
Better Software Conference 2006: Lightning Talks: A Potpourri of 5-Minute Presentations

Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. Lightning Talks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking and offer the chance to try conference speaking without the heavy commitment. Lightning Talks are an opportunity to quickly present your single, biggest, bang-for-the-buck idea. Maybe you just want to ask a question, invite people to help you with your project, boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up a full track presentation. Use this as your opportunity to give a first time talk or to present a new topic for the first time.
Julie Gardiner, QST Consultants Ltd.

Pages

StickyMinds is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.