testing

Conference Presentations

Theory and Practice in Test Process Improvement at Barclays Bank

How do you obtain buy-in on a test process improvement project in an organization with nearly two thousand developers? This presentation gives the inside story of how Barclays Bank Plc. set out to improve their test process, and how they succeeded. Kath Harrison and Martin Pol discuss their first-hand experience, offer recommendations for dealing with obstacles, and put the spotlight on possible pitfalls to avoid. They also detail the method used by Barclay's to implement best process improvement on one of its major Internet applications.

Kath Harrison, Barclays Bank Plc. and Martin Pol, POLTEQ IT Services B.V.
How to Establish a Rapid QA Process for Web Development

The majority of Web development projects incorporate a start-up scenario that slowly evolves a small group of test engineering roles made up of people with little or no QA experience. However, once management sees that their start-up site demands professionalism to meet user and investor expectations, they begin a desperate search to assemble a competent QA department. Patricia Humphrey presents methods to rapidly launch a productive and effective QA department without adding burdensome processes that slow deployment of products and applications.

Patricia Humphrey, Neoforma.com
Designing Reusable Test Automation

This paper introduces the Sequencer design that facilitates the creation and execution of reusable operations. The idea behind the Sequencer is to carve the product under test into sets of functional operations. A test case data file describes the operations to be executed including their order and required data. The Sequencer’s test driver executes the test by loading the test case and sequencing the operations. The beauty of this approach is with a well-stocked library of operations coded, new tests can be generated by combining different sequences of existing operations.

Edward Guy Smith, Mangosoft Incorporated
Internationalizing Your QA Process

The main topics of this presentation are: Understanding G11N, I18N and L10N; Planning for a Global QA Process; Overcoming Language-Specific Testing; and Selecting the Proper Tools.

Benson Margulies and Tom Lee, Basis Technology
Bottlenecks Exposed: The Most Frequently Found Performance Problems

Dan Downing's experience with stress testing projects has revealed a handful of common denominators present in most Web site performance problems. These include memory starvation; a CPU-gobbling database access; improperly sized heaps, caches, and pools; poor application design; and load balancing that doesn't balance. This presentation uses actual B2C and B2B project examples to show you a symptom-measurement-diagnostic approach to understanding, exposing, and documenting these common problems.

Dan Downing, Mentora
Learning to Test Wirelessly

Wireless testing is closely related to Web testing, but they are not twins. While wired Web access has settled on a handful of platforms with a few dominant operating systems, the wireless world is still a riot of platforms with a small number of operating systems and a myriad of browsers. There's also no way to test a wireless tool directly the way you can a Web site, because the tools rely primarily on emulators. Geraldine Conley talks about these and other surprising experiences in the wireless testing arena. She also covers the testing processes most affected by wireless technology: document reviews, the change control board, and configuration management.

Geraldine Conley, Golden-Gate Technologies, Inc.
Flight Recorders: Analyze and Fix Defects Quickly

Users find 25 percent of your defects after your software goes live, according to a recent study. In addition to being expensive to fix, these post-ship defects often prove impossible to find due to the many potential user environments out there. Flight recorders are new tools, named after those already present on aircraft, that trace the execution of an application in or before production. Their job is to collect information while the system runs. Then, if a problem or failure occurs, you can examine the trace file and discover what operations led to the problem without actually having to recreate the problem.

Oliver Cole, OC Systems, Inc.
DAST: The Diagnostic Approach to Software Testing

Every test manager knows the pain of testing in a chaotic environment. The DAST (Diagnostic Approach to Software Testing) process allows you to cut through the chaos by implementing a strategic way to test products and releases, even when you don't have good product requirements or documentation. Founded on the premise of asking systematic questions to build test cases, Hung Nguyen takes participants through the process, which ultimately leads to valid requirements, specifications, and test cases.

Hung Nguyen, LogiGear Corporation
Enjoying the Perks of Model-Based Testing

Software testing demands the use of some model to guide such test tasks as selecting test inputs, validating
the adequacy of tests, and gaining insight into test effectiveness. Most testers gradually build a mental
model of the system under test, which would enable them to further understand and better test its many
functions. Explicit models, being formal and precise representations of a tester’s perception of a program,
are excellent shareable, reusable vehicles of communication between and among testers and other teams
and of automation for many tasks that are normally tedious and labor-intensive.

Ibrahim K. El-Far, Florida Institute of Technology
Testing an eCommerce Shopping Cart Site

Karen Johnson takes attendees through a shopping session that recreates a number of possible scenarios-and highlights what can go wrong. She'll also explain how to prevent defects from going live on your production Web site. From securing transactions to managing cart contents, this talk is a must for anyone involved in the eCommerce arena.

Karen N. Johnson, Peapod, Inc.

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