test techniques
Articles
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Taste-Testing: Cooking Up Good Software Think about what we do while cooking food to make it the best dish possible. We taste the food first, make necessary adjustments and add a few more ingredients, taste the food again, and repeat until the dish is how we want it. This is just like building a software product. If you don’t taste the food before serving it—or test the software before rolling it out—there will be a risk that the quality isn’t up to your standards. |
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Simplify Continuous Operation Tests with a Periodic Reboot Continuous operation tests find important bugs, partly as a result of their long operation and partly by increasing the probability of finding statistical bugs. However, CO tests have their own downsides. Mandating a periodic reset or reboot can work around these issues, as well as save time and cost for testing, reproduction, debugging, and fix verification. |
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The Difference between Structured and Unstructured Exploratory Testing There are a lot of misunderstandings about exploratory testing. In some organizations exploratory testing is done unprofessionally and in an unstructured way—there's no preparation, no test strategy, and no test design or coverage techniques. This leads to blinds spots in the testing, as well as regression issues. Here's how one company made its exploratory testing more structured. |
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Shifting Your Testing: When to Switch Gears Shifting your testing either left or right can meet different needs and improve different aspects. How do you know whether to make a change? Let your test cycles be your guide. Just like when driving a car with a manual transmission, if the engine starts to whine or you’re afraid you’re about to stall out, switching gears may be just what you need. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Using Agile and DevOps to Achieve Quality by Design When software nears completion, it is the wrong time to focus on quality. Product delivery improves if you invest in a plan, validate in small increments, and focus on continuous testing. |
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QA Is More Than Being a Tester QA testers often take on more of a role than just testing software code. When the team needs help, QA should lend a hand in assisting with business analysis, customer communication, user experience, and user advocacy. |
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Supporting Continuous Testing with Automation Create tests that can be used in a continuous testing environment, build the right number of tests, and don’t fall victim to the mistaken belief that everything can be automated. |
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The Unspoken Truth about IoT Test Automation The internet of things (IoT) continues to proliferate as connected smart devices become critical for individuals and businesses. Even with test automation, performing comprehensive testing can be quite a challenge. |
Interviews
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Testing Your Metal: An Interview with Paul Grizzaffi
Video
Paul Grizzaffi, principal automation architect at Magenic, discusses his keynote presentation, which focuses on changing your perspective to add value and determining where you are spending your time so you can evaluate what can be automated. |
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Achieving a Balance between Manual and Automated Testing: An Interview with Jim Holmes
Video
Jim Holmes, executive consultant at Pillar Technology, discusses tools and methods to effectively communicate with management your goals for balancing manual with automated testing. |
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Why Manual Testers Shouldn't Fear Automation: An Interview with Chris Loder
Video
In this interview, Chris Loder, automation architect at InGenius Software, addresses the misconception that the goal of automation is to replace manual testers. |
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Yes before No and Building a Culture of Innovation: An Interview with Hilary Weaver-Robb
Video
In this interview, Hilary Weaver-Robb, a software quality architect at Quicken Loans, explains how you can create a company culture that encourages trying new things—even if they fail. She discusses the importance of learning, changing roles as you grow, and testing RESTful web services. |
Conference Presentations
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Improve Testing of AI Systems with "Grey-Box" Testing Technique
Slideshow
There are two main challenges to testing systems that incorporate elements of artificial intelligence. First, the same input can trigger different responses as an AI system learns and adapts to new conditions, and second, it is difficult to understand what the correct response really should.. |
Yury Makedonov
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A Tester’s Role in Requirements Exploration
Slideshow
Having a shared understanding of desired and undesired behaviors for each new product feature is key to delivering value to the business frequently and predictably. However, many teams lack this understanding even as they start coding. As testers, we can explore feature specifications early.. |
Janet Gregory
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Evolution—Not Revolution: Transforming Your Testing
Slideshow
You may have heard the saying “The only constant on any project is change.” Yet the prospect of change is rarely welcomed—either personally or professionally. How is it that we still believe that these changes apply to others but not to us? Julie Gardiner says that now is the time to re-evaluate and transform how we do testing in order to deliver more value to organizations—from a people, processes, and tools perspective. Join Julie as she shares current experiences of transformations and lessons learned within different organizations. She discusses an automation framework that ended up being thrown away, revamping processes, and tools and techniques to transform your testing. This thought-provoking session will give you the courage and ideas for how you can add even more value to your company. |
Julie Gardiner
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Reduce Wait Time with Simulation + Test Data Management
Slideshow
Data has become the most significant roadblock that testers face today. In fact, up to 60% of a tester’s time is spent waiting for data. Chris Colosimo shows that many factors contribute to this wait time, including internal requirements from the test data management team to pull data in the proper form, wait times for sanitized or “test-safe” data, or, most importantly, building data sets that do not exist. Compounding these challenges is the inherit complexity of today’s data. You have to be a DBA to even begin to understand the structure and relationships needed to support your testing. There has to be a better way! Learn how to solve these challenges by providing a self-service method where users can model and repurpose their data on demand. Discover how to use a test data assistant automation to capture, model, and generate data for efficient use in API tests and virtual services. |
Chris Colosimo
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