Process

Many struggle to accurately judge the value, success, and return on investment of test automation. In this session, Ross Collard helps you identify which areas and aspects of testing-both manual and automated-provide fruitful opportunities for improvement. You'll have the opportunity to compare the effectiveness of your organization's test automation with industry norms and best practices. You'll also see how other organizations gather, interpret, and apply these metrics. Find out what's worked and what hasn't.

Can test automation really advance your testing mission? The answer to that question is a resounding "That depends!" But to make it happen you have to provide value to development and find new ways of testing. Bret Pettichord offers lessons from the the trenches in building powerful test suites. He shares his experiences as well as those of other test automators to help you avoid the pitfalls others have already stumbled onto.

Action Word Testing. This concept illuminates testing as an action, a process, an art. Learn how Action Word Testing can be applied to deal with critical test issues such as lack of functional knowledge of a system under test; instability of the design during test development; and automation of 100% of the functional or technical tests. Hans Buwalda uses a financial exchange that's introduced a new electronic trading system to demonstrate Action Word Testing (approximately 15,000 tests). In this example, automation of the entire test was essential, but it was difficult to achieve.

It's impossible to test everything-even in the most trivial of systems. Tight time schedules and shortages of trained testing personnel exacerbate this problem; so do changing priorities, feature creep, and loss of resources. In many companies, test professionals either begin their work on whichever components they encounter first, or the parts they're most familiar with. Unfortunately, these approaches may result in the delivery of a system where the most critical components remain untested. Or, at the very least, critical components are tested later in the lifecycle when there may not be time to fix the problems found. All of this adds to the risk of a project. One way to overcome every one of these challenges is to employ the use of risk analysis. Rick Craig demonstrates the basics of a usable process for assigning testing priorities based on relative risk.