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How to Build Your Own Robot Army Software testing is tough-it can be exhausting and there is never enough time to find all the important bugs. Wouldn't it be nice to have a staff of tireless servants working day and night to make you look good? Well, those days are here. Two decades ago, software test engineers were cheap and machine time was expensive, demanding test suites to run as quickly and efficiently as possible. Today, test engineers are expensive and CPUs are cheap, so it becomes reasonable to move test creation to the shoulders of a test machine army. But we're not talking about the run-of-the-mill automated scripts that only do what you explicitly told them … we're talking about programs that create and execute tests you never thought of and find bugs you never dreamed of. In this presentation, Harry Robinson will show you how to create your robot army using tools lying around on the Web.
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Harry Robinson, Google
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STAREAST 2006: Testing Dialogues - Technical Issues Is there an important technical test issue bothering you? Or, as a test engineer, are you looking for some career advice? If so, join experienced facilitators Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman for "Testing Dialogues-Technical Issues." Practice the power of group problem solving and develop novel approaches to solving your big problem. This double-track session takes on technical issues, such as automation challenges, model-based testing, testing immature technologies, open source test tools, testing Web services, and career development. You name it! Share your expertise and experiences, learn from the challenges and successes of others, and generate new topics in real-time. Discussions are structured in a framework so that participants receive a summary of their work product after the conference.
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Facilitated by Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman
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Behavior Specification for Testing Embedded Systems A behavior specification is a valuable engineering artifact for the design, review, and testing of embedded software. It is a black-box model defining all interactions between system and environment and the conditional state-based causal relationships among them. Based on work by IEEE working group P1175, Dwayne Knirk describes a new reference model for specifying the behavior of computing systems. An embedded software control application is used to illustrate the application of this model. Dwayne provides an overview of the application and shows specification examples from the requirements document. He focuses on how the specification was initially developed, analyzed for completeness and consistency, used for generating test cases, and valued by the entire development and test team throughout the project.
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Dwayne Knirk, Sandia National Laboratories
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Open SourceTest Automation Frameworks Open source software has come a long way in the past few years. However, for automated testing there still are not many ready-made solutions. Testers often must spend their time working on test cases rather than working on a test automation framework. Allen Hutchison describes the elements of an automated test framework and demonstrates a framework that you can quickly assemble from several open source software tools. He then explains how to put the pieces together with a scripting language such as Perl. Once you build the framework, you can improve and reuse it in future test projects. At the end of the presentation, Google will release the described framework as a new open source project that you can begin using immediately.
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Allen Hutchison, Google
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The QA/Testing Perspective on Software Security Most everyone now realizes that we cannot solve security vulnerabilities with firewalls, virus scanners, and other tactics that build an electronic “moat” around systems. According to Julian Harty, security is not an operational issue, not a developer issue, and not a testing issue. It is a systems issue that you must focus on throughout the software’s life. From a QA/testing perspective, we need to look early in the development process for adequate security requirements. Then, we should assess the designs for vulnerabilities and participate in security code reviews. When specialized, security tests find bugs that get past our early prevention efforts, causal analysis helps prevent the recurring security defects. Dig into system security issues with Julian and learn about manual techniques, commercial software, and home-brew automation tools to help you find security vulnerabilities-before the bad guys do.
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Julian Harty, Commercetest Limited
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Moving from Test-Last to Test-Driven Development Has it ever happened to you? Due to an immovable delivery schedule, time for testing is squeezed and long hours are the norm at the end of a project. Well, let’s move the testing forward in the development process. In fact, teams are learning that, rather than relegating tests to near the end of a project, there are huge benefits to adopting a test-driven process-a more maintainable and robust design, testable code, fewer defects, and a cross-functional highperformance team. By combining unit test-driven and acceptance test-driven processes in a more agile setting, you can deliver on shorter schedules without sacrificing quality. Mike Cohn shares his experiences with test-driven development, including the flexibility it offers for dealing with schedule pressure, the role of documentation, and the steps for getting started. He also describes a test “pyramid” and how to separate test specifications from test writing.
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Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software
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Go on Offense: Prevent Web Application Security Breaches You must successfully test your browser-based applications before hackers do the job for you! Whether you have to worry about critical business applications or government compliance issues like HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) or GLBA (Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999), security failures can cost your organization big dollars, unnecessary embarrassment, or both. Hackers have gone beyond simple exploits of open IP ports and standard applications such as Telnet, FTP, and Sendmail, turning their attention to commercial and custom Web applications. To thwart the hackers, test engineers must focus their efforts on common and uncommon security vulnerabilities within the application, including SQL injections, session hijacking, cross-site scripting, and more.
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Dennis Hurst, SPI Dynamics Inc
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Design Testability and Service Level Measurements into Software Design and architecture decisions made early in the project have a profound influence on the testability of an application. Although testing is a necessary and integral part of application development, architecture and design considerations rarely include the impacts of development design decisions on testability. In addition, build vs. buy, third party controls, open source vs. proprietary, and other similar questions can affect greatly the ability of an organization to carry out automated functional and performance testing-both positively and negatively. If the software or service is delivered to a separate set of end-users who then need to perform testing activities, the problems compound. Join Jay Weiser to find out about the important design and architecture decisions that will ensure more efficient and effective testability of your applications.
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Jay Weiser, WorkSoft
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Testing your Web Site for Privacy, Quality, and Accesibility Today's business world relies heavily on transactions conducted through the web. Because of this, brand image and how a web site is rendered to customers has become increasingly important. A poorly functioning web site poses significant risk for web-based companies. This presentation discusses the challenges involved when testing to ensure the quality of your company's web site and to ensure that the components of the site function properly. With the ever-increasing web complexity, specific tools and processes are required to manage these challenges.
- Discover ways to ensure that your web site reflects your privacy policy
- Learn how to manage your web sites's links to ensure that they remain current and unbroken, and ensure that web content is accessible to users
- Learn about specific tools and processes to test and manage your web site
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John Burg, IBM Global Services
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Automated Database Testing: Testing and Using Stored Procedures for Testing Today's heterogeneous data environments place a heavy burden on test engineers. Applications must be tested for seamless interface with the back-end databases, but often this goes beyond what popular test automation tools can provide. Testers must know how to create and use SQL, stored procedures, and other database objects to effectively test today's data driven environments. This presentation delivers techniques for creating efficient automated tests of the critical database back end using simple scripting languages and relational database objects. It includes specific procedures, queries, views, and other relational database objects that are valuable for typical testing situations, and demonstrates how these automated tests can be used in conjunction with popular testing tools.
- Learn about the testing of database objects and stored procedures
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Mary Sweeney, Sammamish Software Services
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