With rapid application development environments and sometimes daily product releases, test cases can be an unnecessary burden on testers. Test cases are expensive to write, often fail to adequately describe interrelationships, and are ineffective for whole-team collaboration. Brett Leonard explains how you can employ software models to replace test cases as your main vehicle for test design, execution, and reporting. Using real-life examples from testing a business-to-business networking application, Brett explains two types of models to accelerate your test efforts: the simple Straight-Line Model approach and the more robust Uniform Customer Modeling language. By planning and executing tests from models, you will quickly gain an understanding of the software under test and have a new tool for collaborating with developers and all project stakeholders.

To ensure the quality and safety of Web applications, security testing is a necessity. So, how do you cover all the different threats-SQL injection, cross-site scripting, buffer overflow, and others? James Knowlton explains how Ruby combined with Watir-both freely available-makes a great toolset for testing Web application security. Testing many common security vulnerabilities requires posting data to a Web server via a client, exactly what Watir does. The Ruby side of Watir, a full-function programming language, provides the tools for querying the database, checking audit logs, and other test-related processing. For example, you can use Ruby to generate random data or large datasets to throw at a Web application. James describes common security attacks and demonstrates step-by-step examples of testing these attack types with Ruby and Watir.

In the software business, poor product design can lead to frustration and wasted time for our customers. Although we can ignore "usability" and "good design" without negatively impacting the initial success of a product, sales and customer satisfaction will suffer in the long run. Usability is a topic that has been discussed at great length, but many of the accepted design conventions either lack explanations of where and how to apply them, or they are entirely untrue. Sanjeev Verma explains how to ignore usability and save valuable time during the design phase of a product and apply it where it really counts-on new feature development. Kendra Yourtee offers proven practices that she has used in her daily routines to improve the usability of products as they are updated. She discusses simple ways to "test" designs against real data before the software is complete.

Job interviews for test automation engineers are often limited to, "How proficient are you with the tool vendor XYZ's scripting language?" This approach does little to help the hiring manager choose those individuals who are or will become highly skilled automation professionals. As a test engineer, you will need to acquire specialized knowledge and tool independent capabilities to become a test automation expert. Join Dion Johnson as he identifies the core set of tool-independent competencies required of a successful automated software test engineer: automation framework design, programming and debugging skills, object model concepts, and automation methods based on the required quality attributes. Learn how you, as a hiring manager, can identify these skills, or find out how you personally can improve your skills to become a true test automation expert.