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Crowdsourced Testing: An Emerging Business Model Crowdsourced testing has emerged as a startlingly effective by-product of social networking. Manoj Narayanan describes how many organizations are leveraging crowdsourcing to reduce testing costs and increase product quality. They are learning that the value of crowdsourced testing can differ significantly based on whether you are testing a web application, mobile device, or gaming app. To help you evaluate the benefits and constraints, Manoj compares the business model crowdsourced vendors are adopting to traditional testing approaches. Explore how crowdsourced vendors are now focusing on vertical integration through partnerships with both cloud-based infrastructure services and on-demand testing tool vendors to improve ROI. Manoj concludes by exploring how greater integration between social networking and crowdsourcing can further enhance the testing business model.
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Manoj Narayanan, Cognizant Technology Solutions
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STAREAST 2011: Service-driven Test Management Over the years, the test manager's role has evolved from "struggling to get involved early" to today's more common "indispensable partner in project success." In the past, it was easy to complain that the testing effort could not be carried out as planned due to insufficient specs, too few people, late and incomplete delivery, poor test environments, etc. Martin Pol explores why–and how–test managers must provide a high level of performance within their projects and organization. By implementing a service-driven test management approach, test managers can best support and enhance product development, and maximize testing's value. Service-driven test management encourages the project team to collaborate and find solutions for any testing problem that could negatively impact the project's success.
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Martin Pol, Polteq Test Services B.V.
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The Estimate Is Nothing, The Estimating Is Everything In many software projects, estimation is consistently troublesome, contentious, and unreliable. A big part of the problem is that we fantasize that estimates tell us about the future; and so management wants "accurate" estimates that we can "commit" to. In fact, estimates tell you nothing about the future. Estimates are entirely about the present. Estimates express our expectations, based on what we believed when we made the estimate. Dale Emery invites you to explore a gold mine of information left untapped by most estimation processes–the extensive range of knowledge, assumptions, risks, and unknowns that influence our estimates and are often unexpressed and forgotten. Making this information explicit and visible can outweigh the value of the estimate itself.
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Dale Emery, DHE
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Top Testing Challenges We Face Today Some people thrive on challenges; others struggle daily to deal with them. Handled well, challenges can make us stronger, more passionate, and more determined to succeed. Lloyd Roden describes the top software testing challenges facing many of us today and explores how we can respond in a positive, constructive way. One challenge Lloyd often sees is identifying and eliminating metrics that deceive. While we (hopefully) do not set out to lie with our metrics, we must endeavor to employ metrics that have significance, integrity, and operational value. Another challenge test leaders face is providing reports that are clear, accurate, relevant and tailored to the recipient. A third challenge is convincing test managers to actually test regularly to attain credibility and respect with the team they are leading.
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Lloyd Roden, Grove Consultants
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Developing a Testing Center of Excellence In spite of well-established testing processes, many organizations still are struggling to achieve consistent, reliable testing results. Are testing deliverables completed incorrectly? Is your organization slow to react to change? A Testing Center of Excellence (TCOE) provides oversight of the testing efforts across the enterprise to help provide the best testing services possible and adapt more rapidly to innovations and challenges. Mona Lane shares the strategy Aetna followed to build a successful TCOE. Originally focused on one specific area-test tools-it evolved and continues to expand to encompass all aspects of testing. She shares the checklists they've developed to review testing artifacts for consistency and how these reviews are helping Aetna improve quality.
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Mona Lane, Aetna
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Grassroots Quality: Changing the Organization One Person at a Time Throughout its history, SAS has valued innovation and agility over formal processes. Attempts to impose corporate-wide policies have been viewed with suspicion and skepticism. For quality analysts and test groups with a quality mission, the challenge is to marry innovation with the structures expected from a quality-managed development process. Frank Lassiter shares the experiences of his group’s working within the corporate culture rather than struggling against it. He describes the services his group provides to individual contributors-mentoring, facilitating meetings, exploring best practices, and technical writing support. With a reputation for adding real, immediate value to the daily tasks of individuals on R&D teams, Frank’s group is enthusiastically invited into projects.
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Frank Lassiter, SAS Institute Inc
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Don't Be the Quality Gatekeeper: Just Hold Up the Mirror One of the greatest temptations of test managers and their teams is to be the quality gatekeeper-the ones who raise the gate when testing reveals little and keep it closed when they believe that defects (found and unfound) risk the project. Invariably, this role creates an expectation from stakeholders that if the release fails or a major flaw occurs in production, the test team is at fault. Based on his sometimes-painful experiences, Mfundo Nkosi shares his insights on how testing teams can maintain credibility and increase their influence by holding a mirror up to the project rather than becoming the quality police. Mfundo describes the process of maintaining a risks and issues log, writing an informative test closure report, and clearly communicating status-the good and the bad-in a non-threatening way.
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Mfundo Nkosi, Micro to Mainframe
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Taking Your Testing Team Global With pressure to downsize local teams in favor of offshore or outsourced testing, you may be faced with taking your team global. Jane Fraser discusses the good, the bad, and the ugly of having to outsource or offshore testing. She talks about the pitfalls of hiring across cultures, such as when “Yes” means “We don't understand, but we'll try.” Jane shares ways to maintain your team processes and standards with a distributed team. She examines the issues and benefits of insourcing and outsourcing-and the difference between the two. Using her experience setting up insourced offices in China and India, and outsourced offices in Argentina, Vietnam, India, and China, Jane shares her transition plan to move 70% of her main development studio to five countries around the world. Whether you decide to offshore testing or it's decided for you, join Jane to discover how to successfully transfer some or all of your testing to a remote team.
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Jane Fraser, Electronic Arts
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STARWEST 2010: Quality Metrics for Testers: Evaluating Our Products, Evaluating Ourselves Finally, most businesses realize that a final system testing "phase" in the project cannot be used as the catch-all for software quality problems. Many organizations are changing development methodologies or creating organization-wide initiatives that drive quality techniques into all aspects of development. So, how do you know that a quality initiative is working or where the most improvement effort is needed? Adrian O’Leary shares examples of quality improvement programs he has observed and illustrates how they are using defect data from various test phases to guide their efforts. See how measurements of defect leakage help these organizations gauge the efficiency and effectiveness of all development activities. Adrian identifies key "quick hit" recommendations for defect containment, including the use of static testing, traceability, and more.
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Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
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Focusing with Clear Test Objectives Frustrated with your team’s testing results-sometimes great, sometimes lacking? Do you consistently over promise and under deliver? If these situations sound familiar, you may be suffering from the ills of UCT (Unclear Test Objectives). Clearly defining test objectives is vital to your project’s success; it’s also seriously hard to get right. Test objectives are often driven by habit-“Let’s copy and paste the last set of objectives”; by lack of understanding-“Let’s use whatever the requirements say”; or by outside forces-“Let’s just do what the user wants.” Sharon Robson shares the structured approach she uses to define test objectives, including key test drivers, approaches, processes, test levels, test types, focus, techniques, teams, environments, and tools. Sharon illustrates how to measure, evaluate, compare, and balance these often conflicting factors to ensure that you have the right objectives for your test project.
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Sharon Robson, Software Education
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