In today’s competitive marketplace, the ability to rapidly release new product features is vital. As we move from traditional release cycles of months and years to cycles of days and weeks, test automation approaches need rethinking. Alexander Andelkovic describes the challenges of implementing and integrating rapid test automation on an agile project. Traditional test automation tries to maintain an ever-growing regression test suite and struggles to implement automated tests of new functionality. Manual testers often lack the necessary skills to implement automated tests in a short-cycle development environment. Alexander describes a process to save time by having manual testers implement their own tests daily using a simple, model-based test automation framework that requires only basic modeling and scripting skills. Automated tests can be implemented earlier, providing valuable feedback to the project.

When an organization builds a data warehouse, critical business decisions are made on the basis of the data. But how do you know the data is accurate? What should you test, and how? Karen Johnson discusses how to test in the highly technical areas of data extraction, transformation, and loading. Stored procedures, triggers, and custom ETL (extract, transform, load) transactions often must be tested before the reports or dashboards from a business intelligence (BI) project can be tested. The volume of data is frequently so large that testing “all the data” is simply not possible so choosing an appropriate test data set is often one of the most strategic decisions in BI testing. Karen shares stories about past BI projects and ideas on how to test data warehouse and business intelligence projects. Learn the techniques for ensuring quality data on your vital databases.

The cloud is penetrating every technology organization and almost every software product or service. The cloud affects everything inside development, bringing profound changes to how engineers build, test, release, and maintain software and systems. Sharing his experiences at Microsoft working on the Bing search engine, Ken Johnston reveals how they devised and implemented a test-oriented architecture (TOA) at every layer within their product solution. He explores what stayed the same and what changed when their test organization moved to state-of-the-art cloud testing. Learn how the cloud is driving broader adoption of agile development and driving organizations toward accelerated release rates. Find out how the Bing team shifted to a “continuous testing in production” model for testing web services and eliminated the surprises that came from the old approach of big-at-the-end testing.

Look around you at all those people gazing into smart phones and tablets, tapping away, seemingly oblivious to what’s going on around them. Like it or not, mobile devices and the applications they host are now enmeshed in our everyday lives. And these mobile devices present testers with unique challenges-rapidly changing technologies, multi-platform support, new human factor UI challenges, and how to best employ these devices for testing. Join Jonathan Kohl, who works in the nuts and bolts of mobile testing, to explore testing opportunities in this growing market. Learn about the new landscape of testing in areas of mobility (we need to move around when we test), social interactions (how social media can enhance or distract from our testing), and entertainment (how casual use is affecting commercial software). Finally, and most importantly, discover how testing on mobile devices can be really fun and enjoyable.