Test environments are often maintained under favorable conditions, providing a stable, reliable configuration for testing. However, once the product is released to production, it is subject to the stresses of low resources, noisy–even malicious–data, unusual users, and much more. Will real-world use destroy the reliability of your software and embarrass your organization? Shmuel Gershon describes fuzzing and fault modeling, techniques used to simulate worst-case run-time scenarios in his testing. Fuzzing explores the limits of a system interface with high volumes of random input data. Fault models examine and highlight system resource usage, pointing out potential problems. These techniques help raise important questions about product quality–even for conditions that aren't explicit in requirements.

The quality problems many companies face after releasing a new product can be as painful as a root canal. One way to avoid this pain is timely root cause analysis (RCA) during development. Proper RCA and resulting improvements prevent product failures, eliminate associated rework, and reduce the pain of initial product releases. Based on empirical research conducted on today's RCA practices in the industry, Jan van Moll explains why many companies fail to do effective root cause analysis in practice. Presenting astonishing RCA data from projects, Jan shares specific examples of successes and failures with RCA. He points out the common pitfalls of defect analysis and demonstrates how to work toward problem solutions in a pragmatic and practical manner. Learn the critical success factors of RCA derived from industry experience to improve your practices and produce better products.

What do testers need to do differently to be successful on an agile project? How can agile development teams employ testers' skills and experience for maximum value to the project? Janet Gregory describes the seven key factors she has identified for testers to succeed on agile teams. She explains the whole-team approach of agile development that enables testers to do their job more effectively. Then, Janet explores the "agile testing mindset" that contributes to a tester's success. She describes the different kind of information that testers on an agile team need to obtain, create, and provide for the team and product owner. Learn the role that test automation plays in the fast-paced development within agile projects, including regression and acceptance tests. By adhering to core agile practices while keeping the bigger picture in mind, testers add significant value to and help ensure the success of agile projects.

Generally, testers mix test execution and test analysis. Typically, each test case execution also does its bit of analysis focusing on the feature under test, comparing actual to expected results. Jacques Durand explains that by declaring and enforcing a "legal" separation between execution and analysis tasks, testers' perspectives automatically change. Rather than focusing only on actual vs. expected results of one output, every output in every test becomes fair game for a more comprehensive analysis, leading to finding more bugs sooner. With this separation approach, each test suite is split into a set of test scenarios plus a set of logical test assertions. Join Jacques to learn how to leverage XML to format scenario outputs and other analyzer inputs, and how to write executable declarative test assertions independent from test scenarios.