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Virtual Test Labs: The Next Frontier Are you spending too much time setting up test environments? Do you have too many "can't repro" defects? Test lab virtualization may be the answer you're looking for. It's no longer just a promise-it can be a reality in modern test labs today. Darshan Desai explains how to leverage virtualization to solve some of your complex testing problems. Virtualization provides the ability to create and share test environments quickly and do more testing in the same amount of time. Darshan explains how virtualization reduces the total cost of ownership of test labs and helps you test earlier on production-like environments. More importantly, you'll be able to file high-quality, actionable defect reports that are reproducible for the developer. Learn how successful teams at Microsoft use virtual test labs and understand the best practices and the pitfalls to watch out for when you go virtual.
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Darshan Desai, Microsoft
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Improving Your Testing Assets Through Domain Modeling Just as agile approaches have made inroads in development, FitNesse is doing the same in acceptance testing. Many testers rely heavily on FitNesse to improve collaboration and communication among the product owner, developers, and testers. However, beginning by writing tests based on a specific tool will ultimately lead to ineffective testing. Renato Quédas asserts that by basing your tests on a domain model of your application rather than your test tool, you will gain a better understanding of what needs to be tested and, therefore, design more effective test cases. Once the model is created, test cases can be derived automatically from the model. Also, should the model change, test cases can be easily recreated. Renato demonstrates this concept applied to FitNesse using the open-source Eclipse Modeling Technology (EMT).
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Renato Quedas, Borland Software
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Using Data Objects to Create Effective Test Data Fact-the quality of test data directly impacts the quality of testing. Traditional manual methods for creating test data are laborious, time consuming, often ineffective, and error prone. Huw Price explains the concept of test "data objects," an approach he uses to create high quality test data and eliminate the need to access live production data for testing. Data objects are abstractions of the data that capture the essence of a data type that can be quickly assembled to support specific tests. With definitive examples, Huw shows how to create basic "data objects" using data sampling and then expands to more complex objects using "data inheritance" that varies the data to satisfy specific testing needs. Learn about test data selection techniques-such as all-pairs, cause and effect, randomization, and probability distribution, to build high quality sets of data.
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Huw Price, Grid-Tools Ltd.
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A Pragmatic Approach to Improving Your Testing Process Although most test managers know they need to improve their processes, many don't know how to go about it. How do you understand the effectiveness of your current test process and then move forward for quick wins and long-term gains? Clive Bates presents a step-by-step approach to gather information on the existing process using special questionnaires and interviews that help you compare your organization with others and identify short and long-term improvement activities. Find out how to package these improvement activities and present them to management and gain their commitment. Once changes start to happen, learn to monitor your testing to determine the impact of your actions and how to properly guide improvement activities. Learn how to conduct project retrospectives, identify what metrics to gather before and after the improvements, and report your successes.
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Clive Bates, Grove Consultants
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Practical Security Testing for Web Applications Testing teams are generally quite efficient at testing Web applications through a wide range of functional data, business processes, and click streams. However, testing for security defects, which requires testing and a different mindset, is another story. Security testing involves anticipating what the application is not expecting and building test cases to cover those situations. Rafal Los demonstrates the approaches you need to understand negative security testing by offering insight into common attacks from simple parameter-based attacks like Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection (SQLi) to more complex attacks like Cross-Site Request Forgeries (CSRF) and multi-stage persistent Cross-Site Scripting attacks (pXSS). Rafal provides examples and methodologies for gathering information, creating a negative-test strategy, executing attacks, and interpreting the results.
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Rafal Los, Hewlett-Packard Application Security Center
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An Open Source Tool for RIA/Ajax Testing Building rich Internet applications (RIA) using Ajax is challenging partly because of all the variations in browser performance and functional issues. In addition, different browsers render Ajax differently depending on version and operating environment. Frank Cohen shares a free, open-source service to check Ajax application functions and create a gallery of screen shots to ensure browsers are rendering your application correctly. The unit tests run on a distributed set of test engines in a cloud of servers. Each server in the cloud operates a different browser version and operating environment combination. Frank also describes the skills and experience you need to be successful in testing Ajax applications and describes an appropriate test methodology you can employ.
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Frank Cohen, PushToTest
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Cheap and Free Test Tools Too often, testers have limited money, time, or both to purchase, learn, and implement the robust commercial test tools available today. However, as a tester, one of the best things you can have is your own personal testing toolkit. Since 2001, Randy Rice has been researching free and inexpensive test tools and has compiled a set of tools that have been a great help to him and many others. Randy presents an overview of these tools that can add power and efficiency to your test planning, execution, and evaluation. Randy presents and demonstrates tools that can be used for pairwise test design, test management, defect tracking, test data creation, test automation, test evaluation and Web-based load testing. Learn how you can use these tools together to achieve a combined effect of greater test speed and better test coverage at little or no out-of-pocket cost.
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Randy Rice, Rice Consulting Services
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After System Testing: Don't Forget Infrastructure Testing Traditionally, testing IT applications is done in isolation on a stand-alone platform. However, when applications interface with the corporate IT infrastructure, you need to plan, engineer, and execute an additional level of integration testing. David Watt describes a typical IT infrastructure and the historical problems, costs, and complexities of conducting infrastructure integration testing. Because of the complexities common to many IT infrastructures, this level of testing is often ignored and omitted. David explains how enhancements to testing techniques and test process management can remediate many of these complexities and make infrastructure integration testing possible. David introduces the concept of an Enterprise Test Bed and explains how strict management techniques can make this resource a reality for your infrastructure integration testing.
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David Watt, Lockheed Martin
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Lesson Learned in the 24/7 Online Web World Managing a successful, rapidly changing Web site and trying to track the bugs is a never-ending process. Every release brings new challenges-identifying a bug that's causing havoc, creating patch solutions, and strategizing ways to fight fires with little down time. If you don't juggle resources well, the stress of managing a live site will take a toll on your team. Jane Fraser takes you through the setup and deployment of a War Room for releasing software in a 24/7 online world. See how Electronic Art’s use of wikis, chat rooms, and call bridges help keep communications flowing smoothly. Join Jane to follow the path of a production issue from inception to conclusion-identification, reproduction, risk assessment, patching, and the checks and balances to ensure the safest path towards fixing the issue. Learn from Electronic Art's lessons to eliminate some of the pitfalls in your 24/7 online world.
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Jane Fraser, Electronic Arts
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The New Era of Community-based Testing Professionals are being confronted by a growing list of challenges-shorter release cycles, increased expectations, smaller budgets, and fewer testing resources. It's time to rethink the outdated methods of the past to enable us to deal with increased complexity in technical platforms, agile development methodologies, and greater scrutiny into the costs of defect discovery. Community-based testing meets these challenges head-on. By utilizing a global community of professional testers, companies can achieve higher quality releases, meet their release schedules, and stay within budget. Doron Reuveni describes the increasing role of community-based testing in the world of quality assurance. He describes how innovative software and Web companies are using virtual QA teams to support their in-house testing efforts.
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Doron Reuveni, uTest
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