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Bringing Shrek to Life: Software Testing at DreamWorks Want to take a behind the scenes look at DreamWorks Animation testing? Learn what happens when you have a tiny QA team, release deadlines that cannot slip even a day, and a crew of crazy animators using software in ways most developers never imagined. You just make it work! Anna Newman discusses how to leverage your development team to create and even execute tests on your behalf and ways to best prioritize testing areas. Find out how a small team operates successfully when a software release cycle is only few weeks long, rather than months as in many other industries. Anna explains her communications strategies for better partnerships with customers, developers, and senior management in the absence of formal development specs and test plans. Break out of your testing box and get that "happily ever after" (or is it "happily ogre after?") feeling in your test group.
- Small team testing issues and solutions
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Anna Newman, DreamWorks Animation
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Preparing for the Madness: Load Testing the College Bracket Challenge For the past two seasons, the Windows Live development team has run the Live.com College Bracket Challenge, which hosts brackets for scores of customers during the "March Madness" NCAA basketball tournament. March Madness is the busiest time of the year for most sports Web sites. So, how do you build your Web application and test it for scalability to potentially millions of customers? Ed Glas guides you through the process their team uses to model users, establish performance goals for their application, define test data, and construct realistic operational scenarios. Learn how the tests were conducted, the specific database performance and locking problems encountered, and how these problems were isolated and fixed. Finally, Ed demonstrates the custom reporting solution the team developed to report results to stakeholders.
- How to establish performance goals and requirements
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Eric Morris, Microsoft
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Testing for Security in the Web 2.0 World While many are extolling the virtues of the next generation of Internet and Web technologies, others are warning that it could turn the Internet into a hacker's dream. Web 2.0 promises to make applications more usable and connect us in ways that we've never imagined. We’ve just begun to digest a host of exciting technologies such as AJAX, SOAP, RSS, and "mashups." Are we making a big mistake by increasing the complexity of Web applications without taking security into account? Michael Sutton discusses the major security issues we must address when implementing Web applications with the newest technologies and describes poor coding practices that can expose security defects in these applications. Most importantly, Michael discusses testing techniques for finding security defects-before they bite-in this new world.
- The new technologies of Web 2.0
- Major security issues exposed within these technologies
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Michael Sutton, SPI Dynamics
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The Tester's Critical C's: Criticism, Communication, Confidence Testers are professional critics. Our job is to evaluate and criticize other people's work. Although criticism can have a positive meaning, it is more often taken as negative. When we communicate our criticism to other people, we are sometimes misunderstood, and this can lead to serious problems, including losing confidence in ourselves. Dorothy Graham examines how our delivery of criticism and the ways we communicate can make us more effective-and not damage our interpersonal relationships. Dorothy presents a communications model that helps explain how and why personal interactions can go wrong. Both the "push" and "pull" styles of influencing can help us communicate better with our managers. Dorothy explains how your confidence level affects your ability to constructively criticize others' work and communicate test results. She concludes with valuable tips for increasing your confidence.
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Dorothy Graham, Grove Consultants
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Testing on the Toilet: Revolutionizing Developer Testing at Google You work in an organization with incredibly smart and diligent software engineers. Deadlines are tight and everyone is busy. But when developers outnumber testers by ten to one and the code base is growing exponentially, how do you continue to produce a quality product on time? Google addressed these problems by creating the Testing Grouplet—a group of volunteer engineers who dedicate their spare time to testing evangelism. They tried various ideas for reaching their audience. Weekly beer bashes were fun but too inefficient. New-engineer orientation classes, Tech Talks by industry luminaries, and yearly “Fixit” days became successful and continue to this day. But no idea caught the attention of engineers like Testing on the Toilet. This weekly flyer, posted in every Google bathroom, has sparked discussions, controversy, jokes, and parodies.
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Bharat Mediratta and Antoine Picard, Google, Inc.
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STARWEST 2007: The Nine Forgettings People forget things. Simple things like keys and passwords and the names of friends long ago. People forget more important things like passports and anniversaries and backing up data. But Lee Copeland is concerned with things that the testing community is forgetting—forgetting our beginnings, the grandfathers of formal testing and the contributions they made; forgetting organizational context, the reason we exist and where we fit in our company; forgetting to grow, to learn and practice the latest testing techniques; and forgetting process context, the reason that a process was first created but which may no longer exist. Join Lee for an explanation of the nine forgettings, the negative effects of each, and how we can use them to improve our testing, our organization, and ourselves.
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Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
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Customer Advocacy: The Key to Testing Success Testing professionals are often viewed as the pessimists of the software world. Some people think testers will do anything to prevent an application’s release into production. In reality, testers should be pro-active protectors of the organization and a strong voice for its customers-lines of business, end-users of the applications, system designers, developers, and the operations group responsible for application support. Theresa Lanowitz believes that testers should be customer advocates, representing all constituents in each and every stage of the application development lifecycle. As such, testers help ensure delivery of quality products that meet the needs of all. To be a successful customer advocate, you must understand and balance the complex web of requirements, constraints, roles, skills, and abilities of all stakeholders.
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Theresa Lanowitz, voke, Inc.
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The Coming SOA Revolution: What It Means To Testers Applications deployed with service oriented architectures are implemented as producers and consumers of services. Testing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) application is unlike anything you've done before because every service can be invoked by consumers of whom you have no knowledge. This requires you to understand the specifications of those services in order to build valid, robust tests. Before SOAs began appearing in IT organizations, testers often dealt with lack of management commitment, poor testing tools, and minimal testing environments. Now, with SOA, the risks of failure are high, and the powerful processes, protocols, and tools that software developers use to build applications can also be used by testers to verify, validate, and test SOA applications.
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Frank Cohen, PushToTest
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Why is "Test Driven Development" Not Driven by Testers? For years, testers implored developers to do better unit testing. Our pleas fell mostly on deaf ears. Testers were constantly frustrated, finding bugs that should never have escaped the developers. Then, out of nowhere, a few developers started preaching Test Driven Development-test early and often, write unit tests for the code, then write the code. Suddenly, unit testing was cool! Why did testers fail to entice developers to test earlier, more, and better? Why is Test Driven Development a practice that was not driven by testers? Antony Marcano examines these questions and explains how the testing community can become a driving force of software improvement practices. If testers want to be more influential in our day-to-day projects and in our organizations, we must broaden our horizons. Join Antony to find out how to provide concrete ideas that make things easier for everyone-not just ourselves.
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Antony Marcano, Testing Reflections
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The Five "Doings" of Software Testing As testers, we sometimes are so busy "doing", we forget about the "why’s" and "how's" of what we are doing. Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster take a closer look at five key activities of testing: searching for defects, checking against requirements and specifications, assessing software readiness, measuring quality, and sampling software and data. Dorothy and Mark have found that these software testing activities have strong parallels with things that we do in ordinary life. They also have found that most testers are not conscious of how useful their personal skills and knowledge can be to their testing work. Drawing on some surprising examples of things we do every day that can make us better testers, Mark and Dorothy examine the why's and how's of all five testing "doings." Raise your consciousness level, and gain a deeper understanding of testing activities to improve your performance and your team's results.
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Mark Fewster and Dorothy Graham, Grove Consultants
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