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The Test Strategist's Toolbox As a decision-making framework, a test strategy outlines the vision and values that drive the project and keeps you on a clear path in times of change or uncertainty. A good test strategy makes you more resilient to inevitable changes as the project progresses. However, each test
project needs its own strategy depending on the business and risk profiles of the applications, technology in use, development methods, and even the experience and culture of the test group. In this interactive session with James Lyndsay, you will learn about a wide range of test strategy
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James Lyndsay, Workroom Productions
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Model-Based Testing Meets Exploratory Testing When we are faced with software with unknown requirements or software in an unstable condition, exploratory testing is a cost-effective test technique. Once a product is more stable and settled, the value of exploratory testing drops off rapidly. Model-based testing, on the other hand, provides extremely thorough testing that can run day and night, but it can be difficult to justify the required
investment. Exploratory modeling is a technique that bridges the gap between manual testing and model-based test automation. It uses the information you gather during the exploration phase to fuel the test generation in the later phase, combining the best aspects of these very different
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Harry Robinson, Google
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Controlling Performance Testing in an Uncontrolled World Think about it ... You are responsible for performance testing a system containing over 5 billion searchable documents to an active user base of 2.6 million users, and you are expected to deliver notification of sub-second changes in release response and certification of extremely high reliability and availability. Your n-tier architecture consists of numerous mainframes and large-scale UNIX
servers as well as Intel processor-based servers. The test environment architecture is distributed across large numbers of servers performing shared functions for a variety of products competing for test time and resources during aggressive release cycles. Because it is impractical and too costly to totally isolate systems at this scale, capacity and performance test engineers produce high quality
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Jim Robinson, LexisNexis
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Navigating the Minefield of Open Source Test Tools Each year more and more open source development tools, including test tools, are available. By choosing to use open source test tools, companies expect to save money and take advantage of the community of shared development. Recently, there seems to be an abundance of open source testing tools being released, including tools for automated regression, load testing, test management, and defect tracking. But how do you know which tools are right for you? Based on his real-world experiences using such tools, Jeff Jewell covers the issues that you are likely to encounter as you evaluate open source testing tools. Learn where to find open source test tools, the challenges you
face in choosing these tools, and what you will need to do once you find the right tools. Find out if your organization is ready to use open source tools and how to find the right tools for you.
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Jeff Jewell, ProtoTest LLC
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Testing Inside the Box These days, we hear a lot about unit testing, testing for programmers, test-first programming, and the like. Design techniques for such tests and for improving system testing are often called white box test designs. Join Rex Black as he explains the basics of white box testing and compares
white box with other types of testing. Find out how the metaphor of "boxes" can inform-and confuse-us. Rex discusses the basis path tests, including cyclomatic number as a measure of complexity and a way to determine the number of tests necessary to cover all paths. He walks
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Rex Black, Rex Black Consulting
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Structured Testing within the Rational Unified Process Many organizations have adopted, or are in the process of adopting, the Unified Process (UP) and, in particular, the Rational Unified Process (RUP). The test process defined within UP/RUP differs from more traditional, structured testing processes such as TMap (Test Management Approach) in Europe and STEP™ (Systematic Test and Evaluation Process) in the US. Tim Koomen, who has operated within these and other development lifecycle and test processes,
describes testing as defined in UP/RUP, maps the processes to those in TMap, and combines them into a "best of both worlds" approach. Learn about the UP/RUP defined practices such as the risk based test strategy, testability, test design, the role of the tester, independent testing,
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Tim Koomen, Sogeti - Netherlands
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A Tester's "Wonderful Life" in an Agile Development Shop Some subscribe to the notion that agile methods-such as eXtreme programming (XP) and test-driven development-eliminate the need for QA and testing specialists. Others, including Greg Grivas, subscribe to the belief that QA/test is needed in every aspect of Agile development. While gathering requirements as stories or use cases, the test specialist takes on the roles of consultant, facilitator, questioner, and possibly leader. After the code is developed, reviewed by users, unit tested, and close to production-ready, the QA specialists subject the software to further tests: smoke, regression, endto-end, performance, load, usability, exploratory, and more. In the final phase of delivery, the code is subjected to all the different testing techniques again, and bugs are immediately converted to requirements and corrected at a fast pace.
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Greg Grivas, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
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Integrating In-house Tesing with Outsourced Development For many companies the lure of cutting costs by outsourcing, particularly with offshore software
development, is very tempting. Unfortunately, if handled incorrectly, the highly touted short-term savings can evaporate due to quality issues that ultimately result in higher maintenance and support costs. For the past few years Steve Splaine, an experienced project and test manager, has lived in a world where some development projects have been sent offshore to speed development.
To leverage cost savings while ensuring that quality is not compromised, his company has instituted a software development lifecycle that integrates in-house QA testing with outsourced, offshore development. Steve describes the development lifecycle that works at his company and explains the new audit role that his and other QA test groups fill. Learn about the special processes and critical
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Steve Splaine and Padmanabhan Surendhar, Nielsen Media Research
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From Waterfall to Unified Process: A QA Department View When Chemical Abstracts Service adopted the Unified Process (UP) for software development at the same time it changed to J2EE technology, the QA Department had to find its way into this new environment. The problem? No one seemed to know how QA should function in the UP world. After much soul searching, a new role for QA has emerged-one of information integrator. QA has learned to produce its own view of the project information, from vision documents and architecture assumptions to use cases and user interface specifications. Michael Buening shares examples of the concise, flexible, and functional test plans they devised to embrace the iterative nature of UP, balance the fuzzy nature of new products, and avoid throw-away work. Find out how the focus on new test plans has armed QA with a proactive tool to stay relevant in uncertain times.
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Michael Buening, Chemical Abstracts Services
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Lightening Talks: A Potpourri of 5-Minute Presentations Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. Lightning Talks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking and offer the chance to try out conference speaking without the heavy commitment. Lightning Talks are an opportunity to present your single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea quickly. Use this as an opportunity to give a talk for the first time, or the first time on a new topic. Maybe you just want to ask a question, invite people to help you with your project, boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up a full track presentation.
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Matthew Heusser, Priority-Health
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