New test approaches and methods can temporarily disrupt your testing department's productivity, often making it tough to get these new approaches embraced by senior management and accepted into test teams. For the past few years, Microsoft has experimented with and finally embraced advanced methods, including model-based testing. Small-scale pilot projects, readily available tools, and widespread education can ease your migration to a new generation of software testing. Harr y Robinson shows how a small group of people successfully introduced test innovation into teams across Microsoft, and how they won acceptance for improvements that flew in the face of conventional methods and metrics.

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help manage the testing effort and make informed decisions about the software' quality. Although there is no one set of metrics that satisfies the needs of every test manager, there are certain things that all managers need to measure. Additionally, most important decisions should be supported by more than one metric. Rick Craig presents guidelines for you to build a set of metrics to track test status, measure test effectiveness, and predict product quality. Rick also addresses some of the major causes of dysfunction in the collection and use of metrics.

This paper will help you understand approaches to test automation that have worked, identify some common requirements for success, determine which contexts favor the different approaches, contrast benefits and risks of using different product interfaces (GUI, API) for automation, and how to select a test automation architecture suitable for your project.

This paper will teach you the keys to test automation success and tell you how to design test library architectures. Also discussed are the pros and cons of using test automation tools.