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What's That Supposed to Do? The Archeology of Legacy Systems In testing utopia, all software products submitted for testing have thorough and comprehensive documentation describing how every program function should work. On planet Earth, however, test engineers usually have to make do under less-than-ideal circumstances. It's not uncommon for test engineers to be asked to verify the functionality of a critical legacy system which has no documented requirements whatsoever. While there are many reasons this can happen, the result is the same: You assume the role of an archeologist sifting through the layers of clues to reconstruct the specifications. Patricia Ensworth gives you instructions and tools so you'll be ready to roll up your sleeves and dig.
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Patricia Ensworth, Moody's Investors Service
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Proactive User Acceptance Testing User Acceptance Testing (UAT) tends to take a lot of effort, yet still often fails to find what it should. Rather than being an afterthought subset of system test, effective UAT needs to be systematically planned and designed independently of technical testing. In this session, Robin Goldsmith shows how going from reactive to proactive UAT can make users more confident, cooperative, and competent acceptance testers.
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Robin Goldsmith, Go Pro Management, Inc.
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Testing In A Squeezed, Squeezed World All things are possible in the face of adversity, even an under-resourced testing project with an immovable deadline. Many testing projects start out with high ideals then descend into a mad panic when the realities begin to set in. However, usually by this stage it's too late to back out of commitments made to the business, and the risk of delivering a product that doesn't meet expectations may not be an option. This is especially true in the case of a project driven by legislative changes totally beyond your control. Geoff Horne provides useful insights and tips for taking a testing project that's resource- and time-challenged and turning it into a successful exercise that still delivers a quality solution.
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Geoff Horne, Integrity Software Testing & Quality
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STAREAST 2002: Testing Web Site Security The Internet can be a less-than-secure place to conduct business. So how do you make sure your Web site is secure from attack? Is a firewall the only line of defense you need? This presentation provides insight into the different attack points that a hacker could seek to exploit. It teaches you what to look for when testing the security of a Web site and delivers a simple, ten-step process for testing the security of a Web site.
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Steve Splaine, Splaine & Associates
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Software Inspection: A Failure Story? Even the most successful inspections can fail if team members aren't vigilant. A large financial institution has agreed to allow their story to be told (anonymously) for the purpose of illustrating how a program that was a classic success could fall into disuse. Specifically, you'll see how the company built up a very successful inspection program, and was achieving significant benefits, until four years later when inspections were no longer being done. How did this happen? Is it unique? What did they do right, and in the end what went wrong? This presentation delivers the lessons learned from this story, so you can avoid making the same mistakes.
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Dorothy Graham, Grove Consultants
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The Context-Driven Approach to Software Testing Several jokes about consultants revolve around the idea that they answer most questions by saying "It depends." The context-driven school of testing accepts the "It depends" reality but then asks, "Depends on what?" Rather than talking about best practices, this approach asks when and why a given practice would be beneficial; what risks and benefits are associated with it; what skills, documents, development processes, and other resources are required to enable the process; and so on. Rather than dismissing an unpopular testing technique or test documentation method as useless, you should ask these questions to determine possible uses. The appropriate context might be narrow, but you'll learn a lot more about the technique and its alternatives by becoming aware of the context variables rather than ignoring them.
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Cem Kaner, Florida Institute of Technology
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Get Real ! The Importance of Realism for Web Site Capacity Assessment What is meant by Internet realism during load testing/capacity assessment? Part of it is understanding the importance of not only carefully characterizing the behavior of visitors to a Web site, but also the behavior of the Internet itself. Contributing to this realism are important measures such as packet loss, link speeds, millions of IP addresses, browser emulation, SSL, and other factors that can cause significant performance issues. The Internet has all these issues, and testing with these values is an important part of gaining a clear picture of system performance right from the start. Philip Joung shows you the different factors and how each one can have a significant impact on your site's performance.
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Philip Joung, Caw Networks
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Teach Your Automation Tool To Be As Smart As You Teach your automation tool to speak your language instead of the other way around. This presentation demonstrates how test professionals can write automated scripts-without knowing coding-while providing a full complement of management reports that identify project progress, script status, and error tracking. You'll learn to fully integrate requirements, project management, and testing automation. Don't just use an automation tool, get it to do what you need it to do.
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Bonnie Bayly, Anteon Corporation
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The Road to UML is Paved with Good Intentions A picture is worth a thousand words. Does that mean that a model is worth a thousand requirements? A thousand test cases? Not exactly, but a model will tremendously aid in the development of requirements and test cases, and help facilitate inter-team communication of requirements and test cases; at least, that's always the intent. One way to help ensure that these good intentions come to fruition is to test the diagrams that the model is composed of, for 4C compliance-completeness, correctness, consistency, and clarity. There are different languages for producing models, but this presentation focuses on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and methods of testing models that are created with UML.
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Dion Johnson, Pointe Technology Group
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Test Management in Turbulent Times In uncertain circumstances, the challenges facing test managers are numerous and, at times, daunting. Layoffs, reorganizations, restricted resources, and job concerns can contribute to the disruption of the status quo at any given time. So what's a test manager to do? This presentation identifies test management issues and describes tips and techniques on how to better manage yourself and others. It suggests some ways to adjust your management style to have a more effective impact on your staff and guide you all through the difficulties that may arise.
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Lauri MacKinnon, Phase Forward Inc and Eric Patel, VeriTest Inc/Lionbridge Technologies
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