Combinatorial Test Design (CTD) is a great technique to ensure that your tests cover your test space thoroughly at a depth that matches the level of risk. Although it is entertaining to consider the huge number of tests required to test all combinations and compare that to the small number that CTD selects, there is so much more to learn. Karen Rosengren takes you on a journey through a program she led inside IBM. Its objective was to minimize the number of tests being run; however, in the process they learned much more about their testing efforts. They found ways to measure the effectiveness of their testing, how to clearly show the complexity of feature creep, how their understanding of the test space drove better low level designs in the product code, and how the generated test designs created a better foundation for test automation. Join Karen to learn about these additional-and valuable-benefits of CTD.

If your software product is recompiled and integrated frequently, you can improve your testing by integrating automated tests into your continuous integration process. In many organizations, unit tests are run as part of continuous integration; however, that is not enough. During the continuous integration cycle, integration of all automated tests-system, integration, unit, and regression-is vital to help find defects quickly and provide a substantial return on investment. Ayal Cohen and Roi Carmel describe the types of tests needed, the pros and cons of each type, and how to choose which tests to execute according to development code change, business criticality, and history of execution. Ayal and Roi discuss the need for service virtualization so you can run your tests in an environment that has not yet been fully developed, providing virtual substitutes for the missing services.

Whose job is it to ensure that the user has a good experience with a new application? As agile processes are taught today, the user experience (UX) design practice is usually left out or at best described as an optional team role. However, the companies that build useful, usable, and desirable software know that UX is baked into the whole development process. Jeff Patton describes what user experience design is and isn’t, and how every person on the team has something to contribute. Hear concrete examples of how companies have adapted their UX practice to work well in an agile context and, along the way, discovered innovative UX practices that work better in agile contexts. Jeff explores pragmatic personas, guerrilla user research, design sketching, lightweight prototyping, and concept testing. Leave with valuable tips for adding UX practices and thinking to your agile process to help you get good user experience.

Change is everywhere in software-feature enhancements, regulatory requirements, technology updates, re-designs, and re-implementations. How can we ensure that testers really understand requirements, business rules, and know what’s changing? Vijay Atmavilas shares how Verisign began to employ visual modeling and visual test design techniques to address these challenges. New models were produced using diagrams that highlighted process flows, input types and combinations to highlight data, and scenarios to highlight usage. As a result, team members quickly increased their understanding of feature requirements and improved their testing. Learn how Vijay and his team employ visual models to identify undertested functional areas and to help them measure coverage and the effectiveness of their regression tests and suites.