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Using Mindmaps to Develop a Test Strategy[presentation]
Slideshow

Your test strategy is the design behind your plan—the set of big-picture ideas that embodies the overarching direction of your test effort. It captures the stakeholders’ values that will inspire, influence, and ultimately drive your testing.

Fiona Charles, Quality Intelligence
STARCANADA 2013: Maybe We Don’t Have to Test It[presentation]
Slideshow

Testers have been taught they are responsible for all testing. Some even say “It’s not tested until I run the product myself.” Eric Jacobson thinks this old school way of thinking can hurt a tester’s reputation and—even worse—may threaten team success. Learning to recognize opportunities...

Eric Jacobson, Turner Broadcasting Inc.
Risk-based Testing: Not for the Fainthearted[presentation]
Slideshow

If you’ve tried to make testing really count, you know that “risk” plays a fundamental part in deciding where to direct your testing efforts and how much testing is enough. Unfortunately, project managers often do not understand or fully appreciate the test team’s view of risk...

George Wilkinson, Grove Consultants
Creating Dissonance: Overcoming Organizational Bias toward Software Testing[presentation]
Slideshow

Overcoming organizational bias toward software testing can be a key factor in the success of your testing effort. Negative bias toward testing can impact its perceived value—just as inaccurate positive bias can set your team up for failure through mismanaged expectations. A structured...

Keith Klain, Barclays Capital
STARCANADA 2013 Keynote: Testing Lessons from Hockey (The World’s Greatest Sport)[presentation]
Video

Over the years, Rob Sabourin has drawn important testing lessons from diverse sources including the great detectives, the Simpsons, Hollywood movies, comic book superheroes, and the hospital delivery room. Now Rob scores big with breakaway testing ideas from hockey, Canada’s national sport.

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Structural Testing: When Quality Really Matters[presentation]
Slideshow

Jamie Mitchell explores an underused and often forgotten test technique—white-box testing. Also known as structural testing, this technique requires some programming expertise and access to the code. Using only black-box testing, you could...

Jamie Mitchell, Jamie Mitchell Consulting Inc.
How Spotify Tests World Class Apps[presentation]
Slideshow

In today’s competitive world, more and more HTML5 applications are being developed for mobile and desktop platforms. Spotify has partnered with world-renowned organizations to create high quality apps to enrich the user experience. Testing a single application within a few months can be...

Alexander Andelkovic, Spotify
Designing Self-maintaining UI Tests for Web Applications[presentation]
Slideshow

Test automation scripts are in a constant state of obsolescence. New features are added, changes are made, and testers learn about these changes long after they've been implemented. Marcus Merrell helped design a system in which a "model" is created each time a developer changes...

Marcus Merrell, WhaleShark Media, Inc.
Usability Testing: Personas, Scenarios, Use Cases, and Test Cases[presentation]
Slideshow

To create better test cases, Koray Yitmen says you must know your users. And the path to better test case creation in usability testing starts with the segmentation and definition of users, a concept known as personas. Contrary to common market-wise segmentation that focuses on users'...

Koray Yitmen, UXservices
STARCANADA 2013 Keynote: Cool! Testing's Getting Fun Again[presentation]
Video

The last exciting era in testing was the late ‘90s when the web turned technology on its ear, the agile movement overthrew our processes, and the rise of open source gave us accessible and innovative tools. However, since then, Jonathan Kohl finds it has been a lot of the same-old, same-old.

Jonathan Kohl, Kohl Concepts, Inc.
An Agile Test Automation Strategy for Everyone[presentation]

Most systems are not designed to make test automation easy! Fortunately, the whole-team approach, prescribed by most agile methodologies, gives us an opportunity to break out of this rut. Gerard Meszaros describes the essential elements of practical and proven agile test automation strategy.

Gerard Meszaros, Independent Consultant
The Seven Deadly Sins of Software Testing[presentation]
Slideshow

Many smart, otherwise-capable testers sabotage their own careers by committing one or more of the deadly sins of testing: irrelevance/redundancy, ignorance of relevant skills, obstructionism, adversarialism, nit-picking, blindness to project/organizational priorities, and last-moment-ism.

Rex Black, RBCS Inc.
Snappy Visualizations for Test Communications[presentation]

Do you struggle to find the best way to explain your testing status and coverage to your stakeholders? Do numbers and metrics make your stakeholders’ eyes glaze over, or, even worse, do you feel dirty giving metrics that you know are going to be abused? Do you have challenges...

Thomas Vaniotis, Liquidnet
STARCANADA 2013: The Tester's Role in Agile Planning[presentation]
Slideshow

If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be missed or glossed over. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while...

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
STARCANADA 2013 Keynote: Lighting Strikes the Keynotes[presentation]
Video

Lightning Talks are a popular part of the STAR conferences. Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period and are an opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation.

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering

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