The Latest

Churning out medium-grade software to meet deadlines, and experiencing critically defective projects over the years, can easily wear down optimism till it gives way to cynicism in the software testing and quality professions. In this column, Eileen Strider empathizes with that tendency and offers ideas that may improve the quality of your experience.

This paper offers an alternative to the typical automated test scripting method of "record and playback now and enhance the automation environment later." It explores a regression automation system design for testing Internet applications through the GUI, along with scripting techniques to enhance the scalability and flexibility of an automated test suite. This paper will present a basic
structure for an automated test environment, and will expand on each of the items found in that structure. Web testing levels will be laid out, along with a basic approach to designing test scripts based on those Web-testing levels.

Even though the benefits of inspection have been extensively documented, you may find it hard to introduce this practice into your development process. A novel approach to finding defects, an outsourced software inspection service is easier to introduce and has successfully jump-started inspection in the software development organizations of major telecommunications and industrial process companies.

This paper explains how to identify good reusable components and describes a strategy for maintaining reusable components.

The correlation between project size and project failure is well known in the software industry. Despite this well documented danger, companies continue to sponsor huge projects. It's unlikely we will talk executives out of their dreams of huge projects, but we can talk with them about ways to manage the inherent risks. Often a short story is worth a thousand words. The "Hudson's Bay Start" is one of these stories and a great risk reduction technique.

This paper presents data on the effectiveness of software fault insertion, discusses the advantages and risks of fault insertion, provides tips on gaining cultural acceptance for fault insertion and suggests high payback areas for fault insertion which have proven themselves over multiple products. In a typical software development cycle, defect detection starts to trail off once the mainline code stabilizes. With software fault insertion, it was found that the defect detection rate does not level off and the hardest task becomes not one of finding defects but one of prioritizing the stream of defects.

Technical Editor Brian Marick explains the values behind the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Above all, Agile practitioners value: individuals and interactions; working software; customer collaboration; and responding to change.