The Angels and Devils of Software Testing
Jonathan Kohl, Kohl Concepts, Inc. & Michael Bolton, DevelopSense

It's never been easier to fool your manager into thinking you're doing a great job testing! Does that sound tempting? Some would rather spend time playing Spider Solitaire, Foosball, or watching online videos of cats begging for cheeseburgers instead of doing their testing work. Jonathan Kohl and Michael Bolton discuss the types of test fakery that are out there—and that you need to avoid. These temptations include banishing critical thinking, using misleading test case metrics, generating impressive looking but useless test documentation, maintaining obsolete tests (so we have something to count and display), engaging in methodology doublespeak, tinkering endlessly with expensive test automation tools, and taking credit for a great product that would have been great even if no one had tested it. Jonathan and Michael present these and other testing fakery temptations using a format of a tester's tempter (the little devil on your shoulder) and a tester's conscience (the corresponding little angel).

• Testing—a service, not an obstacle to delivery
• Metrics as a tool for deception
• Critical thinking to reduce self-deception

Branch Out: Using Classification Trees for Test Case Design
Julie Gardiner, Grove Consultants

A structured, visual approach to identify and categorize equivalence partitions for test objects, classification trees offer a unique way for you to document test requirements so that anyone can understand them and quickly build test cases. Join Julie Gardiner to look at the fundamentals of classification trees and how they can be applied in both traditional and agile test and development environments. Using real-world examples, Julie shows you how to use the classification tree test technique, how it complements other testing techniques, and its value at every stage of testing. She demonstrates one classification tree editor from among the free and commercial tools now available to help you build, maintain, and display classification trees.

• How to develop classification trees for test objects
• Benefits and rewards of using classification trees
• When—and when not—to use classification trees

The Ten Principles of an Agile Tester
Lisa Crispin, ePlan Services, Inc.

On an agile team, everyone is a tester—anyone can and often does take on testing tasks. If that’s true, then what is special about being an agile tester? If I’m a tester on an agile team, what does that really mean? Do agile testers need different skill sets than testers on traditional teams? What guides agile testers in their daily activities? An agile tester embraces change, collaborates well with both technical and business people, and understands the concept of using tests to document requirements and help drive development. Agile testers have good technical skills, know how to collaborate with others to automate tests, and are experienced exploratory testers. How do they get that way? Skills are important, but mindset and attitude count even more. Learn how the agile principles of feedback, courage, simplicity, improvement, and others will help you create your “agile testing mindset” and bring more value to your agile—or not so agile—team.

• The agile principles that enhance testing
• How agile testers add value to their development teams
• The “agile mindset” for improved testing efficiency and effectiveness

Testing SOA Applications: A Guide for Functional Testers
Brian Bryson, IBM

Functional testers assigned to their first SOA application can easily be caught off guard by some of the challenges posed by the SOA architecture. Testing without a user interface, the importance of security and performance, and the heavy emphasis on negative testing all require testers to approach SOA applications with new tools, techniques, and a different attitude. Through practical demonstrations of open source and commercial tools, Brian Bryson demonstrates techniques to test SOA applications. Brian starts by building and deploying a Web service, the main building block of SOA applications. Then, he tests this Web service from the ground up beginning with functional unit testing using jUnit and progressing to infrastructure testing using SoapClient and Eclipse. Brian concludes with a discussion of security and performance testing issues. Take away an SOA testing checklist and the practices IBM consultants use for testing large scale SOA implementations.

• Understand SOA architectures from a tester’s perspective
• Differences between testing traditional and SOA applications
• A proven checklist for testing SOA applications

Fundamentals of Data Warehouse Testing
Marc Bloom, Capital One

In today’s connected world, nearly every action we take involves a data stream. Online banking, credit card transactions, brokerage, e-commerce, bill pay—the list is endless.  Yet few testing strategies specifically focus on this crucial aspect of our systems and, thereby, forego the business benefits that may be gained. Although data warehouse testing starts with the same basic fundamentals as typical application testing, it introduces additional nuance and complexity that make data warehouse testing both more challenging and exciting for testing and development professionals. Marc Bloom describes the differences between data warehouses and traditional IT applications, reviews the basic principles of “extract, transform, load,” and shares proven testing strategies, techniques, tips, and lessons learned. Improve your data testing skills and increase your value to the business by implementing focused data warehouse testing in your organization.

• Components of a data warehouse
• Differences between data warehouse and typical application testing
• Important strategies for formal data warehouse testing

Agile Testing: Traditional Testing Meets Agile Development
Dietmar Strasser, Borland Software

Agile development methodologies are taking center stage in many software organizations today. Testing in a highly iterative environment adds great opportunities for success but it also brings challenges. Dietmar Strasser explains how to successfully transform testing from a traditional process to a highly iterative approach that aligns testing efforts around requirements while fostering communication and collaboration among all team members in a distributed development environment. Dietmar describes how to move to an iterative, SCRUM-based development approach and, at the same time, align testing activities around it while dealing with an ever-evolving set of processes and technologies. Lessons learned, tips, and tricks will be shared based on Borland’s experiences moving to an iterative approach. If one thing is certain, the path to agile development from traditional waterfall is far from perfectly straight, and we are learning as we go.

• Common challenges faced by testers embracing agile development
• How visibility and agile frameworks can assure improved productivity
• Start on the path to agile testing today

Assuring Web Service Quality
David Fern, Social Security Administration

David Fern demystifies Web services technology, explaining that Web services are loosely coupled, language independent processes that communicate following SOAP standards using XML messages. He describes how to ensure the quality and compatibility of these unique applications by addressing their specific challenges and risk mitigation test strategies. David shares some of the tools that help him perform functional testing as you would with a GUI application—compare and validate the request and response XML files, ensure language independence and cross platform compatibility with .NET and Java services, and ensure that the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) specifications meet the Web Service Interoperability Organization (WS-I) standards. Finally, David describes how to integrate these tools and strategies to support and automate your Web service testing process.

• Web services and how they work
• Testing Web services
• A Web services testing strategy for your organization

Growing Our Industry: Cultivating Testing
Isabel Evans, Testing Solutions Group Ltd

Although software testing is a relatively young discipline, immaturity is not the only reason we are still developing our methods, professional qualifications, trade associations, and its position in the software industry and society. All successful professions must continuously evolve and grow. For example, horticulture has been practiced for about 8,000 years longer than software testing. During those millennia, horticultural practices have continued to develop, supported by accidental discovery, increased scientific understanding, and improved technology. Horticulture has brought many benefits and, at the same time, dangers and environmental damage. Just like horticulture, software testing is a multi-discipline, science- and technology-driven industry with political, sociological, and economic implications. Isabel Evans, gardener and expert software tester, compares the two disciplines to see how commercial, legislative, and social concerns affect risk, working practices, and changing skills in the two industries dear to her heart.

• How good practices evolve over time
• Practices that can be beneficial and dangerous at the same time
• The risks of our actions in testing today

Testing Disasters and Turnarounds
Randall Rice, Rice Consulting Services

It’s good to learn from your own mistakes, but even better to learn from the mistakes of others. Randy Rice presents case studies of testing projects that have gone horribly wrong and reveals the one characteristic they all have in common. Although many of these projects ultimately ended in failure, Randy presents examples where mid-course corrective actions were very successful. Learn important lessons that address test team organization, test environment design, working with software developers, test outsourcing, test tool integration, team building, and the importance of strong leadership to the success of your testing. Find out how to become a change agent and what you need to do in order to turn around testing projects that are headed toward disaster. Avoid the mistakes of others and focus your efforts in leading your test team to get the best possible results.

• Testing mistakes that will put your project at risk
• Corrective actions that can save a failing test project
• On becoming an agent for change in your test team and organization

Systematic Test Design . . . All on One Page
Peter Zimmerer, Siemens AG

Good test design is a key ingredient for effective and efficient testing. Although there are many different test design methods and a number of books explaining them in detail, studies have shown that the regular use of these methods is actually quite limited. What are the reasons behind our neglecting to use these methods? How can we improve our practices to design better tests? Peter Zimmerer shares a poster-sized document, “Test Design Methods on One Page,” that displays the big picture of test design through a systematic, structured, and categorized overview of different test design methods. When designing test cases, testers in his organization systematically consider each technique as they design and develop tests. He urges you to give this poster to every developer and tester on your team and put it on the wall in your office. It serves to remind you and your team of the valuable test design methods and helps you select the right ones for each situation. Trust Peter, you’ll deliver better and smarter test designs instantly.

• How to systematically select test design techniques
• A concise representation of test design methods
• When to apply different design techniques

Perils and Pitfalls of the New Agile Tester
Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.

If your background is testing on traditional projects, you are used to receiving something called “requirements” to develop test cases—and sometime later receiving an operational system to test. In an agile project, you are expected to continually test changing code based on requirements that are being uncovered in almost real time. Many perils and pitfalls await testers new to agile development. For example, as a tester new to agile, you might think, “I’ll test the latest ‘stories’ on Tuesday when I get my next build.” And you would be WRONG! Waiting for a new build will almost always put you at least one iteration behind the developers and in a schedule hole from which you cannot recover. To avoid this trap, you must start testing as soon as the developer has completed a feature story, even before coding begins. Janet Gregory discusses the new when’s, how’s, and what’s of agile testing and helps you begin to change your mindset so you can become the new agile tester in such high demand today.
 

• Pitfalls of agile waiting for unsuspecting testers
• Ways to avoid traps that test teams fall into when agile practices are introduced
• Tools and techniques for testing in an agile development environment

GUI Testing for Multi-language Applications
Marco Torres, Citrix Systems Japan R&D K.K.

An analysis of defect reports on several multi-language projects demonstrated that, for localization, almost 80% of the bugs were cosmetic issues. Because of this tendency, GUI tests are always an important part of the localization testing process. However, manual GUI testing is time consuming, labor intensive, and therefore expensive. For testers, it is boring, tedious, and error prone. An automated test suite is the most efficient method to automate detection of these defects, especially for multi-language applications. Marco Torres demonstrates how to simultaneously verify the quality of the GUI in all the languages supported by an application. Using real-world examples, he shows you how to create automated tests for multi-language environments. Join Marco and learn how to write test scripts that consider future language additions. Take away the key development rules and test practices that Citrix uses for developing internationalized and localized products. 

• Testing the quality of the user interface in multi-language applications
• Platform, site, and language-independent test automation
• A data-driven automation process for localization testing

Today's Top Ten Controversies in Testing
Lloyd Roden, Grove Consultants


Having been in the IT industry for thirty years, Lloyd Roden believes that we often adopt behaviors even though there is little evidence that they are correct or beneficial. Some of these are “that’s the way we’ve always done it” so they must be right. Others come from the latest development and testing philosophies (fads). Lloyd suggests we challenge our assumptions on a regular basis. His “top ten” list includes ideas such as “managers should be judged on product quality rather than delivery date”, “acceptance testing should not find bugs”, “defect logs are crucial – even in agile developments”, “certification plays a vital role in defining our profession”, “we define entry and exit criteria but we don’t follow them” and five others. You may not agree with everything Lloyd suggests, but this session will help you understand whether what you do is based on evidence, and what are habits you’ve adopted without testing them.

 

• Why we adopt behaviors without evaluating them
• Ten testing behaviors that may, or may not, be beneficial
• Choosing useful behaviors in your organizational context