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| It seemed simple enough—hire the best available technical staff that would work from home to build some great software. Along the way, the team encountered the usual problems: time zone differences, communication headaches, and a surprising regression test monster. Matt Heusser describes how Socialtext built their high-performance development and test team, got the right people on the bus, built a culture of “assume good intent and then just do it,” created the infrastructure to enable remote work, and employed a lightweight yet accountable process. Of course, the story has the impossible deadlines, conflicting expectations, unclear roles, and everything you’d get in many development projects. Matt shares how the team cut through the noise, including building a test framework integrated into the product, to achieve their product and quality aims. Take away a list of technologies that make remote work possible, cultural ideas to make it effective, and some things to try on Monday—plus, some apparently good ideas that you definitely want to avoid! |
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| Learn more about Matt Heusser |
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“It ain’t what we don't know that gives us trouble; it's what we know that ain't so.” Will Rogers was talking about confirmation bias—the tendency to feel secure in our beliefs rather than to seek evidence that might challenge them. In testing, confirmation bias prompts us to stop a test too early, to choose tests that conform too closely to the happy path, or to ignore results that confound our expectations. As a result, defects have a chance to hide in our self-induced blind spots. We can't eliminate confirmation bias, but we can manage and control it by diversifying our models, our techniques, and our test teams. In this hands-on and eyes-on session, Michael Bolton presents a set of exercises, videos, and conversations that show testing biases in action. Discover some new tricks that can help you defend yourself and your testing clients from being too sure, too soon, and later … sorry.
 Laptop Required. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop computer on which to perform exercises.
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| Learn more about Michael Bolton |
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Even though it is easy to say that you should continuously test your application for performance during development, how do you really do it? What are the processes for testing performance early and often? What kinds of problems will you find at the different stages? Chris Patterson shares the tools and techniques he recently used during the development of a highly concurrent and highly scalable server that is shipping soon. Chris explores how developers and testers used common tools and frameworks to accelerate the start of performance testing during product development. Explore the challenges they faced while testing a version 1 product, including defining appropriate performance and scale goals, simulating concurrent user access patterns, and generating a real world data set. Learn from his team’s mistakes and their successes as Chris shares both the good and the bad of the process and results.
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| Learn more about Chris Patterson |
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| Once the company decides to move to an agile development methodology, questions invariably arise: How should we implement this methodology? What are the expected benefits and pitfalls? How does testing fit into this new approach? Join Robert Reff as he describes real world experiences that helped his test team move from the design-code-test approach to a test-driven, agile development philosophy. Robert offers concrete advice on how to integrate testing, what testing activities to include or drop, and what to expect from both automation and exploratory testing. He describes possible practices, focus, and pitfalls, rather than the all-or-nothing approach often recommend by well-meaning experts. Take home the basis of a plan to implement agile testing without falling into common traps such as lack of training, demoralizing your team, sacrificing a project to the methodology gods, and worst of all—abandoning processes that work while ignoring needed improvements. |
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| Learn more about Robert Reff |
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| Whether you are a tester or a test manager, Jon Bach believes you have little time to do the things you want to do. Even the things on your “absolutely must do” list are competing for your limited time. Jon has a list of what he calls “half-baked” ideas on how to cope. That is, these ideas are still in the oven—still being tested. In his role as a tester and manager, Jon has learned that it’s not about time management; it’s really about energy management—where you focus your personal energy and direct your team’s energy. Jon shares ideas that have worked for him and some that have failed: Open-Book Testing, Dawn Patrols, Tester Show-and-Tell, Test Team Feud, and Color-Aided Design. Learn how these ideas may solve your problems with test execution, reporting, measurement, and management—all at low or no cost and relatively easy to implement. |
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| Learn more about Jon Bach |
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| Test environments are an important part of our testing portfolio, yet often we seem to spend very little time planning, creating, and maintaining them. Julie Gardiner explains the reasons we fail to build test environments that are realistic, reliable, representative, and have integrity. As a result, they become the weakest link in our testing process. Julie provides examples of environments—good, bad, and sometimes ugly—and shares why the ugly are often a symptom for an organization's disregard for testing. She offers practical advice for transforming your current test environment from the weakest into the strongest link of your testing. Julie’s specific advice includes identifying early signs that the environment will cause problems, convincing management that extra resources are required, and obtaining tool support—for test data test data preparation and test execution—to assist in creating an excellent environment. |
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| Learn more about Julie Gardiner |
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Often, we discover the “real” software performance issues only after deploying the product in a production environment. Even though performance, scalability, stability, and reliability are standards of today’s software development, organizations often wait until the end of the development life cycle to discover these limitations, resulting in late deliveries and even chaos. He embraces agile development’s philosophies to explain how performance testers can identify and resolve software performance issues early and continue performance testing throughout the development process. Learn how to optimize the use of performance tuning tools such as SQL profiler and MS PerfMon to identify and fix MS SQL server, application, and Web server performance issues. Institute agile methods in your performance testing efforts to avoid that “Oh, no!” moment when the system goes live.
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| Learn more about Alim Sharif |
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| One of the major challenges confronting traditional testers in agile environments is that requirements are incrementally defined rather than specified at the start. Testers must adapt to this new reality to survive and excel in agile development. C.V. Narayanan explains the Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) process that helps testers tackle this challenge. He describes how to create acceptance test checkpoints, develop regression tests for these checkpoints, and identify ways to mitigate risks with ATDD. Learn to map acceptance test cases against requirements in an incremental fashion and validate releases against acceptance checkpoints. See how to handle risks such as requirements churn and requirements that overflow into the next iteration. Using ATDD as the basis, learn new collaboration techniques that help unite testing and development toward the common goal of delivering high-quality systems. |
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| Learn more about C.V. Narayanan |
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| Many test leaders believe that development, business, and management don’t understand, support, or properly value our contributions. You know what—these test leaders are probably right! So, why do they feel that way? Bob Galen believes it’s our inability and ineffectiveness in communicating—selling—ourselves, our abilities, our contributions, and our value to the organization. As testers, we believe that the work speaks for itself. Wrong! We must work harder to create the crucial conversations that communicate our value and impact. Bob shares specific techniques for holding context-based conversations, producing informative status reports, conducting attention-getting quality assessments, and delivering solid defect reports. Learn how to improve your communication skills so that key partners understand your role, value, and contributions. Discover why improving your cross-team communications and feedback skills is a key to creating highly effective test teams. Come prepared to engage and begin developing your own crucial conversations. |
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| Learn more about Bob Galen |
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| Over the years, experts have defined testing as a process of checking, a process of exploring, a process of evaluating, a process of measuring, and a process of improving. For a quarter of a century, we have been focused on the internal process of testing, while generally disregarding its real purpose—creating information that others on the project can use to improve product quality. Join Lee Copeland as he discusses why quantifying the value of testing is difficult work. Perhaps that’s why we concentrate so much on test process; it is much easier to explain. Lee identifies stakeholders for the information we create and presents a three-step approach to creating the information they need to make critical decisions. He shares key attributes of this information—accuracy, timeliness, completeness, relevancy, and more. Learn how to turn vague impressions and a multitude of data into concise, actionable information that will improve your products and support your organization. |
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| Learn more about Lee Copeland |
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| Faced with the reality of tight deadlines and limited resources, many software delivery teams turn to risk-based test planning to ensure that the most critical components of the software are production ready. Although this strategy can prove effective, it is only as good as your underlying risk analysis. Unfortunately, understanding where risk lies within a product is difficult with the analysis often resulting in little more than an “educated guess.” These risk-based testing exercises can lead to uneven test coverage and the uneasy feeling that the team has neglected to test what is really important. Dan Craig describes how to employ system usage patterns and production defect reports to identify the real risks in a system. Walk with Dan as he creates a risk-based test plan, explores which production usage patterns provide the most value, and describes how his teams leveraged agile practices to quickly account for unexpected gaps in test coverage. |
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| Learn more about Dan Craig |
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| Growing application complexity, coupled with the exploding increase in application surface area, has resulted in new quality challenges for testers. Some test teams are adopting a tour-based testing methodology because it’s incredibly good at breaking down testing into manageable chunks. However, hackers are paying close attention to systems and developing new targeted attacks to stay one step ahead. Rafal Los takes you inside the hacker’s world, identifying the landmarks hackers target within applications and showing you how to identify the defects they seek out. Learn what “landmarks” are, how to identify them from functional specifications, and how to tailor negative testing strategies to different landmark categories. Test teams, already choked for time and resources and now saddled with security testing, will learn how to pinpoint the defect—from the mountains of vulnerabilities often uncovered in security testing—that could compromise the entire application. |
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| Learn more about Rafal Los |
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| Continuous integration is one of the key processes that support an agile software development and testing environment. Sean Stolberg describes how a traditional software tester—transitioning to an agile development environment—put a continuous integration infrastructure in place. In doing so, he helped improve development practices and made possible his team’s transition to agile testing. Sean discusses his team’s initial motivations for adopting agile development practices and dives into the nuts-and-bolts implementation details. He shares their post-assessment of the implementation using Martin Fowler's “Practices of Continuous Integration” and concludes with a retrospective on implementing and promoting continuous integration within the context of agile testing. Find out how continuous integration can help improve your testing results and the quality of the software your team delivers. |
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| Learn more about Sean Stolberg |
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| Is your organization releasing applications that target multiple mobile devices, platforms, or browsers? If so, you have faced—or soon will face—the challenge of choosing and setting up a test environment for these devices and platforms. Nat Couture shows how to develop a cost-effective application test environment to mitigate the risks associated with deploying mobile applications. He shares his latest research on mobile devices, mobile platforms, and mobile browser usage, and explains in detail what you need to consider when choosing a test environment. Learn how to select a winning combination of device-specific simulation, platform-specific simulation, and browser-specific simulation—coupled with tests on the actual devices. Build a mobile device testing program that reduces cost, increases coverage, and helps achieve the level of confidence you need to release mobile applications into production. |
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| Learn more about Nat Couture |
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| Erik Boelen starts his risk-based testing where most others stop. Too often, risk-based test strategies are defined in the initial test plan and are never looked at or used again. Erik explores how a dynamic, living risk-based testing strategy gives testers a vital tool to manage and control testing activities and identify the infrastructure they need to perform these activities. Find out how to use your risk-based testing strategy as a tool for negotiations among the different stakeholders. Take on the important role of risk mediator for all of the parties in the project. The risk-based test strategy is a tool you can use to defend testing’s need for time and resources, especially when late delivery is possible. Use your risk-based strategy to drive and manage exploratory testing sessions. Take back the tools and skills you need to develop and maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date risk-based test plan to guide you and all stakeholders throughout the project. |
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| Learn more about Erik Boelen |
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| Your company is ready to launch its new product. How will it perform under real-world conditions? Will it meet the needs and expectations of the users? Will it operate on all the platforms and configurations for which it was designed? With the future of the product, your company, and perhaps your job depending on the answers, beta testing is a great way to maximize your chances of success. Beta testing provides empirical metrics that prove or disprove that your product will meet clients’ expectations, providing you with input for necessary course corrections in the product. Rob Swoboda explains the process of beta testing as well as the key concepts needed to plan, execute, and evaluate a successful beta testing effort. Rob shares his insights into the practices he employs to design and manage high-priority beta test efforts and offers you the keys to succeed in your own beta test program. |
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| Learn more about Rob Swoboda |
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| To ensure the quality and safety of Web applications, security testing is a necessity. So, how do you cover all the different threats—SQL injection, cross-site scripting, buffer overflow, and others? James Knowlton explains how Ruby combined with Watir—both freely available—makes a great toolset for testing Web application security. Testing many common security vulnerabilities requires posting data to a Web server via a client, exactly what Watir does. The Ruby side of Watir, a full-function programming language, provides the tools for querying the database, checking audit logs, and other test-related processing. For example, you can use Ruby to generate random data or large datasets to throw at a Web application. James describes common security attacks and demonstrates step-by-step examples of testing these attack types with Ruby and Watir. Leave this session with a new set of free, open source tools for security and other testing needs. |
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| Learn more about James Knowlton |
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| Software defects bug everyone. If your organization is like most and you have a large queue of defects waiting to be fixed, this session is for you. It's probably not realistic to think we’ll get around to fixing all of these bugs; so, we need to consider another approach. Lisa Crispin explains how agile teams address defects and how you can apply an agile approach to defects whether or not your development approach is “agile.” Explore with Lisa ways to deal with a giant pile—or database—of old bug reports and which of the many, available defect tracking systems to consider—if you need one at all. See examples of alternatives to traditional bug reporting and how to shift your team's mindset toward preventing bugs in the first place. Get new ideas for taming your backlog of defects and discover ways your team can work together to minimize or eliminate bug reports all together. |
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| Learn more about Lisa Crispin |
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| With new mobile applications for Blackberry, iPhone, and Android battling for media attention and consumer dollars, the pressure to get applications built, tested, and launched has never been greater. Getting high-quality apps to market quickly can make or break a product or company. However, the testing methods that work for Web and desktop apps (e.g., in-house QA, outsourcing, emulators/simulators, and beta testers) do not meet the extreme testing needs of mobile apps. Companies must test across many handset makers and models, wireless carriers, operating systems, browsers, and locations. This calls for a new approach—crowdsourcing. Doron Reuveni provides insight into the growing trend of crowdsourced testing for mobile applications and addresses both the benefits and challenges of this new testing model. Learn how, by tapping into a diverse crowd of testers operating outside the lab environment, companies can build a virtual test team that meets their coverage requirements. |
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| Learn more about Doron Reuveni |
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