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Monday Tutorials
See Sessions From:
Monday
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Tuesday
MA
Managing Successful Test Automation
Dorothy Graham, Independent Test Consultant
Many organizations never achieve the significant benefits that automated test execution tools promise. What are the secrets to test automation success? There are no secrets, but the paths to success are not commonly understood. Dorothy Graham describes the most important automation issues that you must address, both management and technical, and helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use. If you don’t begin with good objectives for your automation, you will set yourself up for failure later. If you don’t show return on investment (ROI) from automation, your automation efforts may be doomed, no matter how technically good they are. Join Dot to learn how to identify achievable and realistic objectives for automation, show ROI from automation, understand technical issues such as testware architecture, pick up useful tips, learn what works in practice, and devise an effective automation strategy.
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Dorothy Graham
MB
A Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing
Michael Bolton, DevelopSense, Inc.
You're under tight time pressure and have barely enough information to proceed with testing. How do you test quickly and inexpensively, yet still produce informative, credible, and accountable results? Rapid Software Testing, adopted by context-driven testers worldwide, offers a field-proven answer to this all-too-common dilemma. The “rapid” approach isn't just testing with speed or a sense of urgency; it's mission-focused testing that eliminates unnecessary work, assures that the most important things get done, and constantly asks how testers can help speed up the successful completion of the project. Rapid testing focuses on both the mind set and skill set of the individual tester who uses tight loops of exploration and critical thinking skills that help to continuously re-optimize testing to match clients' needs and expectations. In this one-day sampler of the approach, Michael Bolton introduces you to the skills and practice of Rapid Software Testing through stories, discussions, and "minds-on" exercises that simulate important aspects of real testing problems.
Participants are strongly encouraged to bring a Windows-based laptop computer to the workshop.
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Michael Bolton
MC
Key Test Design Techniques
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
All testers know that we can identify many more test cases than we will ever have time to design and execute. The major problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset from the almost infinite number of possibilities available. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class and boundary value testing, decision tables, state-transition diagrams, and all-pairs testing. Explore white-box techniques with their associated coverage metrics. Evaluate more informal approaches, such as random and hunch-based testing, and learn the importance of using exploratory testing to enhance your testing ability. Choose the right test case design approaches for your projects. Use the test results to evaluate the quality of both your products and your test designs.
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Lee Copeland
MD
Risk-driven Testing with the STEP™ Process
Dale Perry, Software Quality Engineering
Whether you are new to testing or looking for a better way to organize your test practices and processes, the Systematic Test and Evaluation Process (STEP™) offers a flexible approach to help you and your team succeed. Dale Perry describes this risk-based framework—applicable to any development lifecycle model—to help you make critical testing decisions earlier and with more confidence. The STEP™ approach helps you decide how to focus your testing effort, what elements and areas to test, and how to organize test designs and documentation. Learn the fundamentals of test analysis and how to develop an inventory of test objectives to help prioritize your testing efforts. Find out how to translate these objectives into a concrete strategy for designing and developing tests. With a prioritized inventory and focused test architecture, you will be able to create test cases, execute the resulting tests, and accurately report on the quality of your application and the effectiveness of your testing. Take back a proven approach to organize your testing efforts and new ways to add more value to your project and organization.
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Dale Perry
ME
The Test Manager’s Dashboard: Making It Accurate and Relevant
Lloyd Roden, Lloyd Roden Consultancy
Gathering and presenting clear information about quality—both product and process—may be the most important part of the test manager’s job. Join Lloyd Roden as he challenges your current progress reports—probably full of lots of difficult-to-understand numbers—and asks you to replace the reports with a custom Test Manager’s Dashboard containing a series of graphs and charts with clear visual displays. Your dashboard needs to report quality and progress status that is accurate, useful, easily understood, predictive, and relevant. Learn about Lloyd’s favorite dashboard graphs—test efficiency, risk progress, quality targets, and specific measures of the test team's well being. Learn to correlate and interpret the various types of dashboard data to reveal the complete picture of the project and test progress. By creating a Test Manager’s Dashboard, you will provide significant long term benefits to both the test team and the organization—and make your job easier and more fulfilling.
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Lloyd Roden
MF
A Test Leader’s Guide to Agile
Bob Galen, iContact
Much of the work of moving traditional test teams toward agile methods is focused on the individual tester. Often, the roles of test director, test manager, test team leader, and test-centric project manager are marginalized—but not in this session where we’ll focus on agile testing from the test leader’s perspective. Join experienced agile test leader and long-time coach Bob Galen to explore the central leadership challenges associated with agile adoption: how to transform your team’s skills toward agile practices, how to hire agile testers, how to create a “whole-team” view toward quality by focusing on executable requirements, and how to create powerful doneness criteria. Beyond the tactical leadership issues, Bob explores strategies for becoming a partner in agile adoption pilot projects, making changes to test automation strategies, and how to reinvent your traditional planning and metrics for more agile-centric approaches that engage stakeholders.
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Bob Galen
MG
Requirements Engineering for Testers
Erik van Veenendaal, Improve Quality Services BV
Testers use requirements as the basis of test cases, review them for testability, and often participate in general requirement reviews or inspections. Unfortunately, many testers have little knowledge of or skill in requirements engineering. What level of quality and detail is realistic to expect in requirements documents? What does testability really mean? How can testers help improve requirements? Erik van Veenendaal answers these questions and more while helping you develop skills in requirements engineering. Erik illustrates requirements issues and solutions with practical case studies, and conducts hands-on classroom exercises in finding, specifying, and evaluating requirements. Walk through the requirements process from a tester’s viewpoint to learn what you can and should contribute to requirements quality. At the end, Erik and students will collaboratively create a set of “Golden Rules” that every tester needs to successfully participate in the requirements engineering process.
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Erik van Veenendaal
MH
Adapting Testing Techniques for Cloud Computing and Virtualization
Jason Macy, Crosscheck Networks
Cloud computing and virtualization have moved beyond the experimental stage to become core aspects of modern enterprise architectures. Jason Macy describes a foundation for testing applications and systems employing software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) architectures. After briefly introducing cloud computing and virtualization concepts, Jason explores emerging methods and approaches for testing cloud-based application and infrastructure services. Find out about service virtualization techniques—mimicking services even before they are implemented—that enable testers (and developers) to proceed in parallel before service implementation is completed. You’ll learn how to build pass/fail rules that ensure proper on-boarding, ways to mimic service error states and latencies, and techniques for simulating varying identity token types. With these tools and knowledge about message formats and cloud APIs, testers can create and promote test policies that provide significant value upstream in the application development lifecycle.
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Jason Macy
MI
How to Break Software: Robustness Edition
Dawn Haynes, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
Have you ever worked on a project where you felt testing was thorough and complete—all of the features were covered and all of the tests passed—yet the software had serious issues and problems in the first week in production? Join Dawn Haynes to learn how to inject robustness testing into your projects to uncover those issues before release. Robustness is the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions—an important and often overlooked area of testing. By expanding basic tests and incorporating specific robustness attacks, Dawn shows you how to catch defects that commonly first show up in production. She offers strategies for making robustness testing a project-level concern so those defects get the priority they deserve and are fixed before release. Even if your test team is over-tasked and under-resourced, join Dawn to learn about robustness tests you can add to your suite and execute in just a few minutes.
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Dawn Haynes
MJ
Distributed Agile Testing: Yes, You Can
Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
When agile development first gained popularity, “agile” meant co-located teams, including testers, programmers, analysts, and customers who were expected to perform many functions. As agile methods have spread and expanded, many organizations with globally-distributed teams are facing challenges with their agile deployment. Having worked with many such teams, Janet Gregory has observed ways that testers in agile teams can be very productive while delivering a high-quality software product and working well with the rest of the team. In this interactive session, Janet shares her experiences and offers opportunities for all participants to discuss their specific issues and potential solutions. Whether your distributed team is scattered across time zones, has individuals working remotely from home, or is part of an offshore outsourced project, you’ll take away methods and tools to help develop open communication, deal with cultural differences, and share data and information across the miles.
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Janet Gregory
MK
Leading Change (Even If You’re Not in Charge)
Jennifer Bonine, Up Ur Game Learning Solutions
Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it doesn’t get the support that you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for communicating your ideas to your target audience, a set of questions you can ask to better understand your executives’ goals, and methods for overcoming resistance to change from teams you don’t lead. These tools—together with an awareness of your organization’s core culture—will help you identify which changes you can successfully implement and which you should leave until another day.
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Jennifer Bonine
ML
Exploratory Testing Explained
James Bach, Satisfice, Inc.
Exploratory testing is an approach to testing that emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of testers to continually optimize the value of their work. It is the process of three mutually supportive activities done in parallel: learning, test design, and test execution. With skill and practice, exploratory testers typically uncover an order of magnitude more problems than when the same amount of effort is spent on procedurally scripted testing. All testers conduct exploratory testing in one way or another, but few know how to do it systematically to obtain the greatest benefits. Even fewer can articulate the process. James Bach looks at specific heuristics and techniques of exploratory testing that will help you get the most from this highly productive approach. James focuses on the skills and dynamics of exploratory testing, and how it can be combined with scripted approaches.
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James Bach
MM
Production Performance Testing in the Cloud
Dan Bartow, SOASTA, Inc.
Testing in production for online applications has evolved into a critical component of successful performance testing strategies. Dan Bartow explains the fundamentals of cloud computing, its application to full-scale performance validation, and the practices and techniques needed to design and execute a successful testing-in-production strategy. Drawing on his experiences, Dan describes the methodology he has used for testing numerous cloud applications in a production environment with minimal disruption. He explains how to create a performance testing strategy to give your team critical data about how your online application performs and scales. Learn how to create a robust lab-to-production ecosystem that delivers the answers about what will happen when peak traffic hits your site. Take back practical approaches to mitigate the three most common problems—security, test data, and live customer impact—that arise when designing test plans.
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Dan Bartow
MN
Agile Requirements Exploration with Tester Collaboration
Sue Burk, EBG Consulting
Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
In agile projects where roles are often blurred, it is not always clear how and where testers can best help—especially early in the project. Janet Gregory and Sue Burk have discovered that having testers participate in requirements analysis improves the requirements and makes testing more productive. In this experiential tutorial, Janet and Sue lead participants to employ agile analysis models and specify acceptance criteria as a way to verify and validate requirements. Experience how incorporating your testing mindset and using test design techniques during requirements exploration accelerate test planning, improve specifications, and enhance product quality while uncovering erroneous, missing, conflicting, and unnecessary requirements.
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Sue Burk,
Janet Gregory
MO
Leadership for Test Managers
Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
For years, managers of every ilk have attended courses on various aspects of “management.” Although the word “leadership” has recently become the new buzzword of choice, many of today’s courses, books, and articles are repeats of the same basic management theory we’ve known for years. Not so with this tutorial session! Retired Marine Corps Colonel Rick Craig engages participants with such provocative questions as: Are leaders made or born? What leadership traits do the best test managers exhibit? How can you develop a personal leadership style for your test team and organization? Who is responsible for the morale and motivation of test team members? Join this session to be challenged on how you can become a better—even great—leader within your organization’s structure and corporate culture. Learn to apply leadership principles to testing, explore the impact and importance of influence leaders, and learn how to “sell” testing within your organization. Leave with new skills and a renewed enthusiasm for leading your test team.
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Rick Craig
MP
Free and Cheap Test Tools
Randy Rice, Rice Consulting Services, Inc.
Too often, testers have limited time and little or no money to purchase, learn, and implement commercial test tools. However, the most effective testers have accumulated and regularly use their own personal toolkit of free and cheap test tools. Since 2001, Randy Rice has been researching such tools and has compiled a set of tools that he and many others in his consulting practice have found very helpful. Randy shares a plethora of tools that you can employ to add power and efficiency to your test planning, execution, and evaluation. He’ll present and demonstrate tools for pairwise test design, test management, defect tracking, test data creation, test automation, test evaluation, web-based load testing, and more. Randy shows you how to make the case for incorporating free and open-source tools into organizations that may resist such tools. Learn how you can combine these tools to achieve greater test speed and better test coverage—at little or no out-of-pocket cost.
Learn more about
Randy Rice
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