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Tuesday Tutorials
See Sessions From:
Monday
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Tuesday
TA
BIG Testing: Dealing with Large and Complex Testing Projects
Hans Buwalda, LogiGear
Test teams working on large and complex projects often must simultaneously test and support multiple versions while validating numerous configurations and customizations. Today, you have to test more, faster, and better while targeting a multitude of technologies, platforms, versions, and configurations. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and the strategies he’s developed over the years for large testing projects. Join Hans to explore managerial issues that must be addressed on large testing projects—how to build an effective team and how to embed your QA efforts into the organization. Learn ways to implement robust automation techniques, organize your tests for more efficient automation, approach testing in agile projects, use the cloud for testing, and succeed at offshore or outsourced testing. Get answers to your challenges when testing multiple versions and variations of systems and platforms. Take back specific techniques for handling automation challenges such as graphics-intense applications, systems without a user interface, and mobile platforms.
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Hans Buwalda
TB
SOLD OUT
Test Automation for Mobile Apps
Julian Harty, eBay, Inc.
Even if you are not already involved in testing software aimed at mobile devices such as smartphones, that day may be just around the corner. Testing mobile software is particularly challenging, especially if you are unfamiliar with the impact of network connectivity, phone providers, software platforms, etc., or if you have to deal with multiple platforms and devices. Because test automation in this field is still immature, there are few references and examples to guide you toward quick and effective test techniques. In this interactive session, Julian Harty helps you understand how and when automation can aid your mobile wireless application testing and explains how to test mobile apps. Based on the several years Julian spent testing mobile applications at Google and his collaboration with industry experts, the simple and practical tips you’ll learn for the typical and unusual problems mobile applications testers encounter may just make the difference between your success and failure.
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Julian Harty
TC
Becoming an Influential Test Team Leader
Randy Rice, Rice Consulting Services, Inc.
Have you been thrust into the role of test team leader? Are you in this role now and want to hone your leadership skills? Test team leadership has many unique challenges, and many test team leaders—especially new ones—find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the problems they face. The test team leader must motivate and support the team while keeping testing on track, within time and budget constraints. Randy Rice focuses on how you can grow as a leader, influence your team and those around you, and positively impact those outside your team. Learn how to become a person of influence, deal with interpersonal issues, and help your team build their skills and value to the team and the organization. Discover how to communicate your team’s value to management, how to stand firm when asked to compromise principles, and how to learn from your successes and failures. Develop your own action plan to become an influential test team leader.
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Randy Rice
TD
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
James Bach, Satisfice, Inc.
Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker, too. Critically thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master. James Bach shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing puzzles that help you practice and increase your thinking skills. Critical thinking begins with just three questions—Huh? Really? and So?—that kick start your brain to analyze specifications, risks, causes, effects, project plans, and anything else that puzzles you. Join this interactive, hands-on session and practice your critical thinking skills. Study and analyze product behaviors and experience new ways to identify, isolate, and characterize bugs.
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James Bach
TE
Software Performance Testing: Preparing for a Successful Test
Dale Perry, Software Quality Engineering
What does it take to properly plan, analyze, design, and implement a software performance test? How do you report the results? What factors need to be considered? What is your performance test tool telling you? Do you really need a performance test? Is it worth the cost? These questions plague all performance testers. Many performance tests do not appear to be worth the time it takes to run them, and the results never seem to resemble—yet alone predict—production system behavior. Performance tests are some of the most difficult tests to create and run, and most organizations don’t fully appreciate the time and effort required to properly perform them. Dale Perry discusses the key issues and realities of performance testing—what can and cannot be done with a performance test, what is required to do a performance test, and how to present what the test “really” tells you.
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Dale Perry
TF
Usability Testing in a Nutshell
Julie Gardiner, Sage UK
Because our systems are becoming more complex and the market is becoming saturated with competing brands, usability can be a differentiating factor in purchasing decisions. A classic system requirement is “The system must be user-friendly” but what does that mean, and more importantly, how do we test for this requirement? Join Julie Gardiner as she describes usability techniques you can employ to demonstrate a user interface’s efficiency and effectiveness. Find out how to predict and test for usability, and, most importantly, for user satisfaction before the software’s release. Take back new knowledge of proven usability testing techniques: heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthroughs, focus groups, user personas, contextual task analysis, usability labs, and satisfaction surveys. Learn how to define usability goals and how to get management to take usability defects seriously. If you want to improve your skills in usability testing, this session is for you.
Delegates are encouraged to bring a laptop to this session.
Learn more about
Julie Gardiner
TG
Acceptance Test-driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing
Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC
On agile teams, testers can struggle to “keep up” with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with Acceptance Test-driven Development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins. Learn to switch from “tests as verification” to “tests as specification” and to guide development with acceptance tests written in the language of your business. Get started by joining a team for a simulation and experience how ATDD helps build in quality instead of trying to test out defects. Then progress to increasingly more realistic scenarios and practice the art of specifying intent with plain-language and table-based formats. These paper-based simulations give you meaningful practice with how ATDD changes the way you think about tests and collaborate as a team. Leave empowered with a kit of exercises to advocate ATDD with your own teams!
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Nate Oster
TH
Essential Test Management and Planning
Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
The key to successful testing is effective and timely planning. Rick Craig introduces proven test planning methods and techniques, including the Master Test Plan and level-specific test plans for acceptance, system, integration, and unit testing. Rick explains how to customize an IEEE-829-style test plan and test summary report to fit your organization’s needs. Learn how to manage test activities, estimate test efforts, and achieve buy-in. Discover a practical risk analysis technique to prioritize your testing and become more effective with limited resources. Rick offers test measurement and reporting recommendations for monitoring the testing process. Discover new methods and develop renewed energy for taking your organization’s test management to the next level.
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Rick Craig
TI
Compact Test Process Improvement
Martin Pol, Polteq Testing Services BV
Ruud Teunissen, Polteq Testing Services BV
Formal test improvement models such as TPI NEXT®, TMMi®, and CMMI® require formal assessments, process change working groups, extensive implementation programs—and very often call for organizational changes for implementation. Compact Test Process Improvement makes it possible for you to quickly implement changes within normal day-to-day activities to improve the testing process incrementally. It represents a way to select and implement a set of activities that rapidly improve testing’s contribution to project success. With examples and case studies, Martin Pol and Ruud Teunissen show you how to apply Compact TPI in practice. Join in this hands-on session and create a custom improvement plan for your team and organization. When you return to the office, you’ll be ready to get started on a systematic path for test improvement.
TPI NEXT® is a registered trademark of Sogeti USA LLC. TMMi® is the registered trademark of the TMMi Foundation. CMMI® is a registered trademark of the Software Engineering Institute and Carnegie Mellon University.
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Martin Pol,
Ruud Teunissen
TJ
Using Visual Models for Test Case Design
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Designing test cases is a fundamental skill that all testers should master. Rob Sabourin shares a graphical technique he has employed to design powerful test cases that will surface important bugs quickly. These skills can be used in exploratory, agile, or engineered contexts—anytime you are having problems designing a test. Rob illustrates how you can use Mindmaps to visualize test designs and better understand variables being tested, one-at-a-time and in complex combinations with other variables. He presents the Application-Input-Memory (AIM) heuristic through a series of interactive exercises. You’ll use a widely available free, open-source tool called FreeMind to help implement great test cases and focus your testing on what matters to quickly isolate critical bugs. If you are new to testing, these techniques will remove some of the mystery of good test case design. If you’re a veteran tester, these techniques will sharpen your skills and give you some new test design approaches.
Learn more about
Rob Sabourin
TK
Reliable Test Effort Estimation
Ruud Teunissen, Polteq Testing Services BV
How do you estimate your test effort? And how reliable is that estimate? Ruud Teunissen presents a practical and useful test estimation technique directly related to the maturity of your test and development process. A reliable effort estimation approach requires five basic elements: (1) Strategy – Determine what to test (performance, functionality, etc.) and how thoroughly it must be tested. (2) Size – Yes, it does matter—not only the size of the system but also the scope of your tests. (3) Expected Quality – What factors have been established to define quality? (4) Infrastructure and Tools – Define how fast you can test. Without the proper organizational support and the necessary tools, you’ll need time you may not have. (5) Productivity – How experienced and efficient is your team? Join Ruud to improve your test estimations and achieve more realistic goal setting and test strategies.
Learn more about
Ruud Teunissen
TL
Code Coverage Is for Testers Too
Julie Gardiner, Sage UK
Often, projects set a goal of 80%, 90%, or even 100% code coverage. So, what is code coverage anyway, and why can it mean many different things? How can testers help the team reach its coverage goals? And why should we care about code coverage anyway? From a tester’s perspective, Julie Gardiner explores the variety of code coverage metrics, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each, and gives examples of how these metrics are used in real projects. Through demonstrations and exercises, learn about a plethora of coverage metrics—statement, branch, decision, branch condition combination, and more. Julie describes the automated tools teams need to calculate and evaluate code coverage. Leave with the confidence to ask about your project’s current coverage levels, the knowledge to set realistic coverage goals, and the ability to guide testers and developers to improve your project’s code coverage.
NOTE: The code used in the examples will be mostly pseudocode that is suitable for testers without a programming background.
Learn more about
Julie Gardiner
TM
Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers
Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics is complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Rick Craig as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality, defect removal efficiency, defect density, defect arrival rate, and testing status. Learn the guidelines for developing a test measurement program, rules of thumb for collecting data, and ways to avoid “metrics dysfunction.” Rick identifies several metrics paradigms, including Goal-Question-Metric, and discusses the pros and cons of each. Delegates are urged to bring their metrics problems and issues for use as discussion points.
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Rick Craig
TN
Exploratory Testing Is Now in Session
Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.
The nature of exploration, coupled with the ability of testers to rapidly apply their skills and experience, make exploratory testing a widely used test approach—especially when time is short. Unfortunately, exploratory testing often is dismissed by project managers who assume that it is not reproducible, measurable, or accountable. If you have these concerns, you may find a solution in a technique called session-based test management (SBTM), developed by Jon Bach and his brother James to specifically address these issues. In SBTM, testers are assigned areas of a product to explore, and testing is time boxed in “sessions” that have mission statements called “charters” to create a meaningful and countable unit of work. Jon discusses—and you practice—the skills of exploration using the SBTM approach. He demonstrates a freely available, open source tool to help manage your exploration and prepares you to implement SBTM in your test organization.
Learn more about
Jon Bach
TO
Quantifying the Value of Testing
Lloyd Roden, Lloyd Roden Consultancy
“Testing costs too much.” “We don’t get the value we should from the investment we make.” “Testing just delays the project.” Familiar sayings in your organization? Although testing is accepted by most as an integral part of any software development lifecycle, it is often seen as a hole in which to throw money rather than an investment in quality. In order to gain credibility and reduce the negative views of our work, we testers must show senior management a clear return on investment. Lloyd Roden describes six measures that demonstrate the value of testing in tangible business terms. Lloyd demonstrates how these highly practical measures can be used to quantify the value of testing and to predict future quality levels. He explains how to report these measures in a way that is meaningful to management. Lloyd demonstrates the use of various measurement utilities that each delegate will receive.
Learn more about
Lloyd Roden
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