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STARWEST 2009 Tutorials
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Many organizations never achieve the significant benefits that are promised from automated test execution tools. 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 smartest approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use. If you don’t begin with legitimate objectives for your automation, you will set yourself up for failure later. For example, if “find more bugs” is your goal, automating regression tests will not achieve it. Even objectives that seem sensible, such as “run tests overnight,” or “automate x% of tests” can be counter-productive. Join Dorothy to learn how to assess your current automation maturity, identify achievable and realistic objectives for automation, build testware architecture for future scalability, and devise an effective automation strategy. |
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| Learn more about Dorothy Graham |
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As a new or current test manager, you may have many questions: How do I create a new team? How can I help my current team become more efficient and effective? How can I build my organization’s confidence in our work? How can I find needed resources? Based on a people-oriented—rather than task-oriented—approach to software testing, Lloyd Roden and Julie Gardiner describe how to build and retain successful test teams. Discover the characteristics of successful testers and test managers. Identify the qualities you should look for to recruit the right people. Learn what you must do for your team and what they should do for themselves. Discuss how to promote the value of testing within the organization while building good working relationships with developers and other organizations. Discuss these relevant issues with others facing the same challenges. Lloyd and Julie provide utilities, spreadsheets, and templates to help you become a successful test manager. |
 
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Learn more about Lloyd Roden
Learn more about Julie Gardiner |
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| Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering |
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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 a 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 test management to the next level in your organization. |
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| Learn more about Rick Craig |
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| James Bach, Satisfice, Inc. |
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Are you in control of your testing education? Do you have a systematic approach to learning the skills a great tester needs? James Bach shares his personal system of testing self-education. It's a system based on analyzing personal experiences and questioning conventional wisdom. He explains and demonstrates the methods that he has used for more than twenty years to develop context-driven testing ideas. You can use similar methods to draw out and codify the lessons of your own experiences. James discusses how to sort through the differing schools of testing; identifies the entry points for personal testing education; provides a syllabus of software testing concepts; and explains how to identify, articulate, and test your own heuristics and assess your progress. Whether you are new to testing, working to be a great test lead, or want to become a better test consultant, this session will take you down the road to more effective learning. |
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| Learn more about James Bach |
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| Richard Bender, Bender RBT, Inc. |
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Over the years, studies have shown that poor requirements are one of the most significant contributors to project failure, and that half of all defects have their origin in bad requirements. We know that the earlier you find a defect, the cheaper it is to fix. Our experience tells us that if specifications are ambiguous, there is nearly a 100% chance that there will be one or more defects in the corresponding code. Richard Bender explains how to review specifications quickly and quantitatively to identify what is unclear about them. Learn how your feedback then can lead to early defect detection and future defect avoidance. Discover how applying these review techniques can reduce the ambiguity rate by 95% on subsequent specifications and how that translates into a significant reduction in the number of defects in the code even before testing begins. Join Richard to learn how this process can also be applied to design specifications, user manuals, training materials, and online help, as well as agreements and contracts ensuring clarity of communications. |
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| Learn more about Richard Bender |
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| James Whittaker, Google |
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Here is your chance to enjoy an educational and entertaining session with expert tester, teacher, and author James Whittaker as he discusses the testing topics that are challenging test managers and testers everywhere. James is a master of hot topics and reads the industry tea leaves for new trends and technologies that will stand the test of time. Topics will include discussions on insourcing vs. outsourcing vs. crowdsourcing, manual vs. automated testing, and developer vs. tester as the owners of quality. James also expounds on technical topics, including exploratory testing techniques, test automation, and less technical topics like managing your testing career, becoming a better tester, and making your organization more quality focused. Although James has prepared material based on these testing topics, the real value of this session is engaging in a conversation that will take your understanding to the next level. This could be a unique opportunity to impact your career and help your organization achieve its goals. |
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| Learn more about James Whittaker |
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You’ve probably heard these questions before: When are you going to be finished testing? Why didn't you find that bug? Why does testing cost so much? So, how do you answer them? Do you just guess or can you respond confidently about the problem that underlies the question? Michael Bolton presents strategies and skills—including critical thinking, context-driven thinking, and general systems thinking—that can help you respond confidently and thoughtfully in difficult testing situations. In this interactive workshop, largely guided by the delegates themselves, we examine some myths about software testing, common cognitive biases, and critical thinking tools. Learn general systems approaches to manage observational challenges and complexity, work through exercises that model difficult testing problems, and discover approaches to solving them. Excellent testing is less about confirming, verifying, and validating, and more about questioning, exploring, discovering, and learning. Come and learn the skills that will help you succeed.
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Participants are encouraged to bring challenging questions and a laptop computer to this session. |
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| Learn more about Michael Bolton |
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| Jonathan Kohl, Kohl Concepts, Inc. |
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Exploratory testing has become a popular approach to software testing, and managers like the results they see in their own teams and what they hear from others. Although many managers would like to embrace exploratory testing, they worry that they might lose track of what’s going on with their testing efforts. Jonathan Kohl addresses these concerns and shows how to effectively manage exploratory testing teams. Jonathan shares methods to track testing progress, determine test coverage, and use information discovered through exploratory testing to help stakeholders make better project decisions. Examine lightweight practices to help understand what people are testing and enable managers to have confidence in the testing work that is being done. Take back an approach to add exploratory testing to your team—without disrupting the practices and procedures already in place. |
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| Learn more about Jonathan Kohl |
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| Ruud Teunissen, POLTEQ IT Services BV |
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How do you estimate your test effort? And how reliable is that estimate? Ruud Teunissen presents a practical and useful test estimation technique related directly 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.
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| Learn more about Ruud Teunissen |
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| Ken Johnston, Microsoft |
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If you have ever shipped a piece of software, you probably have your own “big bug that got away” story. Some missed bugs are bizarre edge cases and perhaps forgivable. Others are enormous errors that have serious financial or business impact. In either case, it isn’t so much that the bug got through testing and out into the wild—unless you are working on rocket or nuclear plant systems. The important thing is what you learn from those bugs. In this fun and exciting workshop, Ken Johnston presents his own Microsoft bug stories, such as the illusive “Sasquatch” and “Billing 101” bugs that got away. Ken shares case studies from inside Microsoft and partner companies and explores root cause concepts, such as seasonality, serialization, certification blind spots, and QoS for services. Take away models for doing your own root cause analysis and implementing process improvements within your team. Bring your current bug challenges and explore others’ bugs in this highly interactive session—where you learn while commiserating your peers. |
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| Learn more about Ken Johnston |
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| Paco Hope, Cigital |
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Rich Internet applications (RIAs) use technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), Flex (based on Flash), and Microsoft's Silverlight to deliver Web applications. These technologies allow a Web-based application to look and feel much like a desktop or client/server system. RIAs, however, pose unique testing challenges because so much of the application's logic runs inside the Web browser. To thoroughly test RIAs, you need to understand the technology, adopt specific testing approaches, and employ special testing tools. Paco Hope introduces dynamic HTML, JSON, and the core technologies that make RIAs possible. Then, he explores the approaches required to adequately test these applications—from the outside-in and the inside-out. Examine an AJAX application and uncover different test strategies while discovering the trade-offs of different testing tools—some open source and some commercial—to interactively and automatically test RIAs.
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| Learn more about Paco Hope |
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| Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com |
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A cast-in-concrete delivery date looms on your project’s horizon. You have precious little time remaining, and the development team keeps delivering incomplete builds of unstable code. Is this a “death march” project, or can the testing team do something useful, or perhaps even save the day? Robert Sabourin describes his experiences when testing in outrageously turbulent projects, sharing five key principles for dealing with the testing time crunch. Robert provides rich examples and case studies illustrating how these principles can be used when testing under pressure. Robert shows how to “triage” testing focus and bug priorities; how to widen the testing net with a rich “variety” of ideas; how to build a dynamic “heap” of tests; how to always know the “last best build”; and how to actively monitor business, technological, and organizational “context” drivers. If you are looking for effective testing strategies when time is running out, development is late, and change is rampant, this session is for you.
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| Learn more about Rob Sabourin |
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Software Quality Engineering • 330 Corporate Way, Suite 300 • Orange Park, FL 32073
Phone: 904.278.0524 • Toll-free: 888.268.8770 • Fax: 904.278.4380 • Email: sqeinfo@sqe.com
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