The key to successful testing is effective and timely planning. Rick Craig introduces you to proven test planning methods and techniques, including the Master Test Plan and level-specific test plans for acceptance, systems, integration, and unit testing. Rick explains how to customize an IEEE-829-type 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 help you become more effective with limited resources. Rick offers test measurement and reporting recommendations for monitoring the testing process. Discover new methods and renewed energy for taking test management to the next level in your organization.

 
About the Instructor
A frequent speaker at testing conferences, Rick Craig is well received worldwide as a test and evaluation instructor with Software Quality Engineering. He has implemented and managed testing efforts on large-scale, traditional, and embedded systems, and co-authored a study that benchmarked industry-wide processes. Rick is co-author of the reference book Systematic Software Testing.

How to Build, Support, and Add Value to Your Test Team  

Creating a test team is one thing . . . maintaining an effective and efficient team is quite another thing. Focusing on a people-oriented approach to software testing, Lloyd Roden and Julie Gardiner examine how we can build (and retain) successful test teams within our organization. Discover the characteristics and qualities of successful testers and test managers and the qualities you should look for to recruit the right person. Identify seven key factors to motivate a test team, including establishing career paths for testers. Discover how a Test Manager can successfully promote the value of testing within the organization, encourage good working relations with Development and other departments, and become a “trusted advisor” to Senior Management. Discuss relevant issues faced in the people side of test management and take back utilities, spreadsheets, and templates to help you build a successful test team.

 
About the Instructors
Lloyd Roden has been involved in the software industry since 1980, working as a developer before managing an Independent Test Group within a software house, joining Grove Consultants in 1999. Lloyd has been a speaker at STAREAST, EuroSTAR, AsiaSTAR, Software Test Automation, Test Congress, and Unicom conferences as well as Special Interest Groups in Software Testing in a variety of different countries. He was Program Chair for both the tenth and eleventh EuroSTAR conferences.

Turbulent Web development projects experience daily requirements changes, as well as changes to user interfaces and the continual integration of new functions, features, and technologies. Robert Sabourin shows you effective techniques to keep your testing efforts on track while reacting to fast-changing priorities, technologies, and requirements. Topics include: test planning and organization techniques, scheduling and tracking, blending scripted and exploratory testing, identifying key project workflows, and using testing and test management tools. Learn how to create key decision making workflows for test prioritization and bug triage, adapt testing focus as priorities change, and identify technical risks and respect business importance.

 
About the Instructor
Robert Sabourin has over twenty years of management experience, leading teams of software development professionals. A well-respected member of the software engineering community, he has managed, trained, mentored, and coached hundreds of top professionals in the field and frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization. The author of I am a Bug!, the popular software testing children’s book, Robert is an adjunct professor of Software Engineering at McGill University.

All too often testers are thrown into the quality assurance/testing process without the knowledge and skills essential to perform the required tasks. To be truly effective, you first must understand what testing is supposed to accomplish and then see how it relates to the bigger project management and application development picture. After that, you can ask the right questions: What should be tested? How much testing is enough? How do I know when I’m finished? How much documentation do I need? This tutorial details a testing lifecycle that parallels software development and focuses on defect prevention and early detection. Learn when, what, and how to test, plus ways to improve the testability of your system. Dale Perry shares the basics for implementing a systematic, integrated approach to testing software.

 
About the Instructor
With over twenty-five years of experience in information technology, Dale Perry has been a developer, DBA, project manager, tester, and test manager. His project experience includes large system conversion, distributed systems, on-line applications, client/server, and Web applications. Dale is a seasoned instructor on subjects including software development, application design, testing and reviews, and software management.

What do you do when you are asked to test a particular feature of an application? In truth, testing theory only provides general guidelines and often falls short of helping you design a total testing strategy capable of guiding your testing activities. This tutorial changes that. “How to Break Software” demonstrates a set of specific techniques you can use to effectively test any software application. With his explanation of software fault models, James Whittaker helps you understand what software does and how it can fail. He then expands these fault models into a set of “attacks” that target the software’s most vulnerable points. James presents this new software-testing paradigm, using real bugs in real software applications as examples. Anyone who loves breaking software will gain a lot from—and enjoy—this tutorial.

 
About the Instructor
A professor of computer science at the Florida Institute of Technology, James Whittaker’s research interests are software testing, software security, software vulnerability testing, and anti-cyber warfare technology. Author of How to Break Software and How to Break Software Security, James has written over fifty papers on software development and security. James was appointed to Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board and was named a “Top Scholar” by the editors of the Journal of Systems and Software.

Learn how to accelerate your test automation effort, dramatically shorten the learning curve, allow non-technical analysts to develop and execute automated tests, and even simplify test library management and maintenance. Linda Hayes presents a guided tour through six levels of test automation, from beginner to advanced implementation approaches, with analyses of the advantages and disadvantages of each. The course provides detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to select and implement a framework. Learn how to use this practical and proven table-driven approach with any commercial or internally developed testing tool for Web, client/server, mainframe, and character-based applications. Linda provides real world examples, new knowledge, and skills you can use as the framework for a new automation project or to make an existing project more successful.

 
About the Instructor
Linda Hayes is Chief Technology Officer at Worksoft, Inc., a software company specializing in test automation. She has more than twenty years of experience in software quality and testing and holds degrees in accounting, tax, and law. Linda is a frequent speaker and award-winning author of books and articles, including the Automated Testing Handbook and regular columns for StickyMinds.com, Computerworld, and Datamation.

Test Process Improvement  

What is the maturity of your testing process? How do you compare with other organizations or with industry standards? Join Martin Pol for an introduction to the Test Process Improvement (TPI®) model, an industry standard for test process maturity assessment. Improving your testing requires understanding twenty key test process areas, your current position in each of these areas, and the next steps to take for improvement. Many organizations want to focus on achieving the highest level of maturity without first creating the foundation required for success. Rather than guessing what to do next, the TPI® model guides the way. Using real world TPI® assessments he has performed in a variety of organizations, Martin describes an assessment approach that is suitable for both smaller, informal organizations and larger, formal companies.

BONUS: Participants receive a copy of the book Test Process Improvement as part of the course materials.

TPI® is a registered trademark of Sogeti USA LLC.

 
About the Instructor
Martin Pol has played a significant role in helping to raise the awareness and improve the performance of testing worldwide. Martin provides international testing consulting services through Polteq IT Services B.V. He has worked with test outsourcing for more than fifteen years, successfully dealing with technical, management, and cultural issues. Martin gained special expertise in offshoring to India.

Exploratory Testing Explained  

A highly productive approach to testing, Exploratory Testing is simultaneous learning—designing and executing tests at the same time. Exploratory Testing typically uncovers an order of magnitude more problems than the same amount of highly scripted testing. All testers conduct Exploratory Testing, but few know how to do it systematically. Even fewer can articulate their process. In this tutorial, James Bach looks at specific heuristics and techniques of Exploratory Testing to help you get the most from this approach. Because Exploratory Testing done well is much like a martial art—the best way to learn is by practicing—James will challenge you with exercises in the art of exploration.

 
About the Instructor
James Bach is founder and principal consultant of Satisfice, Inc., a software testing and quality assurance company. James cut his teeth as a programmer, tester, and SQA manager in Silicon Valley and the world of market-driven software development. In 1999, James designed the General Functionality and Stability Test Procedure for the Microsoft Windows 2000 Application Certification program, which may be the first published example of a formalized intuitive testing process.

People should think—machines should test. One way to achieve high-quality software releases while maintaining your sanity is to get your test machines to do much of the ''heavy lifting'' of creating and executing tests. Model-based testing does exactly that. Model-based testing automatically generates tests from a description of an application's desired behavior. These tests are cost-effective and more dynamic than traditional scripted automation. But the modeling approach requires greater tester design skills, and it calls for a re-thinking of measuring the test team's contribution and where test fits into the development process! Harry Robinson introduces you to state machines, graph traversals, combinatorics, and heuristic oracles that will improve your testing skills and your software's quality. Learn how to generate and automatically execute millions of tests for GUIs, APIs, and Web applications.

 
About the Instructor
Harry Robinson is a Software Engineer in Test for Google in Kirkland, Washington. He writes and speaks frequently on advanced test automation techniques, and he maintains the Model-Based Testing Home page at www.model-based-testing.org. His background includes AT&T Bell Labs, Hewlett Packard and most recently Microsoft, where he was the Test Architect for the Engineering Excellence Group.

Scripting For Testers

Are you a tester who is interested in developing or improving your programming skills to aid your test efforts? Automated testing means programming, but programming doesn't have to be hard. Using the Ruby scripting language in this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to script tests for Web-based software. Explore techniques for automating browser-based testing using an open-source Ruby tool kit. Learn how to write automated functional tests for Web applications, understand how to define a base state for your functional tests, and discover the pros and cons of different approaches for automating Web application testing. By the end of the day, you will have written automated tests for a sample application. Working in pairs is encouraged—bring a friend.

Participants should have some programming skills in at least one language and understand basic programming concepts such as variables and if-then statements.

All participants should bring a laptop (Windows 2000/XP) to this hands-on session.

 
About the Instructor
A leading writer and consultant specializing in Agile testing and homebrew test automation, Bret Pettichord is a contributor to the Watir and Selenium open-source testing tools and co-author of Lessons Learned in Software Testing, a Jolt-award finalist. As his day job, he is director of testing practice with ThoughtWorks, a transnational IT professional services firm specializing in custom software for leading global businesses, where he provides clients with strategic assistance with effective testing practices.