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STAREAST 2010 Pre-conference Tutorials
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| Whether you are new to testing or looking for a better way to organize your test practices and process, 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 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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| Learn more about Dale Perry |
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What is the maturity of your testing process? How do you compare to other organizations and to industry standards? To find out, join Martin Pol and Ruud Teunissen for an introduction to the Test Process Improvement (TPI®) model, an industry standard for testing maturity assessments. Although many organizations want to improve testing, they lack the foundation required for success. Improving your testing requires three things: (1) understanding key test process areas, (2) knowing your current position in each of these areas, and (3) having the tools and skills to implement needed improvements. Rather than guessing at what to do, begin with the TPI® model as your guide. Using examples of real world TPI® assessments they have performed, Martin and Ruud describe a practical assessment approach that is suitable for both smaller, informal organizations and larger, formal companies. Take back valuable references, templates, examples, and Web links to start your improvement program.
TPI® is a registered trademark of Sogeti USA LLC.
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| Learn more about Martin Pol & Ruud Teunissen |
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| 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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| Learn more about Randy Rice |
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| 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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| Learn more about Lee Copeland |
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| Testing generates a huge amount of raw data, which must be analyzed, processed, summarized, and presented to management so that effective decisions can be made quickly. As a test manager or tester, how can you present information about your test results so that decision-makers receive the correct message? Using his experiences as a test manager and consultant, Lloyd Roden shares ways to communicate with and disseminate information to management. Develop your skills so you become a “trusted advisor” to senior management rather than the classic “bearer of bad news.” Discover innovative ways to keep the information flowing to and from management and avoid losing control of the test process, particularly near the delivery date. Learn how to deal effectively with various controversies that often prevent senior managers from taking you seriously. |
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| Learn more about Lloyd Roden |
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Although many training classes and conference presentations describe processes and techniques meant to help you find bugs, few explain what to do when you find a good one. How do you know what the underlying problem is? What do you do when you find a bug, and the developer wants you to provide more information? How do you reproduce those pesky, intermittent bugs that come in from customer land? In this hands-on class, Jon Bach helps you practice your investigation and analysis skills—questioning, conjecturing, branching, and backtracking. For those of you who have ever had to tell the story about the big bug that got away, Jon offers up new techniques that may trap it next time so you can earn more credibility, respect, and accolades from stakeholders. Because collaboration and participation are encouraged in this class, bring your mental tester toolkit, tester’s notebook, and an open mind.
 Laptop required. |
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| Learn more about Jon Bach |
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Exploratory testing is an approach to testing that emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of the tester to continually optimize the value of his work. It is the process of three mutually supportive activities performed in parallel—learning, test design, and test execution. With skill and practice, exploratory testers typically uncover considerably more problems than when the same amount of effort is spent on 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 testers can articulate the process. Jonathan Kohl describes specific heuristics and techniques of exploratory testing to help you get the most from this highly productive approach. Jonathan focuses on the skills and dynamics of exploratory testing itself and how it can be combined with scripted approaches.
Laptop required. This is a hands-on course. A laptop—preferably with Microsoft Windows capability—is required for some of the exercises. |
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| Learn more about Jonathan Kohl |
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| Much of the work of moving traditional test teams toward agile methods is focused on the individual tester and agile methods. Often, the roles of test director, test manager, test team leader, and test-centric project manager are marginalized—but not in this workshop 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 done-ness criteria. Beyond the tactical leadership issues, Bob explores strategies for becoming a partner in agile adoption pilot projects, 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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| Learn more about Bob Galen |
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| Today, focusing solely on testers’ domain knowledge and technical excellence is not enough. From their experiences training more than 2,000 testers, Mukesh Mulchandani and Krishna Iyer describe vital skills they have found essential to hone the mind of the tester—creativity, collaboration, and discovery. Join Mukesh and Krishna to explore ways to collaborate effectively with others in your organization, improve your innate discovery skills, and unleash the higher productivity inside you and your test team. Their focus is on developing your thinking skills, becoming an effective human engineer, and doing better discovery during your everyday tasks. Learn some of the latest research in cognitive thinking that can be applied to testing and participate in exercises that testers and test managers can take back to teach these skills to other testers in your organization. |
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| Learn more about Mukesh Mulchandani & Krishna Iyer |
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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. However, RIAs 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 unique 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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| Risks are endemic in every phase of every project. One key to project success is to identify, understand, and manage these risks effectively. However, risk management is not the sole domain of the project manager, particularly with regard to product quality. It is here that the effective tester can significantly influence the project outcome. Julie Gardiner explains how risk-based testing can shape the quality of the delivered product in spite of such time constraints. Join Julie as she reveals how you can apply product risk management to a variety of organizational, technological, project, and skills challenges. Through interactive exercises, you will get practical advice on how to apply risk management techniques throughout the testing lifecycle—from planning through execution and reporting. Take back a practical process and the tools you need to apply risk analysis to testing in your organization. |
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| Learn more about Julie Gardiner |
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| 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 are 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. Participants are urged to bring their metrics problems and issues for use as discussion points. |
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| Learn more about Rick Craig |
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