If you're new to testing Web applications or facing new challenges, you may feel overwhelmed by the terminology and multiple technologies of today's Web environments. Web testing today requires more than just exercising the functionality of applications. Each system is composed of a customized mix of various layers of technology, each implemented in a different programming language and requiring unique testing strategies. This “stew” often leads to puzzling behavior across browsers; performance problems due to page design and content, server locations, and architecture; and the inconsistent operation of the bleepin' Back button! Dawn Haynes shares a Web testing strategy for discovering and targeting new areas to test and an extensive set of test design ideas and software attacks.

Manipulating a web page is only the beginning of test automation. A large test automation suite contains an enormous amount of information about a system. Creating and maintaining such a system can be a nightmare if done incorrectly. If you don't have a feature-rich test automation framework, you're making your life more difficult than it needs to be. Drawing on his years of experience, Brian Kitchener discusses the benefits and pitfalls of engineering an enterprise test automation framework using Selenium. He discusses overall design schemes, common problems and solutions, and shares specific code examples you can take back with you. Leave knowing how to quickly establish a framework, create hooks and provide features to your entire organization, determine the basic features any automation framework should have, and identify some potential problems to avoid.

Customers in today’s Web 2.0 world expect rapid releases of feature-rich applications that just work. Keeping up with such a paradigm change requires test organizations to focus heavily on test automation. Also required is the ability to deal with a test environment that has multiple teams simultaneously working on different areas of a product. Of increasing importance are parallelism, pipelining, and using machine intelligence to sort through the noise and find real defects in products. Clark Malmgren shares how Comcast has increased throughput of their tests by running them in parallel across multiple set-top boxes and pipelining tests to minimize downtime during a test run. Learn how to maximize your testers’ time by harnessing the power of machine intelligence to identify which test failures are real and which are the result of other issues-and allow your team to focus its limited time on what really matters.

The cloud is penetrating every technology organization and almost every software product or service. The cloud affects everything inside development, bringing profound changes to how engineers build, test, release, and maintain software and systems. Sharing his experiences at Microsoft working on the Bing search engine, Ken Johnston reveals how they devised and implemented a test-oriented architecture (TOA) at every layer within their product solution. He explores what stayed the same and what changed when their test organization moved to state-of-the-art cloud testing. Learn how the cloud is driving broader adoption of agile development and driving organizations toward accelerated release rates. Find out how the Bing team shifted to a “continuous testing in production” model for testing web services and eliminated the surprises that came from the old approach of big-at-the-end testing.