STAREAST 2012 - Software Testing Conference

As testers and test managers we often find ourselves struggling to survive within our organization-sometimes with the possibility of outsourcing or offshoring just around the corner. We often are asked to become more “effective” and more “efficient” with time and resources-to do “more with less.” However, most testers and test managers are unsure of what this actually means. Lloyd Roden shares ten valuable and practical lessons on how you can actually become better at what you do in testing and thrive in your career.

Test automation is an attractive choice for dealing with regression testing, high-volume repetitive testing, data-driven testing, and high risk software that needs its tests to be strictly repeatable. However, the automation tools on the market focus on either software or firmware, so they only offer solutions to pieces of the puzzle.

The "cloud" can deliver services over the Internet in three flavors-software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Testing cloud services requires test managers to focus on more than classical functional testing to address additional risks-new Internet dependencies, different security challenges, and performance concerns-brought by the cloud.

Analysis and testing for data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) projects typically confirm that data was correctly mapped and can be accessed as intended. Such work is absolutely necessary, though not sufficient. Testing for data-centric systems also must prove that the data can be used as intended. Although behavior-modeling techniques that explore system usage aren’t typically part of business warehousing and BI toolkits, they are key to deployments that meet business expectations.