Conference Presentations

The Missing Integration at Best Buy: Agile, Test Management, and Test Execution

What can you do when test tools from proprietary vendors don’t seem to support your organization’s processes and open source tools are too narrowly focused? Best Buy, the world's largest electronics retailer, faced this very situation. With hundreds of agile development projects running concurrently, they needed an integrated test management and test execution tool set that would scale up easily. Frank Cohen describes how he helped Best Buy integrate open source functional and load test tools, vendor-supplied test management tools, and repository tools with their agile software development methodology. Now, with this integrated solution, business managers, testers, developers, and IT Ops managers click the “Start” button to perform a thorough set of automated tests, verify the results, and produce an informative dashboard of results.

Frank Cohen, PushToTest
Tests and Requirements: You Can't Have One without the Other

The practice of software development, including agile, requires a clear understanding of business needs. Misunderstanding requirements causes waste, missed schedules, and mistrust within the organization. A disagreement about whether or not an incident is a defect can arise between testers and developers when the cause is really a disagreement about the requirement itself. Ken Pugh describes how you can use acceptance tests to decrease this misunderstanding of intent. A testable requirement provides a single source that serves as the analysis document, acceptance criteria, regression test suite, and progress tracker for any given feature. Ken explores the creation, evaluation, and use of testable requirements by the business and developers. Examine how to transform requirements into stories- small units of work-each of which has business value, small implementation effort, and easy to understand acceptance tests.

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
Test-driven Development: An On-stage Demonstration

Test-driven development (TDD) is a skill that takes patience to master-you can’t learn it reading a book. As with learning any new language, to gain fluency you need to practice TDD with competent coaching and lots of hard work. Many well-intentioned programmers try and finally give up on TDD because they never develop the fluency it requires. On stage, Llewellyn Falco leads a live TDD demonstration, talking through the process and microsteps of: (1) studying a feature, (2) creating an initial test, and (3) iteratively developing the related test code and feature code until the feature is completely programmed. Watch how to iteratively write a test, see it fail, and then write the feature code to make it pass. After explaining the theory behind the particular TDD technique used, Llewellyn leads participants in testing progressively more complex objects and scenarios.

Llewellyn Falco, DevelopMentor
Testing Application Security: The Hacker Psyche Exposed
Slideshow

Computer hacking isn’t a new thing, but the threat is real and growing even today. It is always the attacker’s advantage and the defender’s dilemma. How do you keep your secrets safe and your data protected? In today’s ever-changing technology landscape, the fundamentals of producing...

Mike Benkovich, Imagine Technologies, Inc.
STAREAST 2012 Keynote: Testing Trends: Cloud, Virtualization, and Mobility
Video

Almost daily, we see reports of software failures that harm enterprises and impact the brand, putting testing organizations and their efforts in the spotlight. Fortunately, testers are now in one of the most exciting times in the software industry’s history!

Theresa Lanowitz, voke, inc.
STAREAST Testing Be More Effective: Test Automation below the UI
Slideshow

To maintain optimal product quality of large-scale enterprise systems, the regression test suite usually increases in size over time. Whether using automated or manual regression, this brings an additional maintenance and infrastructure cost that tends to get way out of hand, often...

Ashish Mehta and Sohail Farooqui
Deal Me In: Playing the Mangage Your Manager Game

We all have managers above us with whom we must deal-and how we deal with them requires skill and practice. To be successful and help a team be its best, you, as a test manager, need daily practice at managing your manager(s). Using an "arms length" viewpoint of gaming, Jon Hagar examines seven situations in which you may need to win in order to get what you want and what your team needs. But not all games can be won or at least not in exactly the way we might want to win them. The test management game is about positive intent, taking the high road-you do not have to cheat-and knowing when to bet and when to fold your cards.

  • You want a promotion or even your manager's job. What can you do?
  • Your manager sets impossible schedule or budget goals. What can you do?
  • A manager is not listening to the test information. What can you do?
Jon Hagar, Lockheed Martin
You'll Be Surprised by the Things Testers Miss

Why do some bugs lie undetected until live operation of the software and then almost immediately bite us? Drawing on instances of problems that were obvious in production--but missed or nearly missed in testing, James Lyndsay can help you catch more bugs starting the day you return to work. James first describes bugs not found because too little time is spent on testing. Then, looking at the testers' knowledge, he discusses bugs missed because of requirements issues or because testers did not understand the underlying technology's potential for failure. In the most substantial part of the session, James looks at bugs missed because they could not be observed or because testers skimmed over the issue. Learn to recognize each type of testing problem and discover ways to mitigate or eliminate it.

  • Coding errors that are hard to spot with typical test
  • Working with emergent behaviors and unexpected risks
James Lyndsay, Workroom Productions
A Balanced Scorecard Approach for Assessing Test Value and Success

Internal test metrics--test progress, defect density, and TPI/TMM measures on process improvement-do not reveal the complete picture of test value and success. By comparing common test metrics with those found in the Balanced Business Scorecard--financial, customer, internal, and learning/innovation metrics-we see the need to also report financial and customer measures. Some of these measures are quantitative (such as profits), and others are more qualitative (for example, customer satisfaction). Learn to measure the financial impact of testing through productivity metrics and measures of how testing affects the total cost of quality. Include in your reporting qualitative assessments such as the customers' perception of the usefulness of testing, the visibility of testing on projects, acceptability measures, and estimation accuracy.

  • Set measures for all viewpoints of testing's value and success
Isabel Evans, Testing Solutions Group Ltd
Tester Skills for Moving Your Automation to the Next Level

Job interviews for test automation engineers are often limited to, "How proficient are you with the tool vendor XYZ's scripting language?" This approach does little to help the hiring manager choose those individuals who are or will become highly skilled automation professionals. As a test engineer, you will need to acquire specialized knowledge and tool independent capabilities to become a test automation expert. Join Dion Johnson as he identifies the core set of tool-independent competencies required of a successful automated software test engineer: automation framework design, programming and debugging skills, object model concepts, and automation methods based on the required quality attributes. Learn how you, as a hiring manager, can identify these skills, or find out how you personally can improve your skills to become a true test automation expert.

Dion Johnson, DiJohn Innovative Consulting, Inc.

Pages

AgileConnection is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.