Conference Presentations

Design and Optimize Test Cases from Use Cases

As part of developing software requirements, many project teams employ use cases to describe the human interactions with a system. Testers can use the same documents to optimize test case design. Learn the basics of use case writing and what you need to do to turn a use case into a test scenario. Find out how to extract test conditions and equivalence classes from use cases, build a test case matrix, and apply orthogonal array techniques to reduce the number of test cases needed. Take away not only a test case template that Vanguard has used successfully but also examples of a test case matrix created from use cases.

Ronald Rissel, Vanguard
What Hollywood Taught Me About Software Testing

Powerful lessons can be learned from some of the great epic movies of our day: "Star Wars" and bug triage, "Indiana Jones" and requirements, "Monty Python" and configuration management, "Jurassic Park" and unit testing, "The Usual Suspects" and teamwork, and "Star Trek" and SLAs. There are important metaphors within these movie stories that you can apply to real test management problems. Robert Sabourin's entertaining talk ties practical real-world experiences to lessons learned from the movies, offers tips to manage your team, and provides his unique insight into how to get things done!

Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc
Behavior Specification for Testing Embedded Systems

A behavior specification is a valuable engineering artifact for the design, review, and testing of embedded software. It is a black-box model defining all interactions between system and environment and the conditional state-based causal relationships among them. Based on work by IEEE working group P1175, Dwayne Knirk describes a new reference model for specifying the behavior of computing systems. An embedded software control application is used to illustrate the application of this model. Dwayne provides an overview of the application and shows specification examples from the requirements document. He focuses on how the specification was initially developed, analyzed for completeness and consistency, used for generating test cases, and valued by the entire development and test team throughout the project.

Dwayne Knirk, Sandia National Laboratories
Outsourcing Testing: Is it Worth The Headaches?

Although offshoring is becoming a business necessity, we've all heard the nightmare scenario. A company wants to save money by using lower-priced engineers in foreign locales for testing projects, but the quality and management problems are so extreme that the company winds up wishing it had just kept the testing in house. Alym Rayani shares the concrete steps you can take to ensure a good outsourcing experience: determining what should be outsourced, selecting a vendor, handling relations between cultures and leaders, and much more. Find out about the critical project management skills, technical infrastructure, and over-site responsibilities that you will need to develop and maintain internally. Learn how to take these crucial steps and keep the migraines at bay.

Alym Rayani, Symbio
End the Guessing Game - Regression Test Selection Methods

Developing your regression test suite does not have to be a guessing game. Impact analysis offers a detailed, code-based, regression test selection process to determine what areas of a software program need-and which do not need-to be re-tested. This approach produces big reductions in the amount of regression testing required. Brian Robinson discusses regression test selection principles, change determination, impact analysis of changes and tests, test selection or creation, and automation tools. When a bug escapes your regression tests, learn how to improve your process and prevent this type of bug from returning. Brian shares the results using regression test selection methods at ABB where they achieved an average of 40 percent savings in time and a 35 percent increase in defects detected.

Brian Robinson, ABB Inc.
Let's Make Bugs Miserable

Preventing and eliminating bugs is what quality is all about. Help! Call the virtual exterminator! From the moment a bug is created until it is killed or morphs into another bug, it goes through many stages in its "life." Anibal Sousa discusses what can be done to shorten a bug's life and offers a manageable bug-handling process, which can be used to track, prioritize, inspect, catalog, and fix bugs safely. A test manager at Microsoft, Anibal discloses best practices and recommendations for preventing simple bugs with check-in test and auto-daily builds with test automation, creating a bug database system, prioritizing and evaluating bugs correctly, killing the bugs and their siblings for good, and more. Let's make a bug's life miserable!

Anibal Sousa, Microsoft Corporation
Quality Assurance and Testing in an FDA Regulated Environment

How can we reduce costs associated with FDA imposed computer systems validation (CSV) guidelines and improve test coverage at the same time? Experienced in the use of automated testing tools in FDA regulated environments, Eric Toburen shares the challenges of complying with FDA validation guidelines. For many companies, manual CSV is a like a heavy boat anchor that slows projects and increases costs while adding no value other than the perception that the practice avoids an auditor's attention. Find out how automated testing and test management practices can be used to shorten the CSV lifecycle and improve test coverage. After deployment use the automated tests for regression testing to enable the deployment of bug fixes and upgrades minimizing the need for re-evaluation.

Eric Toburen, Genilogix
Diagnosing Performance Problems in Web Server Applications

Many application performance failures are episodic, leading to frustrated users calling help desks, frantic troubleshooting of production systems, and re-booting systems. Often these failures are a result of subtle interactions between code and the configuration of multiple servers. On the other hand, well-designed applications should demonstrate gradual performance degradation and advanced warning of the need to add hardware capacity. Join Ron Bodkin as he discusses the patterns of application failure, some common examples, and testing techniques to help reduce the likelihood of episodic failures in production. Learn about the tools and techniques needed to instrument the application, monitor the infrastructure, collect systems data, analyze it, and offer insight for corrective actions.

Ron Bodkin, Glassbox software
Testing Web Services Security

Many organizations are beginning to deploy Web services as the preferred way to interact electronically with employees, customers, and trading partners. To ensure that these Web services implementations are secure, vulnerability assessment and rigorous testing must be built into the Web services development process. Jack Quinnell describes the current "best practices" in developing and testing the security of an enterprise's Web services applications. He explains what makes Web services vulnerable to attacks and the characteristics of both design-centric and attack-centric vulnerabilities. Learn how to identify and test these vulnerabilities during development and in operational settings. Find out about the latest technology to support testing Web services security. Go away with a new appreciation for the security risks inherent in Web services and what you can do about them.

Jack Quinnell, Kenai Systems
STARWEST 2004: Testing Dialogues - Management Issues

Many organizations are beginning to deploy Web services as the preferred way to interact electronically with employees, customers, and trading partners. To ensure that these Web services implementations are secure, vulnerability assessment and rigorous testing must be built into the Web services development process. Jack Quinnell describes the current "best practices" in developing and testing the security of an enterprise’s Web services applications. He explains what makes Web services vulnerable to attacks and the characteristics of both design-centric and attack-centric vulnerabilities. Learn how to identify and test these vulnerabilities during development and in operational settings. Find out about the latest technology to support testing Web services security. Go away with a new appreciation for the security risks inherent in Web services and what you can do about them.

Facilitated by Esther Derby and Elisabeth Hendrickson

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