STAREAST 2005 - Software Testing Conference

PRESENTATIONS

Developing an Error-Based Testing Strategy

For more complete testing, you need to find and simulate possible error conditions in a system. Many methods throw exceptions when an error occurs. And although the application’s code catches many of these exceptions, an "unhandled" error condition could lead to unpredictable
Chris Shelley, Dell, Inc.
Face-off: Stuctured Testing vs. Exploratory Testing and Error Guessing

Exploratory testing and error guessing are valuable functional testing techniques. Like all other methods, though, they have limitations partly because they are based on the knowledge, experience, and intuition of the test engineer. If you primarily use unstructured approaches for testing, you risk wasting effort on redundant testing, testing in non-critical areas, and under-testing critical areas-all of which can lead to missed bugs or finding defects later in the cycle. BJ Rollison uses two case
William Rollison, Microsoft Corporation
FitNesse: An Open-Source Tool for Acceptance Testing

Testing is a critical aspect of agile development methods. In the acceptance testing process, testers and customers write the automated tests before the code is developed. Then, developers run the acceptance tests to verify that the code delivers the expected functionality. FitNesse is a
Micah Martin, Object Mentor
From Waterfall to Unified Process: A QA Department View

When Chemical Abstracts Service adopted the Unified Process (UP) for software development at the same time it changed to J2EE technology, the QA Department had to find its way into this new environment. The problem? No one seemed to know how QA should function in the UP world. After much soul searching, a new role for QA has emerged-one of information integrator. QA has learned to produce its own view of the project information, from vision documents and architecture assumptions to use cases and user interface specifications.
Michael Buening, Chemical Abstracts Services
Get a New Agile Attitude - Quality First

For decades quality assurance (QA) has been a back-end loaded process. Developers put the bugs in, and QA tests the bugs out. For nearly as long, testers have bemoaned the fact that quality can't be put in at the end, that quality must be built in from the beginning. Support for this view has grown from the grassroots within the development community and is now spreading like wildfire in the software industry.
Robert Martin, Object Mentor
Inside the Explorer's Notebook

Exploratory testing is more than just thinking of clever test ideas and executing them on a whim. It's a craft, requiring practice of several classic scientific skills-one of those skills is careful documentation of observations and conjectures. But as much as testers are scientists, they are also explorers. They must document their actions and observations during testing in such a way that stakeholders can easily understand the important problems and issues that are being discovered.
Jon Bach, Quardev, Inc
Integrate Automation Seamlessly into Your Testing Workflow

In many companies, there is a strange phenomenon-treating test automation specialists and the tests they develop . . . like crazy Uncle George. You know Uncle George. He’s not invited to the holiday parties or summer picnics when we can avoid it. He’s different. We don't understand him completely. Like Uncle George, the automation team is out there working on . . . something. We are pretty sure they are. They run their tests . . . regularly. They seem to be contributing. But why should automated tests be different from other tests?
Jamie Mitchell, Test & Automation Consulting LLC
Integrating In-house Tesing with Outsourced Development

For many companies the lure of cutting costs by outsourcing, particularly with offshore software
development, is very tempting. Unfortunately, if handled incorrectly, the highly touted short-term savings can evaporate due to quality issues that ultimately result in higher maintenance and support costs. For the past few years Steve Splaine, an experienced project and test manager, has lived in a world where some development projects have been sent offshore to speed development.
Steve Splaine and Padmanabhan Surendhar, Nielsen Media Research
It's Too Darn Big: Test Techniques for Gigantic Systems

Structuring test designs and prioritizing your test effort for large and complex software systems are daunting tasks, ones that have beaten many, very good test engineers. If you add concurrency issues and a distributed system architecture to the mix, some would simply throw up their hands. At Microsoft, where Keith Stobie plies his trade, that is not an option.
Keith Stobie, Microsoft Corporation
Legal Compliance in Quality Assurance

In many industries, we must comply with state or federal statutes, government regulations, and other legal standards. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) has brought a new awareness to these issues within testing. So, how do you incorporate legal compliance into your QA and test efforts, and how do you get the information you need to do the job well? Elle Ringham, who deals with these important issues every day at Fidelity National Financial, shares her knowledge and experiences.
Elle Ringham, Fidelity National Financial

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