STARWEST 2012 - Software Testing Conference

Efficient agile organizations focus on defect prevention rather than downstream defect discovery because discovering defects during or after testing adds to development costs. Delaying discovery and repair of defects can make an agile team feel like they are operating in a mini-waterfall. Sharing his experience with Scrum/Kanban teams, David Jellison describes how grouping defects into two major categories-work-in-process defects and escaping defects-reduces development costs and improves reliability in the field.

As enterprises scramble for competitive advantage by rapidly creating and deploying compelling mobile applications, testing professionals have been challenged to quickly adopt new tools and processes to provide effective testing. Failing to meet this challenge often can result in "one-star" user ratings that doom the application to failure.

The cloud offers users a way to easily access applications and data from anywhere on any device. However, behind that simple façade lies a colossal testing challenge. Go Daddy's Storage as a Service and the surrounding SOA consist of technologies galore. Test automation and coverage do not come easily with a technology portfolio that includes PHP, Perl, Python, C++, MySQL, RabbitMQ, and Cassandra-to name just a few.

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.