Conference Presentations

Does Test Length Matter?

According to popular testing folklore, long tests are more likely to find bugs than short ones. Based on a series of experiments using formal traversal tools, Shmuel Ur demonstrates that long tests do indeed achieve better coverage and are lower in costs than test suites built of short tests. Explore the trade-offs between short and long tests while learning the effective strategies of converting test requirements to test plans.

Shmuel Ur, IBM Research
An Application Program Interface (API) Testing Method

Discover a technique to test APIs that combines aspects of two published software testing methods: Markov modeling and category partitioning. An example is given that demonstrates this hybrid technique. Two case studies-one performed under laboratory conditions as proof-of-concept and the other on a large API-illustrate this technique's effectiveness.

Alan Jorgensen, Advanced Engineering Technology
Internet Product Delivery: Creating Quality at the Speed of the Web

Based on an operations perspective, Richard Martin shares his experiences with an e-commerce company in the areas of project planning, quality assurance, release management, and project delivery. Learn how the e-commerce market differs from other enterprise applications and which "best practices" make the most sense. Explore the most effective ways to manage change at Web speed.

Richard Martin, Calico Commerce
Performance Evaluation and Measurement of Enterprise Applications

Today's large-scale enterprise applications are all Web-enabled and complex in nature. Many users experience performance problems from day one. Performance evaluation and measurement via extensive testing is the only practical way to raise and address all issues prior to a successful deployment. Learn how to tackle performance and capacity issues with the appropriate testing strategy and scalable infrastructure/architecture.

Rakesh Radhakrishnan, Sun Microsystems
Relentless Application Development

Discover ways to develop and operate a team that can rapidly produce a tested, documented, and deployed application in less than three months! This presentation identifies important people, processes, and technologies that must be in place to ensure application success. Gain insight into what fails most often on rapid development, and learn what structures must be in place to succeed.

Linda McInnis, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Critical Components of Asset Management

Examine how Information Technology (IT) asset management methodologies can reduce your organization's IT budget between five and thirty-five percent. Kathy Shoop discusses the critical components to deploy, the challenges of implementing such a program, and the limitations of asset management tools such as spreadsheets and in-house development efforts. Discover the best practices for implementing an asset management initiative in your organization that will result in immediate cost savings.

Kathy Shoop, Janus Technologies, Inc.
Testing Your Software's Requirements

Many testing organizations focus primarily on software executable code, but that's not the only thing you can test. For instance, did you ever consider testing your software requirements? When you test only code, you face some big disadvantages, not to mention that design defects often aren't even fixable because they demand too much effort, too late in the release cycle. In fact, it's difficult to even report some requirements defects since the developers have already committed to the design strategy. But if you test your requirements early in the game, you can discover defects before they're cast into designs and code, consequently saving your organization potentially huge rework costs.

Brian Lawrence, Coyote Valley Software
What's That Supposed to Do? The Archeology of Legacy Systems

In testing utopia, all software products submitted for testing have thorough and comprehensive documentation describing how every program function should work. On planet Earth, however, test engineers usually have to make do under less-than-ideal circumstances. It's not uncommon for test engineers to be asked to verify the functionality of a critical legacy system which has no documented requirements whatsoever. While there are many reasons this can happen, the result is the same: You assume the role of an archeologist sifting through the layers of clues to reconstruct the specifications. Patricia Ensworth gives you instructions and tools so you'll be ready to roll up your sleeves and dig.

Patricia Ensworth, Moody's Investors Service
Did Your Tests Pass or Fail? Answering with Automation

Automated tests using self-verifying data (SVD) can help determine if your query-type tests have the right information or if they are showing you the expected views. In this presentation, Noel Nyman provides a brief overview of an SVD testing method followed by a demonstration of automation techniques that allow you to run random tests on SVDs with millions of records or entries. Using applications such as Microsoft Office, learn how to adapt the techniques taught in this presentation to many different types of applications using most of the common automation tools.

Noel Nyman, Microsoft
Applying Development Best Practices to Automated Testing

Test automation is a specialized form of software development where executable code is produced for the validation and testing process. Many best practices have been identified to allow developers to code more quickly, efficiently, and correctly, but few test automators have adopted these practices. Learn about several of these "best practices"-including code reviews and coding standards-that can be applied to automated test development. Discover how you, as an automated test developer, can capitalize on the benefits provided by these practices.

Andy Tinkham, Spherion Technology Architects

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