"How do you know when you're finished?" A key process in this assessment is making good bug severity and priority assignment. Robert Sabourin presents a fun, interactive parable that teaches an important lessonx0151assigning bug priority and severity is a business decision, not a technical one. By having clear rules for how you assign severity to bug and applying them consistent, you'll go a long way toward making the right business decisions. Learn how business context impacts bug priority and severity, and review real-world prioritization schemes used by leading organizations.

Because Web services are almost completely dynamic, there is an increased chance of errors in applications using these services. In addition, applications often are more closely tied to business transactions, increasing the business risks whenever those errors do occur. By design, Web services allow access from anywhere in the world and provide its services in real-time. Because a client's behavior cannot be controlled, Web services are vulnerable to many unexpected uses and unanticipated inputs, all of which can impact the functionality of the service. For testing Web services, traditional black-box approaches are not enough. Adam Kolawa explains how to test Web services by adopting white-box testing practices that look in side the software at its design, code, data communications, and control flows.

We have all experienced the "thrill" of functional testing, going through requirements and then crafting test cases to ensure that the application behaves according to specifications. While this method has its place, it misses many classes of bugs, especially security bugs. For example, security bugs can manifest as extra functionality that may not violate requirements directly, but still expose catastrophic holes in software. Based on strategies that have successfully broken some of the world's most secure applications, Herbert Thompson presents the tools and techniques you need to find security problems before your application is released. Learn the security attacks and tools to uncover security vulnerabilities before hackers discover them for you.

Great test managers wear many hats and must know how to balance the company's demands for returns against the need to build capacity and skills within their team-all without breaking a sweat. Test groups are often under-funded and test managers run themselves ragged trying to be all things to all people. From her many years of contact with both senior management and test managers, Johanna Rothman discusses ways to navigate through typical test management traps, such as: how to effectively move people from area to area or project to project; when to say "No;" when to let a project go; and how to speak to management in language they understand. Johanna offers techniques you can use to succeed at the test management balancing act.