Conference Presentations

A Crash Team Approach to Effective Testing

Rapid changes and stunted delivery deadlines are always challenging software testers. To catch up, software testing must take a different approach without cutting corners-hence, the crash team. The crash team approach focuses on integration testing and runs in parallel with functional testing. Its technique discovers system problems early, problems that would be hard to find with traditional methods. It also supports the spiral development model that's been adopted in many rapid application development environments.

Pei Ma, WeiMa Group LLC
Problems with Vendorscripts: Why You Should Avoid Proprietary Languages

Most test tools come bundled with vendor-specific scripting languages that I call vendorscripts. They are hard to learn, weakly implemented, and most importantly, they discourage collaboration between testers and developers. Testers deserve full-featured, standardized languages for their test development. Here’s why.

Bret Pettichord, Pettichord Consulting
Risk Analysis for Web Testing

All Web sites take risks in some areas ... your job is to minimize your company's exposure to these risks. Karen Johnson takes you through a step-by-step analysis of a Web site to determine possible exposure points. By reviewing the functionality and other site considerations, such as supported browsers or anticipated loads, risk areas can be accurately determined. You'll then create categories of testing based on the exposure points you uncover, starting with broad areas such as functional, content, security, load, and performance, and drilling down to test and protect against even minor vulnerabilities.

Karen Johnson, Baxter Healthcare Corporation
Test Automation of Distributed Transactional Services

Distributed transactions are being implemented everywhere. Web services, EAI, and B2B are just a few examples. Testing these transactions across disparate systems-sometimes even across organizations and firewalls-is difficult, yet vital. But automating the testing is impossible without the right tools. Manish Mathuria offers you a test automation framework built specifically for transactional and component-based implementations. He addresses the practical problems of testing such systems, and suggests solutions for many of them.

Manish Mathuria, Arsin Corporation
Adventures in Session-Based Testing

This paper describes the way that a UK company controlled and improved ad-hoc testing, and was able to use the knowledge gained as a basis for ongoing, product sustained improvement. It details the session-based methods initially proposed, and notes problems, solutions and
improvements found in their implementation. It also covers the ways that the improved test results helped put the case for change throughout development, and ways in which the team has since built on the initial processes to arrive at a better testing overall. Session-based testing can be used to introduce measurement and control to an immature test process, and can form a foundation for significant improvements in productivity and error
detection.

James Lyndsay, Workroom Productions
Finding Firmware Defects

Embedded systems software presents a different breed of challenges to the test professional than other types of applications. Hardware interfaces, interrupts, timing considerations, resource constraints, and error handling often pose problems that aren't well suited to many traditional testing techniques. This presentation discusses some of these problems, and the techniques and strategies that are the most effective at finding software bugs in embedded systems code.

Sean Beatty, High Impact Services Inc
Software Documentation Superstitions

Do you need credible evidence that disciplined document reviews (a.k.a. inspections) can keep total project costs down while helping you meet the schedule and improve quality? The project documentation we actually need should meet predetermined quality criteria, but organizations are often superstitious about writing this documentation-and they let their superstitions inhibit their efforts. This presentation dispels the superstitions and shows you how reinforcements for improving the quality of your software project documentation-such as requirements, design, and test plans/procedures-can occur through disciplined document reviews.

Gregory Daich, Software Technology Support Center
Going Beyond QA: Total Product Readiness

The successful release of software requires more than just testing to ensure the product functions properly; success is also defined by how prepared the product is for advertisement, delivery, installation, training, support, etc. In this paper, we’ll discuss how testing can be expanded to cover all aspects of Total Product Readiness (TPR).

Douglas Thacker, Liberty Mutual Insurance Group
Robust Design Method for Software Testing

This session presents a robust design method based on the Taguchi Approach. A new and powerful way to improve reliability and productivity, this method has been applied in diverse areas such as network optimization, audio and video compression, error correction, engine control, safety systems, calibration, and operating system optimization. Learn the basics of the robust design method for software testing, and experience the principles through case studies like Unix system performance tuning.

Madhav Phadke, Phadke Associates
Automated Testing Framework for Embedded Systems

Is it possible to use an "open architecture" automation test tool to avoid the pitfalls of testing in the embedded, real-time world? It is now. In this session, Michael Jacobson presents an architecture that allows existing testing tools to be connected together as components in an automated testing framework targeted for embedded systems using network communications. He shows you how existing testing tools can become servers with just a couple lines of code. You'll even learn how each component can be changed and tested without requiring an update to the rest of the components, as long as interface communication is maintained.

Michael Jacobson, Northrop Grumman Corporation

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