Technical Classes
Thursday, April 2
700 Series
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

701 Effective Training of an Offshore Test Team
By Michael Hackett
Working with offshore teams is a fact of life, but many still struggle to do it effectively. Training your offshore team is as critical to the success of your project as getting the right information to and from these remote workers. Learn through real-world examples the key elements of successful offshore testing, including training in the areas of process, product/domain knowledge and testing techniques, and how training can be used as a retention tool for offshore staff.

702 A Buzz About Fuzz: Finding Software Vulnerabilities
By Joe Basirico
Fuzzing feeds random inputs to applications in an attempt to choke them. It’s a simple, highly automatable way to trap uncommon and unforeseen errors that may have been overlooked. Learn how to include fuzz testing in your QA efforts, about fuzz testing tools and techniques, and discover how fuzzing provides insight into application behavior. Hear examples of how fuzz testing uncovered hard-to-find bugs and how it can provide metrics on software correctness. After this class, you’ll be able to apply fuzz testing immediately.

703 The Business Value of Usability
By Jeff Johnson
Explains in business terms why it is important for software development organizations to strive for highly-usable products. Describes how investing in usability can increase customer satisfaction, reduce cost of sales and support, increase return on investment (ROI), decrease time to profitability and reduce business risk. Also covers how and when and how much to invest in usability.

704 Performance Bugs and Investigation Strategies
By Alfred Wong
Performance bugs appear in many shapes and forms, and each requires its own investigation strategy. Learn different types of performance testing, how to find performance bugs commonly to Web applications, about the different types of performance bugs and the corresponding types of performance tests that expose them, how to participate actively in performance bug investigation and how to apply these strategies to projects.
NOTE: This class builds on End-to-End Performance Process (508), but also may be taken separately.

705 Optimizing The Testing Effort With Keyword-Driven Frameworks
By Brian Massey
Time is always in short supply. Learn about automating reusable manual tests created early in a project by using a keyword-driven framework. Take away that framework and learn how to integrate it with an automated functional testing tool.

706 Optimizing ‘Web 2.0’ Application Performance
By Hon Wong
The Web has become a dynamic platform where users and agents work together, share ideas and add value across myriad interests. Learn the shortcomings of today’s Web monitoring techniques and a new, holistic approach to managing the performance of “Web 2.0” applications and how it is applicable to complex SOA and Web services technologies.

707 Five Common Mistakes When Securing Web Applications
By Lars Ewe
Despite published security practices of the OWASP and WASC threat classifications, a number of mistakes are still commonly made. This class explores five common mistakes of securing Web applications and the impact that these design flaws have on the overall security of an application. Issues such as client-side trust relationships, failure to properly secure application redirection mechanisms and other design and configuration elements can quickly undermine application security, even when diligent security practices are in place.

 

Technical Classes
Thursday, April 2
800 Series
2:15 pm – 3:15 pm

801 End-to-End Performance Process: From Requirements to Production Monitoring
By Alfred Wong
Performance test engineers often engage in projects only during planning and execution of performance tests. There are more ways they can contribute, such as by fixing performance bugs or avoiding them in the first place. Learn a process from requirements to production monitoring that focuses on performance each step of the way. Enhance the performance role of your current process toward increasing tester contribution, forewarning of possible challenges, and explaining how tools and techniques can overcome them.

802 Performance Testing of Large Distributed Systems
By Jon Quigley and Kim Pries
As with other kinds of software, large-scale distributed embedded systems have a basic tool set. Learn a four-mode testing approach used at Volvo comprising compliance testing, extreme scenario testing, combinatorial testing, and stochastic testing. Also covered will be special handling of specifications, software attributes, interrupts, polling (when and why to use), walkthroughs, inspections, and simulation testing. Learn about testing data buses, communication protocols, emergent system phenomena and other system-related issues as well as effects of code modification on the system and the subsystem.

803 Designing with the Mind in Mind
By Jeff Johnson
If you’re a software designer, developer or tester who never took Cognitive Psychology in school, this class is for you. There’s a psychological basis for UI design rules; they’re not simple recipes to be applied mindlessly. To apply them effectively, you must determine their applicability (and precedence) in specific situations. It also requires balancing the trade-offs that arise when design rules appear to contradict. By understanding the underlying psychology, designers enhance their ability to interpret and apply the rules of good UI design.

804 Performance Engineering for Large Application Clusters
By Daniel Bartow
When it comes to testing large n-tier applications, new teams are underequipped and can’t simulate the expected number of users. The class covers performance concerns that are unique to large clusters such as network crosstalk and bandwidth utilization. Learn how to conduct performance testing on applications with tens to hundreds of instances running in production, how to plan for anticipated user loads in the millions, to identify performance objectives, scale out the right environment for testing and see the performance testing through to production.

805 Web Services/SOA Testing Made Easy
By Meera Subbarao
Learn how SoapUI can be used to write functional tests by creating and executing test cases against your Web services. Includes a demonstration using Groovy scripts for assertions, properties setup and tear down for each test case. Also covers use of the tests in a continuous integration environment, with the Hudson Java servlet as an example of integration and execution of the tests, breaking the build when tests fail and generating reports.
NOTE: A laptop is strongly recommended for this class.

806 Testing in the Cold (And Ideas to Warm You Up)
By Hans Buwalda
"Testing in the cold" happens when a test project is not going your way. Commitment and cooperation are lacking, people might show resistance, you might be blamed for project failures, or the testing and automation work might prove more complicated than expected. As a tester or test manager, you can feel left out in the cold. Learn more than 45 tips and techniques you can use to get yourself out of typical situations of testing in the cold.

807 Details to come

 

Technical Classes
Thursday, April 2
900 Series
3:30 pM – 4:30 pM

901 Tools and Techniques for Fixing Memory Errors
By Chris Gottbrath
An application on the server needs to be restarted every few days or it slows to a crawl. Is it a memory leak? Do you even know how to find out? Learn how in this class and help developers stop writing leaky code. Finding memory leaks is an acquired skill that requires constant vigilance to remain effective. And there is a wrong way. Learn the right way, and keep memory errors a distant memory.

902 GUI Bloopers: Avoiding Common Design Mistakes
By Jeff Johnson
Will your application pass the test, or will users be gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists? Attend this session and discover all the blunders that might be in your interface. Based on the book “GUI Bloopers 2.0” and presented by its author, this talk is not just about making apps pretty. Bring your sense of humor; this talk is sprinkled with humorous screen images illustrating common problems and their solutions. It will leave you better able to critically review apps you develop or test.

903 Testing Visibly
By David Kapfhammer
One of the worst things a testing organization can do is to operate in obscurity from the rest of IT. If the testing organization doesn’t treat developers, business analysts and users like customers, they’ll lose credibility as the “team that operates behind the curtain,” and ultimately become ineffective. Learn a strategic road map that test organizations can use to operate visibly and transparently. Learn how and why to issue a user manual for engaging testing services, a specific operational workflow and maintain an open-door policy.

904 Test Destiny: The Psyche of a Professional Tester
By Brian Massey
Lets face it, software testers are special; different. As kids we wanted to break things. Not to be destructive, but to understand how things worked and use them in unintended ways. We ask “what if?” We push the big red button marked “don't push” because we want to know what will happen. We’ve been testing from the beginning—it’s our destiny. Learn how testers are perceived by peer groups and how that knowledge can help you add value to your organization.

905 Finding Vulnerabilities Without Attacking
By Rick McPhee
Dynamic taint propagation allows testers to find vulnerabilities without modifying existing functional tests. It enables security testing inside a QA organization because it allows tight integration with existing QA infrastructure and solid usability for non-security experts. This talk will explain how dynamic taint propagation works, show how to retrofit an existing executable to perform dynamic taint propagation and demonstrate how a tester can use a typical suite of functional tests to find vulnerabilities without the need for malicious input or security expertise.


906 Finding .NET Performance Bottlenecks Using PerfMon
By Joy Nandi
We’ve all heard of Microsoft’s Performance Monitor, but does anyone actually use it? Learn how this powerful free tool can identify performance bottlenecks in .NET applications by watching six critical areas of performance. Learn the significance of each performance counter and how they can be used to identify critical performance thresholds.
NOTE: A working knowledge of Microsoft .NET Framework, networking, IIS 2.0 and operating system concepts is recommended.

907 Details to come