STPCon Spring 2008
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON CLASSES
Quick links
Conference program home page
Tuesday full-day tutorials
Wednesday Opening Keynote
Wednesday AM: 100/200 classes
Wednesday PM: 300/400 classes
Thursday AM: 500/600-classes
Thursday PM: 700/800/900 classes
Conference faculty
Wednesday, April 16, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
301 Integrating Application Security Testing Within the Quality Assurance Life Cycle
By Danny Allan
An estimated 75 percent of Web applications are released with security vulnerabilities, due largely to the absence of security processes in the development cycle. Compounding the problem is the difficulty of the coordination of security testing across multiple departments when QA is used as a hub.
This class will expose some of the most common Web application security vulnerabilities and provide techniques and best practices to build application security testing into existing QA processes.
In this class, you’ll learn how to:
• Address application security defects
• Build security processes into the SDLC
• Understand common Web application vulnerabilities
• Apply techniques to integrate testing with defect tracking and remediation systems Wednesday, April 16, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
302 Effectively Training Your Offshore Test Team
By Michael Hackett
Working with offshore teams is a fact of life now for domestic test leads and managers, but many are still struggling to make their global test team work effectively. Training your offshore test team is critical to the success of your projects. If done right, training can help minimize your stress and late-night phone calls, and ensure that you get the right information from the offshore team, enhancing your testing effort’s chance of success.
In this class, you’ll learn 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. The class will cover several real-world examples based on the instructor’s experiences working with teams in the most common offshoring locations. Wednesday, April 16, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
303 Best Practices for the Creation of Automated Agile GUI Tests
By Markus Tiede
This class uses insights and project experience from agile development processes to suggest requirements and solutions for automated agile test design.
Begin by looking at the agile development process to determine the requirements for agile testing. Then hear practical solutions to achieving these goals within a project based on real industrial project experience with automated agile testing. Aimed at testers and project managers, the class offers a set of practices that enable tests to grow alongside product development, ensuring that both new and old functions are tested at each release. Wednesday, April 16, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
304 The Magic Bullet of Test Automation Is Not ‘Record and Playback’
By Aaron Cook
Many software quality assurance test automation solutions are marketed as an “easy” way to increase test coverage, the QA team’s ability to readily regression test applications, and the number of defects found earlier in the development life cycle, all with a record-and-playback technique. Experience shows this approach is a guaranteed way to develop test automation “shelfware” and to continue to propagate the myth that test automation costs more than it is worth.
In this class, you’ll learn about a framework-based approach to developing high-quality test automation solutions. This method will let your developers and testers spend more time building automation scripts in concert with the business community and the business requirements. Developing custom automation scripts that interact with the application under test is a job left for the automation framework.
You’ll discover how to develop sound strategic automation frameworks for use, and reuse, by the quality assurance test automation team. Additionally, you’ll learn how to leverage the framework-based approach to enable development and QA to:
• Prepare the test data and environment for testing
• Smoke-test a new daily build
• Execute daily automated regression tests of key application functionality and requirements (including user acceptance test scenarios) Wednesday, April 16, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
305 What You Must Know to Demystify Ant Build Scripts
By Matt Gabor
If your testing process doesn’t include a pre-build before you test or an audit of the developer-supplied build, you may be missing critical bugs that, due to mismanaged production libraries, are found only when the application is released to production. Most testing teams avoid managing the build process because the scripts that support the build are cryptic and difficult to understand.
This class will teach you the fundamental components of Ant/XML scripts. You’ll learn how to identify problematic hard-coded source and library reference, the use of debug flags, and statically defined directory information that defines what artifacts are used in the build regardless of what is stored and approved from within your source-code management solution. This basic level of information will allow you to audit the builds performed by the development team and define build script requirements that will improve the quality of builds passed to you for testing and release approval. Wednesday, April 16, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
306 Balancing Test to Break, Test to Validate and Metrics
By Jeff Feldstein
We test software to answer two fundamental questions: Does it work? Will it break? The problem for the test department is how much we invest in answering each question. This class will show you a method for generating a feedback loop among three major areas: test-to-validate, test-to-break and test metrics. You’ll learn guidelines to ensure you’re optimizing the investment in these areas competing for your limited resources. Specific types of test-to-validate and test-to-break methods will be presented. In addition, example metrics will be explored, along with suggested actions to take based on the results. You’ll also come away with suggestions for communicating these concepts to your test team. Wednesday, April 16, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
307 Exploratory Testing: Where It Fits in Today’s Testing Life Cycle
By Clyneice Chaney
Today’s testers are facing significant challenges. Many of us go to work in environments loaded with frantic questions like “Is it ready? Can we ship? Now?” Facing the daily barrage of issues associated with getting software out of the door with some level of quality can be daunting, but there are solutions and tools that might provide some opportunities for surviving these challenges and doing a good job.
Exploratory testing has a place among the options of today’s testers. This class provides an overview of the basic steps involved in exploratory testing, discusses testing situations where this technique is a viable supplement to a standard test strategy, and covers strategies for using exploratory testing and for reporting exploratory testing results. Wednesday, April 16, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
308 Automated Testing in the .NET Environment: A New Opportunity for Test Professionals
By Mary Sweeney
Testing in the .NET environment has changed radically in the past few years. It has gone from a black-box approach to today’s full integration of software development and test within the .NET platform itself.
This class will guide you through the pros and cons of working in the .NET environment and discuss what testing in .NET means to you, your company, and today’s testing industry. Will your approach be left in the dust?
You’ll learn:
• How the new approach affects your best practices for development and test
• How testing in .NET compares to traditional and current practices
• The problems and advantages of this approach and what it can and can’t do for you
• The features in the Visual Studio Team Edition for Testers software that are creating all the buzz Wednesday, April 16, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
309 Automation in the Virtual Environment
By Mona Shah
Virtualization environments such as VMware have been a boon to regression testing, enabling testers to easily set up, store and maintain legacy operating-system platforms and applications, enabling the different production phases to be conducted in a staging testing environment.
In this class, you’ll learn how to use automation software to boot virtual images, install new software packages and execute tests, enabling the integration of regression tests in phases of an event-based environment. This class also will cover how to define the scripts and dependency libraries for each virtual environment, pull the test data from a repository and verify the differences in output produced by the current package using a real-world example.
When you leave this class, you will be familiar with the techniques to effectively automate virtual testing with fewer resources and use event-based integration testing, perform regression, performance and integration testing with system notification.
Wednesday, April 16, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
401 Rapid Business-Driven Testing
By Clyneice Chaney
Structured testing is a vital part of any development project. The problem is that almost no one is given the time and resources to properly execute a thorough test process. In an ideal world, rapid testing wouldn’t be necessary, but with most development projects, there are schedule crunches and times when a quick assessment of the product quality is necessary.
What’s the solution? Rapid testing! It’s a way to scale thorough testing methods to fit arbitrarily compressed schedules. “Rapid” doesn’t mean “not thorough,” but it does mean as thorough as is reasonable given constraints on time. In this class, you’ll learn how to use rapid business-driven testing techniques, methods and templates that will increase product quality in rapid development projects. Wednesday, April 16, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
402 Turn Your Test Team Into a High-Performance Organization
By Michael Hackett
Want a road map to quality? Everyone, all development managers, test managers and their organizations are looking for ways to improve quality. Quality improvement can come in many forms: reducing risks by delivering higher and predictable quality product; optimizing time-to-market; increasing productivity; and building a more manageable organization. Some managers look for quality improvement by attempting to implement a more standard or formal process.
This sounds good, but how do you get there? In this class, you’ll learn how to evaluate your test process and strategy, create a culture for change, implement change, and use effective methods for measuring improvement. Wednesday, April 16, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
403 Using FindBugs Effectively
By Timothy Halloran
Finding common defects in the quality, security and performance of Java applications has never been easier, yet many developers don’t use the tools at their disposal. The open source FindBugs static analysis tool eliminates hundreds of common errors from Java code with a very low false positive rate. FindBugs is used by hundreds of thousands of developers around the world.
This course will teach attendees about the types of flaws covered by FindBugs, the benefits of using FindBugs, and how to effectively use the tool in their software development process.
The course will begin with a basic overview of the tool, demonstrate some of the flaws it can uncover, and also touch on advanced topics including how to tune the tool’s rule-set, how to write custom scripts to automate the analysis, and how to write custom bug detectors for FindBugs. Wednesday, April 16, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
404 Deciding What Not to Test
By Robert Sabourin
Software project schedules are always tight. There’s not enough time to complete planned testing. But don’t stop just because the clock ran out. This presentation explores some practical and systematic approaches to organizing and triaging testing ideas. Testing ideas are influenced by risk and importance to your business. Information is coming at you from all angles — how can it be used to prioritize testing and focus on the test with the most value?
Triage of testing ideas, assessing credibility and impact estimation can be used to help decide what to do when the going gets tough! Decide what not to test on purpose — not just because the clock ran out! Wednesday, April 16, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
405 Performance-Testing ‘Obnoxious’ Protocols
By Mark Lustig
While performance-testing tools and techniques have reached a relative state of maturity, dealing with non-standard, complex and emerging protocols is beginning to demand evasive action. Not all systems are developed using Web HTTP-based protocols, including J2EE and .NET. In Web-based UIs, challenges abound to accurately simulate obnoxious protocols such as compressed XML, Java Swing, Flash and AJAX.
You’ll learn about specific techniques and a mature methodology for working with challenging protocols. Specific topics discussed will include performance-testing tool add-ins and integration points, and custom load generation suites. We’ll also address complementary techniques for workload characterization, data generation and test data management. Wednesday, April 16, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
406 Team Techniques for Influencing Upstream Decisions
By Jeff Feldstein
Influencing people who work for you is easy (usually). Influencing people with whom you have no direct reporting relationship isn’t so easy. Test relies on what it gets from marketing and development to do its job well. But it’s more important for test/QA teams to influence the others rather than vice versa.
Come discover what Jeff Feldstein has learned in his years at Cisco that will help you develop test-specific strategies to influence other internal organizations to deliver the best possible product.
You’ll learn a framing technique based on six steps:
• Target
• Objectives
• Strategy
• Structure
• Roles and accountabilities
• Ground rules
We’ll focus on typical situations that most test teams face in trying to get good requirements from marketing, and good quality, testable code from development. You’ll also learn how to frame these requests in terms of business advantages, rather than advantages to test. Wednesday, April 16, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
407 Software Testing From the Ground Up
By Matt Heusser
Imagine for a moment that you have to reinvent software testing tomorrow, based on the history of science and scientific research. Where would you start? What would you get? Would it bear any resemblance to what today’s test gurus advocate? And would it work?
In this class Matt Heusser reinvents software testing, then goes back to compare and contrast the results with traditional approaches.
Once he’s finished with the testing reboot, Matt will discuss the different processes in testing: Design, Learning, Execution, Verification, Bug Reports, Metrics, Qualitative Assessment and Schedule. Matt will explain how much testing automation actually covers (hint: less than you’d hope), and explore tools that can grease, simplify or automate those areas that aren’t covered.
You’ll leave with:
• Techniques to communicate about testing (and your unique challenges) to senior management
• A strategy to increase the perceived (and real) value of your testing team
• Tools to “grease the skids” of software testing — automating routine tasks beyond record/playback Wednesday, April 16, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
408 Designing JUnit Test Cases for Effective Functional Testing
By Matt Love
The JUnit framework is the standard for creating Java unit test cases. Most Java developers are well versed in logistical test construction matters, such as how to develop a test fixture, add test methods with assertions, use the setup method for initialization and so forth. However, many could benefit from a deeper understanding of how to develop a functional test suite that effectively verifies whether code works as designed.
This presentation introduces and demonstrates the following strategy for building an effective JUnit functional test suite:
1. Identify use cases that cover all actions that your program should be able to perform
2. Identify the code’s entry points — central pieces of code that exercise the functionality that the code as a whole is designed to undertake
3. Pair entry points with the use cases that they implement
4. Create test cases by applying the initialize-work-check procedure
5. Develop runtime event diagrams and use them to facilitate testing
The presentation will demonstrate these strategies by applying them to source code from the Saxon project (http://saxon.sourceforge.net/), an XML utility kit that can process XPath, XQuery and XSLT. |
