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STARWEST 2006 Concurrent Sessions
Go To: AGILE METHODS | EXPLORATORY TESTING | INSPECTIONS | METRICS | SECURITY TESTING |
SOA TESTING | SPECIAL TOPICS | TEST AUTOMATION | TEST MANAGEMENT | TEST TECHNIQUES
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| Special Topics | | | Wednesday, October 18, 2006 11:30 AM |
Software Disasters and Lessons Learned
Patricia McQuaid, Cal Poly State University
Software defects come in many forms—from those that cause a brief inconvenience to those that cause fatalities. Patricia McQuaid believes it is important to study software disasters, to alert developers and testers to be ever vigilant, and to understand that huge catastrophes can arise from what seem like small problems. Examining such failures as the Therac-25, Denver airport baggage handling, the Mars Polar Lander, and the Patriot missile, Pat focuses on factors that led to these problems, analyzes the problems, and then explains the lessons to be learned that relate to software engineering, safety engineering, government and corporate regulations, and oversight by users of the systems.
• Learn from our mistakes—not in generalities but in specifics
• Understand the synergistic effects of errors
• Distinguish between technical failures and management failures |
| | | Wednesday, October 18, 2006 1:45 PM |
Building a Fully-Virtualized Test Lab
Ian Robinson, VMware
For many organizations, creating a testing environment to replicate every combination of hardware and software that their users have is cost prohibitive. If your organization faces this challenge, the solution may be to create an infrastructure that is based upon virtual machines. Virtualization allows a single physical server to run the workloads of many different servers. Virtual test environments save time and money and support sophisticated test cases that are not possible in a traditional physical environment. For multi-tiered systems, an interconnected set of servers (application server, Web server, database server, domain controller, and firewall) can be implemented within a family of virtual machines running on a single system. Ian Robinson describes how to transition your test systems from a physical to virtual infrastructure, resulting in a far smaller and more cost-effective number of systems, increased manageability, and the ability to test across a broader range of platforms.
• Learn how to create virtual machine “libraries” of common platforms
• Discover how to reproduce defects in a virtualized environment
• Use only one system to support multi-tier testing configurations |
| | | Wednesday, October 18, 2006 3:00 PM |
ISTQB™ Certification: Setting the Standard for Tester Professionalism
Rex Black, Rex Black Consulting
A good test certification program confirms, through objective exams, the knowledge and professional capabilities of software testers. The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB™) was formed as a non-profit organization to develop and promote just such a certification throughout the world. The ISTQB™ is comprised of volunteer representatives from eighteen national boards, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Israel, India, Japan, Korea, Poland, and other European countries. Rex Black, current President of both the ISTQB™ and the US national board (ASTQB), presents an overview of the first truly international tester certification program. He describes the development of the standard syllabus outlining required knowledge and skills and presents an overview of the three levels of certification available to professional testers.
• Learn about the ISTQB™—an open, international tester certification program
• Discover how the syllabus is the distilled wisdom of many experts including practitioners, consultants, trainers, and academicians
• Participate in a program with over 32,000 certified testers around the world |
| | | T5 is a Double-Track Session! | | Thursday, October 19, 2006 9:45 AM |
Lightning Talks: A Potpourri of 5-Minute Presentations
Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc
Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. LightningTalks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking and offer the chance to try conference speaking without the heavy commitment. Lightning Talks are an opportunity to present your single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea quickly. Use this as an opportunity to give a first time talk or to present a new topic for the first time. Maybe you just want to ask a question, invite people to help you with your project, boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up a full track presentation. For more information on how to submit your Lightning Talk, visit www.sqe.com/lightningtalks.asp. Hurry! The deadline for submissions is August 28, 2006. |
| | | Thursday, October 19, 2006 11:15 AM |
Testing for Global Customers
Bj Rollison, Microsoft Corporation
More and more organizations are creating applications that are used around the globe. These applications must be customized for various national conventions including time, date, number, and currency formats. In addition, these applications must process data from non-English keyboards in languages such as Russian, Japanese, Hindi, and Arabic. Additional complications include string processing, sorting, and sequencing; character conversion; and bi-directional language support for Middle Eastern languages. Bj Rollison shows how an English-language Windows platform can be used to perform globalization testing without testers having knowledge of non-English languages. Bj shows how to select and use non-English character strings as test data. In addition, Bj provides examples of typical bugs found during globalization testing, methods to detect them, and techniques to generate automated tests using foreign character sets.
• Explore the basics of globalization testing
• Learn the value of early globalization testing
• Discover how to identify common globalization defects |
| | | Thursday, October 19, 2006 1:30 PM |
Testing Web Services in Four Key Dimensions
Dave Mount, J-Soup Software, Inc
As Web services become a more prominent component of many applications, effective testing of these components is increasingly more important. Dave Mount discusses testing Web services in four different dimensions: functionality, interoperability, security, and performance. Functionality testing is familiar territory, but the other dimensions may not be. Although interoperability could be assumed, differences in .NET, Java, and XML implementations among different vendors may cause interoperability failures. Security testing is also important, since Web services can inadvertently expose capabilities and data that should be protected. Finally, Web services are subject to performance issues due to message handling, interface layers, and potentially large data payloads. Real-time and batch performance characteristics should be tested to simulate the range of possible uses of Web services.
• Learn the important differences in testing Web services
• Focus your testing efforts on the four key dimensions
• Ensure your Web services quality through effective testing |
| | | Thursday, October 19, 2006 3:00 PM |
Test Estimation: Painful or Painless?
Lloyd Roden, Grove Consultants
As an experienced test manager, Lloyd Roden believes that test estimation is one of the most difficult parts of test management. In estimation we must deal with destabilizing dependencies such as poor quality code received by testers. Lloyd presents seven powerful ways to estimate test effort. Some are easy and quick but prone to abuse; others are more detailed and complex but may be more accurate. Specifically, Lloyd discusses FIA (Finger in the Air), Formula or Percentage, Historical, Parkinson’s Law v. Pricing-to-Win estimates, Work Breakdown Structures, Estimation Models, and Assessment Estimation. Spreadsheets and utilities will be available during this session to help you as tester or test manager estimate better. By the end of this session you should feel that the painful experience of test estimation could, in fact, become a painless one.
• Uncover common destabilizing dependencies
• Learn how to communicate your estimates (and what they really mean) to senior management
• Discover the appropriateness of each of these methods to your work |
| | | Friday, October 20, 2006 10:00 AM |
Testing for Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
Suresh Chandrasekaran, Cognizant
In the wake of huge accounting scandals, many organizations are now being required to conform to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legal requirements regarding internal controls. Many of these controls are implemented within computer applications. As testers, we should be aware of these new requirements and ensure that those controls are tested thoroughly. Specifically, testers should identify SOX-based application requirements, design automated test cases for those requirements, create test data and test environments to support those tests, and document the test results in a way understandable by and acceptable to auditors, both internal and external. To be most efficient, SOX testing should not be separate but should be incorporated into system testing.
• Learn the SOX testing lifecycle
• Identify testable requirements for SOX compliance testing
• Review SOX test automation strategies |
| | | Friday, October 20, 2006 11:15 AM |
Open Source Tools for Web Application Performance Testing
Dan Downing, Mentora Inc
OpenSTA is a solid open-source testing tool that, when used effectively, fulfills the basic needs of performance testing of Web applications. Dan Downing will introduce you to the basics of OpenSTA including downloading and installing the tool, using the Script Modeler to record and customize performance test scripts, defining load scenarios, running tests using Commander, capturing the results using Collector, interpreting the results, as well as exporting captured performance data into Excel for analysis and reporting. As with many open source tools, self-training is the rule. Support is not provided by a big vendor staff but by fellow practitioners via email. Learn how to find critical documentation that is often hidden in FAQs and discussion forum threads. If you are up to the support challenge, OpenSTA is an excellent alternative to high-priced commercial tools.
• Learn the capabilities of OpenSTA
• Understand performance data
• Detect and repair performance bottlenecks |
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