The EuroSTAR Community

Cross Browser Testing Checklist

2010-12-24T18:26:00.000Z

Cross Browser Testing Checklist for your handy reference!

1) CSS validation
2) HTML or XHTML validation
3) Page validations with and without JavaScript enabled
4) Ajax and JQeury functionality
5) Font size validation
6) Page layout in different resolutions
7) All images and alignment
8 ) Header and footer sections
9) Page content alignment to center, LHS or RHS
10) Page styles
11) Date formats
12) Special characters with HTML character encoding
13) Page zoom-in and zoom-out functionality
And obviously you will have to repeat these tests on:
14) Different Operating Systems like Windows, Linux and Mac
15) Different browsers (with different versions) like Internet explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

New EuroSTAR Community Site

2009-10-09T11:55:00.002+01:00

EuroSTAR have recently launched a new Community Site which includes:

Downloadable Presentations from the past 10 EuroSTAR conferences
A Webinar Archive packed with webinars on various topics to listen to at your convenience
Testing Forum to discuss, debate and interact with testers from across the globe
Importantly, the new EuroSTAR blog which contains interviews with prominent testers and articles on various test related issues

You can take a look at the new community by clicking here - remember you must register first of all on the left of the page

We hope you find it to be a useful resource!

Recession-ary Testing

2009-02-24T10:27:00.002Z

As we all know, the world has entered a particularly challenging time with a continuous stream of daily news on the recession, cutbacks and the credit crunch – what does this mean for Software Testers? How secure are our jobs? What effect will it have on testing as a function? I don’t have a crystal ball but I have read some interesting articles over the past few weeks and have come up with a new term – Recessionary Testing!

The Learning and Skills Council in the UK issued a 10 credit-crunch proof jobs list at the beginning of the year and Software Testing sat comfortably towards the top of the list along with Web Designers, IT Security Professionals & Viral Marketing Professionals. I found this interesting and wondered how they could formulate such a list, on what basis is testing more secure than any other profession?

Testing as a profession has grown enormously over the last decade to a point where the importance of software testing within any IT project cannot be underestimated. At EuroSTAR 2009 – attendees spoke about the future of Software Testing and during Manifesto workshops, came up with some intriguing ideas – Testing will be a university degree, we will survive every economic crisis, now and in the future and importantly, what I want to discuss – We will be Pro-Active, not Re-Active! You can view the manifesto online at http://www.softwaretestingmanifesto.org/

A Pro-Active tester can be relied upon and viewed as a real asset to a project in the current climate – software releases while always important are even more so nowadays as delays, bugs or any user issue will severely damage a company’s reputation. High standards of testing must be applied across the board to ensure that users engage with a highly polished product.

So what can testers do?

Innovate, not stagnate – get involved, interact, add value and continuously strive to improve. Get online, begin to read some test specific blogs, maybe start your own J join a local testing group (there’s lots) contribute in forums, share and receive advice and get informed as ‘Knowledge is Power’ (forgive the cliché) don’t hide away or muddle along, engage with one another and the benefits will be far-reaching.

Recessionary Testing is all about growing the profession and not letting the recession push us backwards – nobody is quiet sure when everything will look rosy again, least of all, our so-called economic experts but we can be Pro-Active and emerge stronger than ever..

EuroSTAR FREE Webinar: The Surprising Right Fit For Software Testing presented by Thorkil Sonne

2009-02-17T14:09:00.003Z

EuroSTAR bring world class testing to the comfort of your own desk!
Thorkil Sonne founder of the inspirational company Specialisterne, has kindly offered to present a 30 minute live webinar titled: 'A Surprising Right Fit For Software Testing'

'The Surprising Right Fit for Software Testing' is all about people. Setting the right team is important - but did you know that you may be able to find untapped talents outside your team, outside your company and even as far as at the edge of society. Hear Thorkil Sonne discuss how testing has given meaning to life for many people with autism (mostly with Aspergers Syndrome) - and discuss with Thorkil, how we can make 'Testing for Real' benefit fragile people, as well as business driven companies.

Key points:
• Adding untapped skilled resources to testing
• Inspiration on how to access untapped talent pools
• There is more to business than just business

TIME & DATE
Date: Thursday, 26th February 2009
Time: 10:00am London-Dublin / 11:00am CET
Duration: 30 minutes

Don't miss this thought-provoking presentation!
Register Now!

Testing Disasters

2009-02-04T10:24:00.001Z

As many of you will know, potential software disasters can easily turn into reality and in the vast majority of cases, can be or could have been avoided. Testing plays a vital role in the succesful implementation/launch of software and in many of the disasters that will be outlined later in this article, a greater emphasis on testing could have prevented any problems.

There is an old motto that ‘Failing to plan is planning to fail’ and this is true in everyday tasks as well as in complex IT projects. Some of the best-known IT related disasters could have learnt from this – Microsoft’s live demo of their Voice recognition software – view video, the notorious millenium bug which netted consultants billions of dollars and more recently, the open of Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

The launch of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 was meant to be a proud day for British Airways but instead turned into an absolute PR disaster as the failure of the baggage handling systems disrupted thousands of holidaymakers plans.

On the day of opening it quickly became apparent that the new terminal was not operating smoothly, and British Airways cancelled 34 flights and was later forced to suspend baggage check-in. Over the following 10 days some 28,000 bags failed to travel with their owners, and over 500 flights were cancelled.

The difficulties were later blamed on a number of problems with the terminal's IT systems, coupled with insufficient testing and staff training and cost BA a considerable amount through a subsequent advertising campaign to assure the public that things.

Another spectacular IT failure that can be attributed to insufficient testing is the Siemens passport system fiasco. It was the summer of 1999, and half a million British citizens were less than happy to discover that their new passports couldn't be issued on time because the Passport Agency had brought in a new Siemens computer system without sufficiently testing it and training staff first.

Hundreds of people missed their holidays and the Home Office had to pay millions in compensation, staff overtime and umbrellas for the poor people queuing in the rain for passports. But why such an unexpectedly huge demand for passports? The law had recently changed to demand, for the first time, that all children under 16 had to get one if they were travelling abroad.

Tory MP Anne Widdecombe summed it up well while berating the then home secretary, Jack Straw, over the fiasco: "Common sense should have told him that to change the law on child passports at the same time as introducing a new computer system into the agency was storing up trouble for the future." (Taken from ZDNET.co.uk)

The Airbus A380 also experienced problems and delays due to a lack of testing and forward planning. This was a major European undertaking and, according to Business Week, the problem arose with communications between two organisations in the group: the French Dassault Aviation and a Hamburg factory. Put simply, the German system used an out-of-date version of CATIA and the French system used the latest version. So when Airbus was bringing together two halves of the aircraft, the different software meant that the wiring on one did not match the wiring in the other. The cables could not meet up without being changed.

The problem was eventually fixed, but only at a cost that nobody seems to want to put an absolute figure on. But all agreed it cost a lot, and put the project back a year or more.
Other notable inclusions include McDonalds plan to create an intranet so grand in scale and scope that it was quiet literally impossible - In 2001, the fast-food chain conceived a project to create an intranet connecting headquarters with far-flung restaurants that would provide operational information in real time. Under the plan, dubbed Innovate, a manager in the company's Oak Brook HQ would know instantly if sales were slowing at a franchise in Orlando, or if the grill temperature at a London restaurant wasn't hot enough. It just proved far too much to bite off (taken from Informationweek.com)

There are of course numerous other examples where a lack of testing can be attributed as a major factor in the failure or delay of major projects – so if anybody would like to add some, feel free to do so through the comments section below

Thoughts on EuroSTAR 2008

2008-12-01T15:26:00.003Z

Following another successful EuroSTAR I am delighted to have received some very positive feedback from both delegates and speakers.

Check out the blogs below with entries regarding EuroSTAR 2008 and feel free to comment here in the EuroSTAR Community about your experience or email me with links to other blogs where you have your thoughts on EuroSTAR 2008.

Thoughts from The Test Eye

Randy Rice's Software Testing & Quality Blog

Thanks,
Susan

EuroSTAR Free Conference Place Winner

2008-10-24T09:30:00.000+01:00

I’d like to extend my thanks to all of you who entered last month's Early Bird Competition to win a free place at EuroSTAR 2008. Congratulations to Jessica Algovik, SEB, Sweden who will be joining us this year in The Hague courtesy of EuroSTAR.
I also would like to congratulate ps_testware who have won a two page advertisement in the year’s conference guide for their cooperation in promoting our Early Bird Competition. Thank you to all the participating companies.

Check out the EuroSTAR 2008 Conference Programme!

Register Now and Save €250!!!!

2008-09-16T09:56:00.003+01:00

The EuroSTAR 2008 Programme Chair, Bob van de Burgt and his committee have put together an outstanding conference programme embodying this year's theme - 'The Future of Software Testing'. Bringing a variety of speakers from throughout the world together, for an action-packed week of networking, discussion and debate is how EuroSTAR has established itself as Europe's premier AND largest software testing conference. With over 1,000 delegates present last year we had our largest ever attendance and predict more record breaking numbers in The Hague!

Register online before this Friday, September 19th and save €250!

Be part of Europe's Ultimate Testing Experience-
Register Today!

Win A FREE Conference Place At EuroSTAR 2008!

2008-08-19T14:22:00.004+01:00

This competition is now closed

To coincide with the Early Bird Deadline of September 19th we are giving YOU the chance to win a FREE conference place EuroSTAR 2008!
Enter our competition today and you could be joining us in The Hague, this November for Europe’s premier software testing conference.

Software Testing Revolutionized - Automate from day ONE for automated progressive testing!

2008-07-09T11:20:00.000+01:00

I would like to invite experts on this forum to comment on this new technology - SCIMITAR for which we have now filed a patent application also - www.sapient.com/scimitar !

With this technology, we are enabling automation for progressive testing (first time testing of new features or new applications) versus the current approach of automating the regression test bed! With this approach you get an automated regression test bed for FREE.

Further more, we are providing a visutal test authoring tool to write these automated test cases which is then so easy to use that manual testers can use it to write these automated test cases (while developers are busy writing code for new applications or for new features). Later, QTP code is generated at run-time to run these test cases in automated fashion.

With this testers can write up to 60% more automated test cases per day compared to number of test cases they typically write manually and 1000% (yes thousand percentage) more test cases per day comapred to number of automated test cases that an automation engineer typically creates per day.

You can read more about it at http://www.sapient.com/scimitar and request for a white paper also.

Please do let us know what you think about it.

EuroSTAR Tutorial Day - Malmö, Sweden

2008-07-08T14:44:00.004+01:00

EuroSTAR Tutorial Day - Malmö, Sweden - September 22nd
EuroSTAR will hold a Tutorial Day in Malmö on September 22nd where attendees will learn from renowned test gurus,
Lee Copeland and John Fodeh.
The two full-day courses will run from 9am - 5.30pm. The price for a full day Tutorial is €580

A: Test Management: Roles, Organisation and Processes - Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering, USA
The key to successful testing is effective and timely planning. Lee Copeland introduces proven test planning methods and techniques, including the Master Test Plan and level-specific test plans for acceptance, system, integration, and unit testing ...Read More

B: Establishing an Effective Test Metrics Program - John Fodeh, Hewlett Packard, Denmark

This course shows how to establish a set of metrics to support development and testing with estimating, planning, predicting and monitoring. Learn how to collect, analyze, present and communicate metrics effectively ... Read More

Places on each Tutorial are limited so contact us today on +353 91 514470 to guarantee your place at what promises to be a fantastic training experience.
Members of SAST receive a 5% discount on Tutorial Fee's.
Group Discounts available.

Book Now!
Click here for more Information

The Future of Software Testing discussed by James Whittaker and Randall Rice!

2008-05-19T12:57:00.005+01:00

EuroSTAR Live 30 minute Webinar.
Join this year's Programme Chair - Bob van de Burgt, together with Keynote Speakers James Whittaker and Randall Rice for a sneak preview of what is in store for you at EuroSTAR 2008, followed by a Q&A session. Don't miss your chance to see these world-class presenters in action.

Date: Wednesday, 11th June, 2008
Time: 2:00pm Dublin- London / 3:00pm CET
Duration: 30 mins

•James Whittaker will discuss ‘The End of Testing As We Know It’
•Randall Rice will discuss ‘Trends That May Shape the Future of Software Testing'
•Followed by a Q&A session- ask the experts your questions!

Recorded version of this webinar is available in our Webinar Archive

EuroSTAR 2008 Programme Now Available!

2008-04-24T14:28:00.002+01:00

We are excited to announce the EuroSTAR 2008 Conference Programme is now available online. This year's Programme Chair, Bob van de Burgt and his committee have brought together an outstanding line-up of world class speakers and innovating topics relating to the conference theme -"The Future of Software Testing"

View Programme Today!!!

Win TWO Tickets To The UEFA EURO 2008 Final!!!

2008-04-08T12:31:00.004+01:00

This Competition is now Closed!

Congratulations to the winner Henk van Merode, from KLM, Netherlands!!!

EuroSTAR 2008 is giving you the chance to win TWO tickets to the UEFA EURO 2008 Final taking place this June in Vienna!

EuroSTAR 2008 Call For Papers Deadline - Friday, 7th March!

2008-02-27T12:00:00.000Z

Read the Call for Papers 2008 today. This is your chance to submit your suggested talk for the EuroSTAR 2008 conference programme.

EuroSTAR 2008 conference theme - 'The Future of Software Testing'

Find out more...

What should every professional software tester know?

2008-01-14T19:30:00.000Z

As part of the Professionalism in IT initiative, the British Computer Society (BCS) recently asked for input in order to produce a Core Body of Knowledge for IT professionals. The aim of this work is to counter the “silo effect” that has resulted from increasing specialisation within IT:

“As the scope of IT has broadened, those working in IT have become increasingly specialised. As a result, IT professionals have less understanding of what each other do, are less able to work effectively together and are less likely to know who to turn to when faced with problems beyond their own competence.”

I’d be interested in what you think every professional software tester should know, especially with respect to those areas of knowledge that fall outside the domain of software testing.

Please share your thoughts on this topic.

Defining the profession - what next?

2007-12-17T12:55:00.000Z

Following my keynote at EuroSTAR, a number of people wanted to know, “What do we do next to develop the profession?” and other people saying to me, “We have already started on this by…” so here are just some of the ideas and some of the projects already underway which you could join.

A group from Norway are already looking at links with universities to provide a improved tester education. This is from the Norwegian special interest group – visit http://dataforeningen.no/FgdLS4k.ips and http://dataforeningen.no/?module=Articles;action=ArticleFolder.publicOpenFolder;ID=1930

In the UK, the UK Testing Board is seeking volunteers to help write exam questions; visit the UK Board on www.uktb.org and email info@uktb.org.uk if you want to be part of the exam question group

Two survey activities are taking place; both researchers would value your input and their research will help us have a greater understanding of current position and what we need to do next.

Brett Sumner is carrying out a survey and interviews for an MBA to look at the evolution of the IT profession and the relationship between IT and the business, and the links to his survey are in the December EuroSTAR Newsletter and are:

For general IT end users, business and management: http://www.surveyconsole.com/console/TakeSurvey?id=416482

For IT practitioners, IT management, etc. : http://www.surveyconsole.com/console/TakeSurvey?id=411081

Nick Pearce – who spoke at EuroSTAR on cultural aspects of professionalism – is starting research for an MSC dissertation “An investigation into the discipline of software testing and its transition towards a profession.” Nick is looking for volunteers to interview, so please contact him on nick.pearce@infuse.it if you are happy to be interviewed.

If you are interested in the IT route map for development of the profession, look at www.ifip.org and click on “projects”. You’ll also find your country’s IT professional body, if you are not sure what it is.

If you are interested in certification schemes, have a look at the International Software Testing Qualification Board website, www.istqb.org. If you want to look at alternatives, have a look at the debates on the Association for Software Testing website http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/
for discussion of certification schemes in an interview with Cem Kaner.

Two people from France said they would be interested in a special interest group in France – so I have put them in touch with each other – if you know of a SIG in France, we could pass that information on, or if you also want a SIG in France, again, we could put you in touch with each other.

If you are involved with any other initiatives or projects, why not write a short piece for the EuroSTAR newsletter to let everyone know what you are doing?

A number of people said that they are interested in continuing to discuss ideas. So, let’s use the EuroSTAR blog to do that as it already exists! But be aware this will not be “my” group as some of you have suggested! This will be “your” group – for you to control, keep alive and keep interesting! For you to agree, disagree, debate and try out ideas. For you to communicate, form plans and form groups to make things happen! So this is the start of a blog-place for you to add to and discuss ideas...

Thanks for your time. Let’s keep the momentum going!

Isabel Evans

Upcoming EuroSTAR Webinar- Thursday, 15th November.

2007-10-11T12:50:00.000+01:00

'Regulating Professional Competence: How do we know we are fit to practice software testing?'
-Presented By Isabel Evans, Testing Solutions Group, UK.

Date: Thursday, 15th November, 2007
Time: 10:00 am London-Dublin / 11:00am CET
Duration: 30 minutes

Key Points
• Education and experience – how professions define competence levels
• Qualification - how professions regulate qualification levels for entry
• Evidence for competence level - how professions regulate individual career progress.

Biography
Isabel Evens, Testing Solutions Group, UK
Isabel is a Principal Consultant at Testing Solutions Group with over 20 years experience in the IT industry, including development of procedures, standards and methods, test management, test design and quality management. As well as presenting seminars and training courses to clients, Isabel has spoken on software quality, testing and test management at conferences in the UK, Europe and the USA. Her book, “Achieving Software Quality Through Teamwork” was published by Artech in May 2004. Isabel is a Certified Fellow of the British Computer Society. After 4 years study part time, Isabel qualified in 2006 with an RHS Advanced Certificate in Horticulture.

Register Today!

and

Save this event to your calendar!

EuroSTAR Webinar - Thursday, 11th October.

2007-09-26T14:37:00.000+01:00

'How To Develop A Reliable Test Effort Estimation'
- Presented By Ruud Teunissen, Polteq IT Services, The Netherlands

Date: Thursday, 11th October, 2007
Time: 10:00 am London-Dublin / 11:00am CET
Duration: 30 minutes

Key Points
• Even with little or almost no information available, it is possible to define a global estimate. By asking and answering a few questions, your estimate becomes more accurate.
• The “average” project is a myth! There are always differences that influence the required test effort. Learn how to create an approach for effort estimation that you can tune and that is reliable, defendable and negotiable.
• It's better to be honest than to admit you did not tell the whole truth at the start. It's essential for any estimate!

Biography
Ruud Teunissen, Polteq IT Services, The Netherlands
In the testing world since 1989, Ruud Teunissen has held numerous test functions in different organizations and projects: tester, test specialist, test consultant, test manager, etcetera. Ruud is co-author of Software Testing- Guide to the TMap® Approach and is a frequent speaker at (inter)national conferences and workshops. He was a member of the program committee for Quality Week Europe and EuroSTAR. Ruud is currently an International Test Consultant at POLTEQ IT Services BV.

Register Now!

and

Save this event to your calendar!

Win A FREE Conference Place At EuroSTAR 2007

2007-09-04T16:17:00.000+01:00

This competition is now closed.

To coincide with this year's Early Bird Deadline of Friday September 28th, we are giving you the chance to win a FREE conference place at EuroSTAR 2007. Simply click the link below to enter our competition and you could be joining us in Stockholm for Europe's premier software testing conference!

Next EuroSTAR Webinar - Wednesday, 5th September!

2007-08-21T10:30:00.000+01:00

An Introduction to Testing on Agile Teams – The Practices & Beyond: presented by Antony Marcano, testingReflections.com, UK.

Date: Wednesday, 5th September, 2007
Time: 10:00 am London-Dublin / 11:00am CET
Duration: 30 minutes

Abstract: An increasing number of organisations are considering, or are in the process of, adopting Agile software development practices. Often, how testers integrate into this process is an afterthought. Worse still, organisations assume that it changes nothing about how testers function and operate. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, a capable Agile team can change the very raison d’etre of a tester in all the ways that testers have often hoped for. No longer does the tester *need* to be the gatekeeper of quality; the whole development team cares about quality like never before. No longer are testers at the end of the process; testers are involved from the outset of the project!

During this webinar, Antony discusses:

Key Points
• What is it that makes a team ‘Agile’? – Practices such as Test Driven Development are a reflection of underlying values and goals. It’s the adoption of these values and goals that allows a team to gain the greatest benefit from adopting an Agile approach to software development.

• What are the common ‘Gotchas’ for testers on Agile teams? – For example, extraordinarily short iterations producing software with end-to-end features can catch out many testing teams. This is especially true if the test team is used to being segregated from the developers as a separate team and/or rely on large amounts of manually executed scripted tests.

• What role do testers play and how can you deliver the most value? – Your primary role is no longer just to inform the project of how the software doesn’t work, but to be a welcomed guide who helps, before the first line of code is written, to make sure that the software does work.

Register Now for this Webinar!

Checklist for Test Preparation

2007-08-04T16:56:00.000+01:00

Listed below are questions/suggestions for systematically planning and preparing software testing.

Have you planned for an overall testing schedule and the personnel required, and associated training requirements?

Have the test team members been given assignments?

Have you established test plans and test procedures for

module testing,

integration testing,

system testing, and

acceptance testing?

Have you designed at least one black-box test case for each system function?

Have you designed test cases for verifying quality objectives/factors (e.g. reliability, maintainability, etc.)?

Have you designed test cases for verifying resource objectives?

Have you defined test cases for performance tests, boundary tests, and usability tests?

Have you designed test cases for stress tests (intentional attempts to break system)?

Have you designed test cases with special input values (e.g. empty files)?

Have you designed test cases with default input values?

Have you described how traceability of testing to requirements is to be demonstrated (e.g. references to the specified functions and requirements)?

Do all test cases agree with the specification of the function or requirement to be tested?

Have you sufficiently considered error cases? Have you designed test cases for invalid and unexpected input conditions as well as valid conditions?

Have you defined test cases for white-box-testing (structural tests)?

Have you stated the level of coverage to be achieved by structural tests?

Have you unambiguously provided test input data and expected test results or expected messages for each test case?

Have you documented the purpose of and the capability demonstrated by each test case?

Is it possible to meet and to measure all test objectives defined (e.g. test coverage)?

Have you defined the test environment and tools needed for executing the software test?

Have you described the hardware configuration an resources needed to implement the designed test cases?

Have you described the software configuration needed to implement the designed test cases?

Have you described the way in which tests are to be recorded?

Have you defined criteria for evaluating the test results?

Have you determined the criteria on which the completion of the test will be judged?

Have you considered requirements for regression testing?

EuroSTAR Webinar Archive

2007-06-19T11:06:00.000+01:00

Did you miss last month's webinar? Now you can watch it at a time that suits you! We now have recorded versions available for both our May and June live webinars in our archive.

Webinar Archive...

EuroSTAR Live Webinars

2007-05-29T11:02:00.000+01:00

Using Lessons Learned to Challenge ERP Projects -
presented by Paul Gerrard, Gerrard Consulting, UK

At EuroSTAR we know you have a busy schedule full of deadlines and meetings. Our solution is to offer live 30 minute webinars on the latest testing topics presented by some of the industry's leading experts.

A very valuable half an hour!

Date: Thursday, June 14th, 2007
Time: 10:00 am Dublin- London / 11:00am CET
Duration: 30 mins

Key points
• Hear how lessons learned in past implementations can help you to avoid the mistakes of the past
• See some examples of real-world ERP failures and lessons learned
• Hear how the lessons learned provide a framework for future Test Strategies

Register Now!

EuroSTAR 2007 Conference Programme Launched Today!

2007-05-08T11:14:00.000+01:00

EuroSTAR is Europe’s ultimate testing experience…
3-6 December, Stockholm, Sweden!

Four action packed days of testing, training, discovery, networking and much more.
Check out our line up of 14 exceptional tutorials, over 40 track sessions and world-class keynote speakers, giving you more choice than ever before!
This year’s conference theme 'Defining the Profession'- is intended to be inclusive and will look at all aspects of software testing. Your participation will make this a conference to remember.

View the EuroSTAR 2007 Conference Programme just launched today!

Registration is now open, secure your place at the most educational and inspiring testing event this year!

RadView Launches World's First Commercial-Grade Open Source Internet Performance Testing Product into $1 Billion Market

2007-04-11T14:14:00.000+01:00

WebLOAD, created by the co-founder of Mercury Interactive and backed by 1,600 commercial deployments and 250 engineering years, adopts GPL

SAN RAMON, Calif., April 11, 2007. RadView Software Ltd. (OTCBB: RDVWF), today launched WebLOAD Open Source, the world's first commercial-grade open source Internet performance testing solution. RadView will now focus on products that are based on open source to offer customers a solid alternative to high-cost proprietary performance testing solutions that are often too difficult to implement and lack the flexibility to properly meet customer needs.

WebLOAD Open Source, licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL) version 2, is based on WebLOAD, the company's flagship product that is already deployed at 1,600 sites. Immediately available for free download and use, WebLOAD is a commercial-grade open source project with more than 250 engineering years of product development.

"Current proprietary solutions are too costly and too inflexible, prohibiting developers from tackling performance issues correctly," said Ilan Kinreich chief strategist of RadView and a co-founder of Mercury Interactive. "RadView's open source approach will foster innovation, expand the use of performance testing, provide the foundation for an open source testing ecosystem, and help to define testing standards. Ultimately, open source testing tools will be the key catalyst to improve the quality of Internet applications."

"RadView is embracing an open source approach for building, marketing and selling software," said Yochai Hacohen, RadView CEO. "The power of the open source ecosystem, will make WebLOAD a better product, reduce time to market and increase WebLOAD's reach, enabling WebLOAD to become the de facto standard for performance testing of Internet applications."

RadView supports and distributes WebLOAD under a commercial open source business model. WebLOAD Open Source is a fully functional, commercial-grade performance testing product that is and will always be freely available. Companies that require commercial support, additional productivity features and compatibility with third-party protocols have the option of purchasing WebLOAD Professional directly from RadView.

About RadView

RadView Software Ltd. (OTCBB: RDVWF), is a commercial open source company that develops, supports, and sells WebLOAD, the world's leading commercial-grade open source performance testing solution. Deployed at over 1,600 customers and built with 250 engineering years, WebLOAD improves the Internet experience for everyone by helping developers build high quality Internet applications. More information on WebLOAD Open Source is available at http://www.webload.org/. Commercial customers seeking support, additional productivity features and compatibility with third-party protocols should visit http://www.radview.com/ or call 1-888-RADVIEW

The EuroSTAR Student of the Year Award

2007-03-13T15:35:00.000Z

This year EuroSTAR are introducing a new award for students to encourage the next generation of testers.
The EuroSTAR Student of the Year Award aims to find the best students involved in software testing and make the results of their research available to the wider testing community.
So if you are (or know) a student who wants the opportunity to make their testing career blossom... find out more!

Last Opportunity to Submit Your Presentation to EuroSTAR 2007!

2007-03-09T13:19:00.000Z

Share YOUR experience, YOUR insight, YOUR vision.

Would you like to speak at EuroSTAR?
Then get writing... Submit your proposal before the close of business on Friday, March 16th!

Full Call for Papers & Submission Form

Mark Your Calendar:
Deadline for submissions: 16th March 2007
Notification of acceptance: 8th May 2007
Presentations / papers due: 7th September 2007
Conference dates: 3rd - 6th Dec 2007

EuroSTAR Presentations Now Available Online!

2007-02-27T13:43:00.000Z

EuroSTAR are delighted to introduce a new offering to the European software testing community - Online access to some of the Highlights of last year's conference!

You may now access up to 40 premium presentations from EuroSTAR 2006, which took place in Manchester last December. A selection of the conference sessions are available online as flash files, complete with the original speakers narration, synchronised to the powerpoint graphics!
This offer applies to past conference delegates or newcomers to EuroSTAR alike!
Perhaps you would like to access a session you really liked at EuroSTAR 2006, or alternatively one you missed because it may have clashed with some other tracks at the conference. We are delighted to offer you the chance to experience some of the excellent presentations from last year's conference in flash format which really does bring the presentations to life.

'Pay to Play'
There is a charge to view presentations. Once you have chosen to pay for a presentation you have unlimited access to that presentation. We also have options to purchase single or multiple presentations. You can choose to purchase 5 or 10 presentations to avail of discounted prices. Please note: Pre - conference tutorials are not available to play online.

CLICK HERE to access online presentations from EuroSTAR 2006.

Browse presentations on People Issues, Metrics, Model-Based Testing, Test Design, Techniques and much more!

STAR Tester Newsletter

2007-02-12T11:23:00.000Z

Keep up to date with what's happening in the testing industry by subscribing to the STAR Tester Newsletter. Each month we bring you outstanding articles from some of the greatest testing minds.

Have a look at our Newsletter archive.

Please remeber your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated, if you would like to contribute your ideas feel free to submit your articles to me at susan@qualtechconferences.com

Kind regards,

Susan McAndrew

Editor

Call For Papers - EuroSTAR 2007

2007-01-15T16:02:00.000Z

"Defining the Profession"
Stockholm, 3rd - 6th December, 2007

The theme of the conference is 'Defining the Profession'.

• Do you consider yourself a testing professional? Do others?
• What allows you to make that claim?
• Is there a core set of skills? Are they technical skills, people skills, or both?
• What is your single most valuable skill? Can you communicate it to others?
• Can qualifications define a professional tester?
• Can your organisation contribute a best practice to the profession?

By the end of the conference both delegates and speakers should have a far better picture of the current state of our discipline - and an opinion on the direction it should be moving in. This theme is intended to be inclusive and we will look at submissions covering all aspects of software testing. After all, if your message is of value to a professional tester attending as a delegate then it should, in some way, contribute to 'defining the profession'.
Your participation will make this a conference to remember.
We look forward hearing from you.
Thanks in advance,

Stuart Reid,
Programme Chair, EuroSTAR 2007

Click here for complete Call For Papers

Empirix Robosapien V2 Winners

2007-01-12T15:36:00.000Z

On behalf of Empirix I would like to congratulate the winners of the impressive Robosapien V2! Many of you who attended EuroSTAR 2006 would have met or in my case bumped into (literally) this little guy as you walked around the Expo!!

The lucky winners are Chris Ambler, QA Director, Electronic Arts, UK
and Hans Ruesink, Competence Manager, Financial Services, Logica CMG, Netherlands.

Congratulations to you both!

QualTech Education In-House Training Course Offerings

2006-11-09T11:12:00.000Z

Qualtech Education offer In-House Training delivered by some of Europe's leading test experts on a wide variety of topics. Our courses are flexible and we can tailor a training solution to meet your specific requirements.
Call us today on +353 91 514472 or
email Tracy at tracy@qualtecheducation.com to discuss your requirements.

Take a look at our selection of course offerings

Testing SOA Applications And Services

2006-11-09T11:03:00.000Z

This is an article from the November edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter - STARTester, written by by Colin Robb, Mercury, UK. You can view the complete newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

Few other innovations in IT offer the transformative potential of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), and Gartner estimates that by 2008, 80 percent of IT initiatives will be service-oriented.

The basis of SOA is not new - composite business applications made up of separate, distributed services which can be shared and reused, from internal or external sources - we've seen it before in guises such as CORBA. However, it is the adoption of global standards which is driving the current popularity of the SOA approach.

Read more...

Iterative Automation

2006-11-09T10:59:00.000Z

This is an article from the November edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter - STARTester, written by by Vijay Acharya, RelQ, UK. You can view the complete newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

In this article, I would like to share my experiences of test automation, when confronted with requirement of automating multiple products within a suite and to deliver automated scripts within short span of time.

A Peek into the Product

The product is an Industrial Engineering workflow management system, pre-dominantly used by plant design engineers. The product has series of interfaces to process information from disparate plant design systems, and sends the output in the form of 2d or 3d graphical images over an intranet portal.
The suite of four products are tightly integrated to manage the chain of activities starting from creating individual design elements to integrating and creating whole plant design diagrams.

Read more...

Off-shoring - A False Economy In A Testing Market

2006-11-09T10:52:00.000Z

The following is an extract from the November issue of STAR Tester Newsletter- written by Pete Stock, SDLC, UK. You can view the complete article and newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

Testing your company's IT systems and applications. A necessary job, but an easy one to tick off the list, right? You just offshore your requirements to someone sitting in a room far, far away, they test your software out of sight and you sit back, smug in the knowledge that you're realising great savings in time and money, unlike many of your competitors who are still utilising UK based software testers.

Read more...

Hoover Dam and IT

2006-11-01T02:11:00.000Z

This is a blog entry i wrote at http://www.techtribe.com, you need to be member of this site to view the blog.
Anyways i am recreating the same entry here again:

I have been amazed from my childhood about the Hoover Dam. It size made me feel tiny even on pictures and the stories of its construction got etched to my memory for ever. So when I got a chance to visit Hoover Dam during April 2006, I was very excited.
Excited – is a very mild word to describe my feelings. It was something that I dreamt from my childhood and was very happy to see it come through.
As our car approached the dam, my heart started racing.
The sheer size of the construction amazed me. I walked around. Saw the dam from different angles. Oh boy, I didn’t get tired even after spending 4 hours at the dam site.
I purchased books about the construction of the Hoover Dam and started back.

I started reading the book once I reached my hotel. As I kept on reading I was amazed to know the details of the construction the amount of materials used etc., but one detail caught my attention more:

“… was accepted by the Bureau of Reclamation on March 1,1936, more than two years in advance of the scheduled date of completion”

Not only Hoover Dam, the Empire state building in NY was also completed 5 months ahead of its scheduled time.

For me working in IT projects this piece of information made me think, what lacks us in delivering projects ahead of schedule and at the required quality?

Here I chose to use “required quality” as we may have to go for stringent quality depending upon the type of projects we do.

What ails the IT world? Why do projects dont end on time and are plagued with bugs? Though many articles have been written about this I thought we should learn from the construction/civil engineering peers on how they execute these mounumental projects on time and with the quality that is needed.

I pondered through the resources and I observe these may be the reasons:

1. Vision
a. The vision with these projects are created is to be admired. Clarity in thought while conceiving the projects.
2. Design
a. All the design aspects validated by qualified professionals. All the design alternates are considered and the best selected based on the impact to environment, wildlife etc., There are no two ways to design once the design is baselined
b. Design in such a way that parallel activities are always possible
3. Attention to details
a. The attention to details before start of the project, during the project and while completing the project and during each and every activity carried out
4. Coordinated execution
a. There is no blame game between the teams and every one is clear on what they are doing
5. Metrics on progress
a. Collect only Metrics that give information and not confusion
b. Filter the metrics as what the exective needs
6. A leadership that knew what its doing and what the people are doing.
a. The leadership then didn’t use complicates ERP/CRM/SCM systems and accounting softwares to manage their resources (men,material and money)
7. Innovation, which was integrated with the way design and execution, was done.
a. It is inspiring to read the innovation that has been used while constructing the Hoover dam like “large 10-ton trucks were modified to support platforms holding 30 drills which were used to prepare the rock face for dynamiting tunnels through the canyon walls”

These 7 factors provide a huge impact on the delivery of any project. I will not say that the IT projects lack this completely but the maturity in which it has been used by the construction industry even 50 years back is amazing and that is lacking in IT industry.
Have i missed any factors?
We should start looking towards construction industry for more ideas onhow they manage their projects.

So the question is will we see a day when we start delivering projects much before schedule and with required quality? Will IT mature?

what are your comments and views?

A testing puzzle that asks you identify the problem

2006-10-15T18:41:00.000+01:00

Hi Reader,

Last week I discovered a problem I was facing at office and framed it as a puzzle that can help testers in thinking and encourage them to refine their approach to solve any such problems in testing.

There were a couple of Indian testers who took part in it and now would like to share it with you too, for a reason which I have listed below.

In order to know what the puzzle is : Testing Puzzle at office !

Now, you might wonder how important is this to you but you might find it interesting when you know from me that James Bach did crack the puzzle I put up.

Spend time solving the puzzle and if you think you have cracked the puzzle, try looking at the answer in the same blog. ( have a look at the answer only after you make an attempt cracking the puzzle )
Answer: Answering the Telephone puzzle

Good luck and kudos to those who crack the puzzle!

Thanks and Regards,

Pradeep Soundararajan

The 2006 Testing Excellence Award

2006-10-05T15:35:00.000+01:00

The "European Testing Excellence Award" is presented annually to an individual who has made a significant contribution to the field of software testing within Europe.

EuroSTAR believes there is a need for an award which recognises leadership and contribution in the field of software testing. An award will provide focus to the contribution testing processes and principles make to the success of the products and services in the Information Technology Industry.

A testing excellence award will serve as a vehicle to build a knowledge base of approaches, solutions and the benefits of implementing testing solutions.

We encourage you to think about your colleagues, teachers and mentors within the software testing community, and take the time to nominate someone who has inspired or motivated you or through their work has made your work easier! Lets reward the people that give their time, energy and full commitment to the world of software testing. The submission details are all explained on our web site, so have a read and then tell us all about your testing hero.

The "European Testing Excellence Award" is presented annually to an individual who has made a significant contribution to the field of software testing within Europe.

EuroSTAR believes there is a need for an award which recognises leadership and contribution in the field of software testing. An award will provide focus to the contribution testing processes and principles make to the success of the products and services in the Information Technology Industry.

A testing excellence award will serve as a vehicle to build a knowledge base of approaches, solutions and the benefits of implementing testing solutions.

We encourage you to think about your colleagues, teachers and mentors within the software testing community, and take the time to nominate someone who has inspired or motivated you or through their work has made your work easier! Lets reward the people that give their time, energy and full commitment to the world of software testing. The submission details are all explained on our web site, so have a read and then tell us all about your testing hero.

Submit your nomination before October 30th. Click Here for full details.

Becoming an Influential Test Team Leader

2006-10-05T15:30:00.000+01:00

The following is an extract from the October issue of STAR Tester Newsletter- written by Randall Rice, Rice Consulting Services, USA. You can view the complete article and newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

Seven Ways to Add Value to Your Team

The essence of leadership is influence. Good leaders are able to influence people to achieve a common goal. As a leader, your sphere of influence extends from yourself to your team and then to others outside of your team.

One of the most powerful ways to influence both your team and the rest of your organisation is to lead your team in doing things that will multiply their value to the organisation. In this article I will suggest some low-cost and achievable things that just about any team can do to greatly multiply value and effectiveness.

Read more...

Six Testing Hats

2006-10-05T15:24:00.000+01:00

The following is an extract from the October issue of STAR Tester Newsletter- written by Julian Harty,Google, UK. You can view the complete article and newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

What are some of the hard problems related to software testing?
In my experience these problems range from things like: unclear goals, insufficient support or respect from others, using our limited time effectively, as well as the more fundamental testing techniques, covered in numerous testing books. Like you I expect there are better ways to test, and I'm always on the lookout for ideas from other fields than we may be able to adapt and adopt to enhance our testing.

Read More...

Achieving Software Quality Through Teamwork

2006-10-05T14:49:00.000+01:00

The following is an extract from the October issue of STAR Tester Newsletter- written Isabel Evans, Testing Solutions Group, UK. You can view the complete article and newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

"I'm going to buy a magic wand, and then when the Development Manager says to me 'We've finished the build, now can you do the quality stuff' I can just wave the wand and make it happen…"
Thus said a Test Manager, complaining about the way testing was regarded in his projects.

Read More...

Your Chance to win a FREE place at EuroSTAR 2006!

2006-09-11T10:46:00.000+01:00

This Competition is now closed
As the date for EuroSTAR 2006 quickly approaches we want to give YOU the chance to join us this year in Manchester.

Simply click here and fill in your details to be in with a chance to win a FREE conference place!
Don't miss this opportunity to attend Europe's premier software testing event!

Developing Testers: What Can We Learn From Athletes?

2006-09-07T11:25:00.000+01:00

This is an article from the September edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter - STARTester, written by Paul Gerrard, System Evolutif, UK. You can view the complete newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

This article presents the first section of the paper that Paul is writing to accompany his keynote talk at EuroSTAR 2006.

1.1 Motivation for this Talk
This article is based on my experience of doing two things. Coaching rowers and coaching testers - two things close to my heart. There are some universal rules about coaching and I wanted to explore some of the commonalities between coaching athletes (rowers are athletes) and testers.

A couple of years ago, I (rather foolishly) volunteered to coach the ‘development women’ squad at Maidenhead Rowing club. The Devwomen squad, as they were called, had learnt to row in 2004 and were keen to carry on and compete in some events the following year. I offered to create a training plan, and coach four sessions a week for the next 11 months. The plan was to take people with a few weeks experience and develop them into competitive rowers in a year.
This sounds quite ambitious, but the beautiful thing about the sport of rowing is that you can compete at almost any level. The levels of enthusiasm and commitment were high enough and I was confident we could make good progress. Whether they competed and won, was another matter.

I briefed the squad on my proposed training plan for the year with a PowerPoint talk. It’s a long story, but between September 2004 and July 2005 the squad were very successful. The squad embraced the training and stuck to it, were enthusiastic and committed throughout. Every person in the group had at least one ‘win’ by the end of the summer – some had three or four pots and medals to display on the shelf. (Half of the devwomen subsequently moved up to row in the ’Elite’ squad last year).

Now, it struck me some time later, that the training plan I worked out at the rowing club had a structure, focus and detail more sophisticated than the personal development plans most testers agree with their employer. (In fact, I subsequently discovered that probably less than 10% of testers have any development plan at all). I was curious to see if a development plan for athletes could be used as the starting point for a tester’s development plan.

1.2 From Athletic Training Plan to Tester Development Plan
I took the devwomen training plan, and using the same headings and appropriate substitutions for the content of my PowerPoint presentation to see what such a plan might look like. It started as just an exercise but much of what I had learnt from working with the devwomen had a direct correspondence to working with testers. There were of course some ‘rough edges’ but far fewer than I would have anticipated. So, it seemed to me that there was value in pursuing it further and developing a talk around this curious exercise.

I took my original training plan and slides and re-ran the thought process for each aspect of the plan. I asked myself, ‘if I were coaching testers and I had that kind of framework, what would I put into a development plan for testers?’
In the paper, I walk through a development plan for athletes and then use the same framework to explore what might be done for testers. I think there is quite a lot of commonality in the resulting proposal, and the thinking that goes into such a plan is at the heart of the message I want to provide. The remainder of the paper sets out a proposed structure for a tester development plan.

1.3 Coaching and Mentoring is Critical
Now, one of the first of several surprises (to me, anyway) was that you cannot separate development from coaching. Coach and mentor are terms often used in the context of people and organisational development, but they are often used just as labels for one’s team leader or manager. Coaching and mentoring are critically important activities that reflect two support roles for every individual that wants to develop their skills and capability.
In my dictionary , a coach is ‘an instructor or trainer (in sport); a private tutor’. The implication is that the coach imparts knowledge, guidance and advice to an individual. In this respect, the coach is pro-active – leading people towards improved performance and capability.

In the same dictionary, a mentor is defined as ‘an experienced and trusted advisor’. The implication seems to be that, whereas the coach takes the initiative, a mentor might wait for the individual under instruction to ask for advice. Whereas a coach would direct the individual, a mentor waits until asked for support. Needless to say, trust and effective communication between coach/mentor and the individual are critical to success.

1.4 The Mentality of IT People is a Barrier to Change
Coach and mentor are terms that are over used in the IT industry, not just testing. The IT industry sees itself as distinct from the rest of business – as if the interpersonal skills so important to most disciplines no longer apply. We are all familiar with the stereotypical deep-techy programmer who has difficulty with the other members of his team, let alone non-technical folk or end-users. Usually male, these ‘types’ excel when it comes to solving difficult problems with technology, and find it easier to communicate with operating systems than people.

I’m exaggerating perhaps, but the perception of most business people is that most folk in IT simply do not appreciate the needs, thinking or motivation of business users. The gap between Business and IT starts at the top and runs through to lowest-level practitioners. The concepts of coaching and mentoring, as softer disciplines, are still met with suspicion by many people in IT even though business folk appreciated their importance decades ago. Can IT-folk even spell interpersonal?

Coupled with this ‘mistrust’ of soft-skills, we tend to assume that we can attend a technical training course, learn a new skill and become instant experts. This preposterous; but the push and pull of certification schemes for example (emerging in all aspects of IT nowadays), tempt you into believing that certification is the same as capability. Don’t get me wrong, certification schemes have some value, but they are no substitute for evidence of achievement and experience and interpersonal skills.

One of the problems we have in IT (and not just testing) is that we seem to think that everything has to be invented from scratch. We are continually reinventing wheels in our industry and this mentality dominates many people’s thinking. Unlike most other industries we are continually reinventing stuff that we probably already have. We are ever so keen to adopt the latest process improvement or capability model, regardless of its relevance or usefulness. No matter – it’s techy, looks simple and it’s new.

But when it comes to adopting approaches that support leadership, motivation, communications, learning methodologies and interpersonal skills in general we shy away. They are soft, alien, non-techy, and worst of all, invented by non-IT Folk.

So, IT tends to be very inward looking and introspective and this is partly because the industry attracts people who like the technology more than the business of exploiting and working with technology. Quite a difference, don’t you think?
Although system and acceptance testers are less obsessed with technology than most, we have to recognise the influence – some would say hold – that technology has on many IT folk.

1.5 The Importance of Leadership
The development process (as an athlete or tester) is mainly about human interaction. Yes, of course, there is a lot of hard work required to be done. Slogging over technical exercises, cranking out test plans and grinding out test results is indispensable. But the real value of preparatory work comes when feedback is obtained and the work is discussed with peers, a customer, the coach or mentor.

The reason a coach exists is to set the vision, to explain how to do things, to hint at faults in technique, to suggest improvements, to cajole, to motivate – all to achieve a change in someone else’s behaviour. It’s not about, “this is how you test boundary values, I have explained it, you have tried it once and now you know it”. Coaching is not like that and learning is not like that. Whether you are learning a new technique in a sport or an approach, technique, mentality or attitude in a discipline like software testing, there is little difference in the thought process of the individual. The coach is trying to change someone else’s behaviour and that is no trivial thing.

Not many people wake up in the morning and say ‘at the end of this day I am going to change the way I do XXXXX’. Usually the drive for change is coming from someone else. The change will not be initiated in the individual. Everyone with a personality, ego and confidence in their own ability is innately resistant to change.
Change threatens one’s ego and confidence in one’s ability. So with few exceptions, people resist (consciously or unconsciously) external demands for changes in their behaviour.

Motivating and encouraging people to change are hugely difficult things to do from the point of view of the individual as well as the coach. Although most team leaders and managers may be good technically, they have poor leadership skills. Needless to say, the development of leadership skills in managers helps practitioners to sustain training and development efforts and improve their capability.

Investing in The Dream Team: How to Keep The Dream Team Together

2006-09-07T10:47:00.000+01:00

This is an article from the September edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter - STARTester, written by Filip Gydé, CTG, Belgium. You can view the complete newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

CTG is quite proud of the low staff turnover in the company. Thanks to the Competency Development system, among other things, the staff turnover at CTG was only 15.5% in 2005 and only 13.82% in 2004, percentages far below the market average.
CTG is an ICT service company. This means that we implement IT projects for customers, usually at their locations.
This also means that staff in the field often have more intensive contacts with the customer than with their own company. This is a real challenge for a company that is proud of its extraordinary high loyalty levels, both from customers and from staff.

How do you make sure that once you have the right people on board, you can also keep them on board?
How do you turn what is usually a big problem in the service world into a real differentiator in the market?

The answer consists of different ingredients and a recipe that combines these ingredients in the right proportions: a very specific recruitment, a clear strategy, focus on continuous development, a corporate culture based on values, etc.

The real secret consists in making all these matters, which are traditionally labelled as "soft", very tangible and "hard", measure very concretely and follow up the results like a financial ratio. "Put your money where your mouth is", is still a very good test to see whether someone actually means what he says.

In this article I will zoom in on one of the ingredients in the recipe of retention policy; Competency Development (CD). We have developed the Competency Development (CD) system and anchored it in an actual job within the organisation. We can also demonstrate that this is one of the reasons for a low staff turnover: 13.82% in 2004 and barely 15.5 % in 2005, percentages far below the market average.

The Competency Developer is continuously looking for the best match: the right co-worker in the right place, with maximum attention for the career path indicated by the consultant and in line with the customer's expectations and the strategy of CTG itself. The reason is simple: we are convinced that the major reason for someone to change companies is mainly related to the job content, which may no longer be in the co-worker's field of interest, or to the feeling that there are little opportunities to further his/her career. Specifically in these domains, the Competency Development concept provides a great added value.

Role of the Competency Developer at CTG

The Competency Developer, called "CD" in short, assists co-workers in developing their career path. He is responsible for our consultants' competency development and for knowledge management in line with the strategy and business plan of our company. When we are looking for a certain profile for one of our projects with a customer, the CD verifies whether the right match can be found. In some cases we immediately come across an adequate co-worker. Sometimes a certain co-worker almost complies with the requested profile description, but he may qualify even better for the job after an extra training or far-reaching coaching.

One CD is responsible for about 50 consultants. Right from the start the CD builds a relationship of trust with the new consultant. For junior profiles, whose career direction is not yet fully defined, it mainly comes down to "steering". Senior consultants usually have already developed a vision of their own, so the CD's task is rather to hold up a mirror for them and give them regular feedback. The CD encourages everyone to develop both technical and interpersonal skills. The idea is to get all our co-workers to really think along with our company and our customers.

The role of the CD starts with the recruitment and settling-in of new co-workers
The HR department takes care of the first screening of an applicant. During the first interview the recruiter does not speak so much about the applicant's technical skills, but he tries to find out whether the applicant's personality would fit into the company. Which values are important for the applicant and do they correspond to our values? From experience we have learned that this fit is the most important aspect: the values of our company describe our identity and the materialisation of these values shows where we are different from other companies. If you do not match our identity, it won't work in the long run.

From positive advice after this first screening, the Competency Developer enters the picture. In a second interview he will go deeper into the job-related skills of the person, he will also perform a double-check of the personality and probes the expectations in the short, medium and even long term. The CD has to be able to commit our company in terms of these ambitions. It makes no sense to start off with someone if the ambitions are not in line with our organisation's strategy.

Because success usually lies in a good start, the CD plays a key role in introducing the new co-worker in our company. The expectations of both parties – the co-worker and CTG – are continuously aligned.

When a first project has been found for the new co-worker, the CD tells him what the current options are and how this fits into the career path he wants to follow. If he does not know which direction he wants to take, the CD will provide "stepping stones" or get him in touch with others which can help him make his choices.

An evaluation takes place after one month: the customer or our own project manager gives feedback to the CD about the technical and interpersonal skills, either or not in the presence of the consultant himself. If required, action items will be proposed.

Besides lots of informal contacts there are also formal moments: feedback interviews and career interviews

A formal feedback interview is organised twice a year, linked to an evaluation with the customer. Once a year the CD holds a career interview: the set objectives and the relevant competencies are assessed. Action items for the next period are defined. Previous to this interview an Appraisal Review document is sent to the consultants, where they have to give themselves a score for all listed competencies relevant to their situation, with the aim of detecting and discussing possible focal points with the CD.
Junior profiles sometimes feel uneasy about this, but more experienced consultants see it as a real support for their personal competency development. In addition, we also work with 360 degree feedback, an evaluation by the customer and an observation to score competencies and corresponding behavioural indicators.

Continuous development means that the CD plays an active role in the training planning.

The competency system is developed on the basis of 10 "levels". A junior consultant starts in level 1 and can grow towards his field of interest via an evolution in technical and interpersonal skills.

For each level a "must-have" list is available of courses to be attended and skills to be acquired before you can be classified in a certain level. For example, influence skills are very important for the profile of a Project Manager. For the choice of learning activities the consultant's preferred learning style is taken into account, through their own assessment or through experience with results of other learning activities.

Everyone can submit an online application for his or her training schedule, consult the growth in level and the training catalogue, as well as register for learning activities, always in consultation with the CD.

No false promises, but a very concrete investment ... which pays off!

A clearly structured system, as you can see, the "Competency Development". With a proportion of 1 in 50 this means an investment of 10 FTEs for 500 co-workers. Such an investment is not just made out of a conviction, it has to work out financially.

And it does, according to the figures. If a co-worker leaves the company prematurely, you at least have to find a replacement and train him/her; you may also have problems with the current project, and you lose the know-how you gathered ... to name just the 3 largest cost items. All together, when one co-worker leaves, it is likely to cost the equivalent of 6 man months. So, if a Competency Developer makes sure that two people less than the market average leave per year, the investment pays off. I can assure you that the ROI is much higher than that.

The Competency Developer is an important ingredient in the recipe for loyalty. Important, but not the only one. During "Investing in the dream team" in Manchester I will disclose a few more ingredients of our recipe.

The Captain of Your Special Teams……The Performance Test Lead!

2006-09-06T12:18:00.000+01:00

This is an article from the September edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter - STARTester, written by Scott Barber, Perfectplus Inc, USA. You can view the complete newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

You are familiar with the “Software Development as a Sports Team” analogy, right?
The project manager equates to the coach, lead developer to offensive team captain, test lead to the defensive team captain – where the entire team views the development process as collaborative and each member of the team is driven to produce his or her best work in order to achieve the team's common goal of delivering a “winning” application.

Typically, this is as far as the model goes, but it doesn't account for some important members of the team – the specialists.
There are a variety of specialists that may be a part of your team: security experts, network engineers, configuration managers and performance testers, to name a few.

If we look to American Football, we find a structure to enhance our model to accommodate these team members.

In American Football, there is a third group known as the special teams. The special teams consist of the kicking teams, kick return teams and other groups dedicated to special plays. Historically, coaches would populate these teams with non-starting players to keep the starters from getting excessively tired or injured during the game and so that the starters could remain focused on their primary positions during practice.

Recently, however, coaches have started fielding their best players, sometimes known as “game breakers,” on the special teams to improve their chances of winning games. These players have become more than just specialists; they have become expert generalists who can contribute to the game in a variety of roles and positions.

The captain of the special teams is often a senior player with both exceptional leadership skills and the ability to play a variety of positions on the field. These are the players coaches put in the game in critical situations when they feel the team needs a big play or a shift in momentum. They are the players that make the crowd cheer and inspire the rest of the team to redouble their efforts simply by taking the field. Much like the recent shift in football where coaches look to top players to populate the special teams, project managers have started looking for experienced, senior individuals who are expert specialists and established generalists for their special roles.

On a software development team, this unique individual equates to the performance test lead... minus the fanfare. On the most effective development teams I've ever been a part of, the performance test lead is someone with leadership abilities, strong generalist skills, and a unique and critical specialty.

So what makes the performance tester so unique? On top of their specialization as a performance tester, these individuals tend to be competent and have experience in a wide variety of roles enabling them to effectively contribute to virtually any aspect of the team. Let's take a brief look at all the different roles a performance tester assumes at various points during a project.

Business Analyst – Before performance testers can begin conducting effective tests, they must understand how users are going to interact with the system under test, what tasks they are going to be trying to accomplish, what their state of mind is likely to be while interacting with the system, and what their performance expectations are. Additionally, to establish relevant performance goals or requirements, the performance tester must also determine what the user's tolerances are and how competing applications are performing. Most performance testing literature implies that this information is simply available from the existing business analysts, but experience says that it is rarely available and when it is available it is poorly formed or simply wrong because very few business analysts have any training in this area.

Systems Analyst – Performance testing is not a black box activity. An effective performance testing strategy has to take into account not only the system as a whole but also the logical, physical, network and software architectures of the system both in test and in production. While this information is generally available, it rarely exists in a consolidated form, and as it turns out, it is often the case that the performance tester ends up being the single person on the team who understands the system from the greatest number of perspectives and has the best grasp on how all of these perspectives interact with one another.

Usability Analyst – When the application finally goes into production, there is really only one aspect of performance that matters: customer satisfaction. And the only way to determine customer satisfaction is to get the customer to use the system. The challenge in determining a customer's satisfaction with performance is that customers often know neither how to quantify performance nor how to distinguish between poor performance and an inefficient interface. Worse, very few organizations have dedicated usability teams, leaving the performance testers on their own to design and conduct these studies.

Test Strategist, Test Designer, Test Developer, Test Manager, Functional Tester, etc.
Typically, the team is just that, a team of people with individual roles and expertise who work together to effectively test the system. Most often, the performance test team is a team of one, so the performance tester has no choice but to be competent at all of the various test team roles. Since there is so little training available that is specific to performance testing, most practicing performance testers were initially trained in functional, systems or even unit testing and have since adapted those skills and techniques to performance testing. Frequently, performance testers were either systems or functional testers prior to becoming performance testers, or have served in those roles after becoming a performance tester.

Programmers – Developing performance tests is far from point and click or record and playback. In order to accurately simulate actual users, it is almost always necessary for performance testers to write elements of at least somewhat complex code. It is frequently necessary for performance testers to be able to read, understand, and interpret the developer's code, and, not infrequently they find themselves developing their own “test harness” simply to enable the possibility of load generation.
Performance testers often write their own utilities to help them parse through the huge volumes of data they collect, to generate test data, to reset their test environments, or to collect performance related metrics on remote machines. Performance testers may not always be senior programmers, but they certainly aren't afraid of code.

There are other roles performance testers play and reasons why the lead performance tester frequently turns out to be that game breaker who equates to the captain of your “software development special teams”, but I've come to the end of my allotted space. I guess you'll just have to attend my keynote at Eurostar to hear the rest of the story. I hope to see you there!

TMap Next book

2006-08-30T12:35:00.000+01:00

New TMap book "TMap Next"

Near the end of last year the start was given for a new version of TMap. Based on experiences, ideas and a lot of change requests from testers around the world we (my co-authors are Leo van der Aalst, Bart Broekman and Michiel Vroon) started writing. Now, 8 months later, we look back on a highly effective period with a revised and enriched method and book as a result. The results of the first reviews are very hopeful and give us the idea we did our work well.
Initially, we aimed for a Dutch publication first, but this has changed. The aim is now to launch the English book at the Eurostar conference early December (http://www.qualtechconferences.com/), the Dutch book will follow soon after. See below for a quick overview of the contents of the book. Essentials of the book and method are:

Based on a business-driven test management (BDTM) approach, allowing the customer to control the test process based on rational and economic considerations.
Gives a full description of the test process.
Contains a complete ‘toolbox’, i.e. technique descriptions, checklists, procedures, and so on.
Adaptive, suitable for all testing situations in most development environments (new systems, maintenance, waterfall / iterative / agile development, custom-made or software packages, and so on).

There are a number of reasons for this completely revised version:

Time didn’t stand still, a large number of people have asked for revising the method.
At present, it’s clear for most organisations that testing is necessary. So, instead of the discussion on why to test, the discussions are more about how long, how much and what to test.
In the current version testing is described as a stand-alone process in waterfall development of new information systems. The current field of play in IT is much larger: more maintenance instead of development of new systems, many implementations of standard software (like SAP) and iterative and agile development besides waterfall. Although the method has grown with current practices, this is not the case for the book. In the new book testing is more seen as an integral part of the larger whole.
In many organisations testing is organised as a separate department instead of purely as a project activity. Many kinds of test organisations are possible, from expertise centers up to complete test factories, each with certain advantages and disadvantages. In current testing literature this is given little attention.
Besides the theoretical part, readers were looking for the practical ‘how’ in TMap. In the new book a lot of tips and examples are given.
And perhaps the most important reason: testing should much more be seen as an economic activity within IT. Time and costs, but also the benefits and risks, have to be made clear to the customer. With this information he or she can control testing in a rational and businesslike way, finding the right balance between required time and money on the one hand and the benefits on the other: insight in quality and risks, confidence in the product and project (tracking) information. This part of TMap is called BDTM, Business Driven Test Management, and will be the guiding principle of the method.

TMap offers the tester and test manager a guide to deliver results to the customer within his/her context.

The change in method does not only has consequences for the book. Also trainings, certification programs, websites and such need to be adapted. We will keep you informed!

Overview book
General part
The first part of the book contains an introduction to TMap and to testing, the what and why. The essentials of TMap are explained.

Processes
This part deals with the various test processes, including a number of test supporting processes. The relations between these processes are also explained. Processes described are master test planning, acceptance testing, system testing and development testing. In the processes, special attention is given to their relation with the rest of the system development process, to BDTM and to managing the tests. To the phases Planning, Control, Preparation, Specification, Execution, Completion a new phase has been added: Setting up and Maintaining the Infrastructure. Within the phases, a better distinction is made between activities of the tester and the test manager.
Besides these primary test processes, a number of supporting processes is dealt with. These are in the following areas:

Organisation
Organizing a permanent test organisation, from a test expertise center to a test factory, outsourcing of testing;
Test environments
Requirements of the test environments, processes to maintain the environments;
Test tools
Kinds of test tools, implementing a test tool;
Test professionals
Hiring, test functions, training and career paths.

Components
The last part of the book contains so-called component chapters that are used within a number of the above processes, like techniques and procedures.
Some examples of components are:

Product risk analysis (PRA)
The steps for conducting a successful PRA are explained: choosing participants, defining the approach, organising the PRA, classifying risks, preparing a session/interview, collecting and analyzing risks, checking completeness;
Test types
Discussed test types are for testing regression, usability, performance, portability/compatibility and information security;
Estimation techniques
Several techniques for estimating the test effort are given, including Test Point Analysis;
Test design techniques
Starting with an explanation of the concept of test design and test coverage, a number of basic techniques (9x) giving certain coverage are described, followed by a starter set of useful test design techniques (12x).

Based on many practical experiences, the book has been revised and enriched, containing many tips, examples and in-depth explanations.

Is there anything left for us to write in Testing?

2006-08-17T11:09:00.000+01:00

Hi Reader,

I have often stumbled upon Cem Kaner's Articles page and it is very recently that I realized, most of the articles have been written and published.

For every problem, you encounter in testing, people like James Bach, Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, Hung Nguyen, Bret Pettichord.....( I could have missed your name too, apologies for that), have written and published articles but "What are we writing nowadays?". For everything else, there is Jerry Weinberg .

I, being naive, did get disappointed but something struck me recently, with which, I now have confidence, to write or continue writing articles about testing.

_ Is there anything left for us to write in Testing? _

Myself being in India, luckily, gave me an opportunity to become optimistic on the scope left in writing articles in testing.

You might be interested to know as to what was one of them, which pulled the trgigger in me to become optimistic about writing and here it is for you.

I graduated, as an engineer, from one of the engineering schools in India and I was able to recollect that for every subject we had to study, we usually referred to two books, one a foreign author and the other an Indian. It is not that we wanted to show patriotism but just that for things that we could not grasp from the foreign author book there was a simpler version written by an Indian author, who understood the audience/students and put things in a layman fashion. Fortunately or unfortunately, they too are a part of the testing community and there should be articles tailored to their understanding levels.

I was able to recollect this concept and this did give rise to my optimism of continuing writing. Before you conclude anything, it is my responsibility to let you know that the above situation prevailing in India or might be in other countries is not because the foreign authors write it in a way that is too complicated for students here to understand but just that there are lot of factors that influences a student to refer to a particular book. One such is psychology, if a person has come across a book authored by some foreigner and due to his own naivety, was unable to grasp then he/she brands all foreign authors book as something written in Greek or Latin, despite the book being very simple to understand.

I also need to mention that the command over the language English is very important, to understand the simplicity of the written book/document.

Did I fail, by making you think that all Indian authors are the ones who abstract work from the ones who originally published the work ?

Not all, but some, yes. There are many genuine writers and I must appreciate their work in this context. Those who write the abstract versions of the original book mostly are the ones who write for commercial or fame, provided they do not give due credits to the original authors. ( As a tester, if I write such abstracted versions of original, I would be mentioning the limitation of my work in terms of the effectiveness in conveying the topic in detail or its usefulness)

It is time for me to make you think of "What can we write?" apart from one such I have mentioned in detail above -

Extensions of research work of published articles.
New experiments, its results, matching or defying with published articles.
Testing, itself, is a game of perspectives, hence, each one's perspective.
Applying the existing research to any non software field/domain.
The problems that did not exist during the days the experts wrote articles and proposed solutions.
Mistakes you have committed and the learning you have had from it.
A new skill that a tester needs, which was not discussed earlier by any of the experts.
Case studies of a project that you have been in, which you are authorized to write and publish.
The kind of change you did to testing to suit new/different business needs.
Things that have baffled you as a tester.
Re-writing an article in native language, giving due credits to the original author.
Lots more... The only limitation is your imagination - ( sorry, I do not know who quoted this)

_ End of _ Is there anything left for us to write in Testing? _

"What can be written, itself, has turned out to be a writing"

Thanks and Regards,

Pradeep Soundararajan

Tester Tested !

Note : In this post, I am representing those upcoming testers who are experimenting, trying to come out of naivety. Seniors excuse if it had not made sense to you.

Testing for Accessibility

2006-08-02T14:00:00.000+01:00

This is an article from the August edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter - STARTester, from Ruth Loebl. You can view the complete newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

Testing software for accessibility involves little more than imagination and common sense, but you have to pick the right standards, and then get to know some users.

Disability
• Lots of disabled people use computers, even people whom you might at first assume could not possibly use one.
• Many disabled people are not "disabled". My mother simply can't see as well as she used to, and has a bit of arthritis in her hands.
• Research commissioned by Microsoft indicated that in the United States, 60% (101.4 million) of adults from 18 to 64 years old "are likely or very likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology due to difficulties and impairments that may impact computer use.

"Even excluding people who are 65 or over, that's more than half the population – this isn't a niche market. So there ought to be a demand for accessible interfaces, although it's sometimes hard to detect. I'm encouraged by the improving legal situation" – check out the Code of Practice on the Disability Equality Duty in the Disability Discrimination Act 2005, example in para 3.46.

So how do all these disabled people use computers? For most, the answer is: in the same way that non-disabled people use computers, with a standard keyboard, mouse and screen.
As an example, one of the most important features of Windows is the ability to change the colour scheme and system fonts. While some of us just like a bit of variety in the colours we look at on the screen all day, for quite a few people choosing the right font and colour scheme is what enables them to read the screen at all. A few pre-set font and colour schemes are offered through the Accessibility Wizard (Programs, Accessories, Accessibility). More can be achieved through the Control Panel (Display, Appearance tab, Advanced button).

Accessibility testing should highlight when systems interfere with or disable these features that are provided through the operating system. It would be most annoying if your choice of colour scheme were ignored by a system that you have to use. All too often, oh dear, it is.

Access technology
Access technology is used where the effect of an impairment is such that an intermediary tool is needed to enable someone to use a computer.

• Partially sighted people who can't get by with an alternative font or colour scheme often use screen magnification software, which enlarges some or all of the screen contents, and provides other powerful features such as image smoothing and colour manipulation.
• People who have a reading impairment, poor literacy or dyslexia can use 'text-to-speech' software, where text highlighted with the mouse is spoken out loud. Sometimes, voice input is useful too.
• People who have a problem with their hands or arms will need adjustments or alternatives to the standard keyboard and mouse. This might simply be different hardware (a one-handed keyboard, a trackball, joystick or mouse pad) or a full speech recognition system.
• People who are blind use a standard keyboard but cannot operate a mouse. Speech output software conveys the contents of the screen, sometimes complemented by electronic braille output on hardware called a braille display. A full keyboard interface without reliance on the mouse is essential for effective access.
These access technologies are very powerful, but are often helpless when faced with really poorly designed software.

Software testing
As testers, you may want to know more about disability and access technology, and to meet some disabled people – I would certainly encourage this. For effective accessibility testing, it is important to involve as many different types of real users as possible, with different abilities, background, experience and so on. We often criticise software and web designers who don’t include people with disabilities in their testing processes.
Real user testing does demand a functional interface, but at this late stage it may be too late to change some aspects of the underlying design without compromising the viability of the whole software development project.

So as well as getting to know your users, we advocate the use of 'inclusive design' standards and guidelines at the earliest stages of interface design. The testable statements focus on the software itself, in isolation, independent of any particular user. They are intended to minimise barriers to both accessibility and usability, and to address many of the requirements of disabled users.

Standards and guidelines
Which standards and guidelines are most applicable for testing software? Three suggestions are below, and for our latest thinking on software and web accessibility, visit the RNIB technology site and follow the link to Software Accessibility. This information is due to be refreshed in early August.

ISO 9241-171 (formerly ISO/TS 16071)
The full title is "Ergonomics of human-system interaction – Guidance on software accessibility". It is in final draft, but as an internationally recognised standard written by professional standards-makers, we hope it will become a reference point alongside the guidelines and checklists that exist.
Within RNIB, we have adopted ISO 9241-171 as the basis for our software acceptance procedures, but it is actually too wide-ranging to implement in its entirety! For each software development project so far, we have had to extract a more workable subset of the full range of standards, tailored to the particular development and delivery platforms for that project.

IBM software accessibility checklist
The IBM Checklists are available for various technologies, including software in general as well as Web, Java and hardware. Each key point is explained clearly, and some information about implementation and testing is also given. They are much more usable and user-friendly than ISO, and free, but less comprehensive.

Section 508
Section 508 is US legislation to ensure that “electronic and information technologies” which Federal agencies develop, procure, maintain, or use, conform to standards designed to provide comparable access for people with and without disabilities. If you want to sell to Federal government in the US, these are the standards to apply. They don't include enough to make your system fully accessible, though.

Some messages to end with
• Accessibility is ultimately subjective, like usability. Effective testing depends on having a wide variety of users to test products in the later stages of the design process.
• Inclusive design is more objective, and applies to the software itself, independent of users. It can be tested from the earliest stages of a software design project.
• Inclusive design does not stifle creativity: good design for people with disabilities results in good design for all.

In my presentation at EuroSTAR 2006, you'll have the chance to see access technology in action, and some examples of accessibility standards and testing in the real world. See you there!

Biography
"Ruth Loebl has been with the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) for 13 years, working in the area of sight loss and technology."

Emotional Testing - Testing From the Heart of the Business

2006-08-02T13:56:00.000+01:00

This is an article from the August edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter - STARTester, from Ian Londesbrough. You can view the complete newsletter by clicking here and don't forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

In the last few years, testing and quality assurance have started to shake off the preconceptions of geekiness and started to carry more gravitas within organisations. Seemingly always the poor relation to development in the IS profession, testing is finally making it onto the agenda for board rooms, businesses and IS communities. But to claim that testing is "sexy" or "cutting edge" would be to overstate its appeal - if this is the case, how can the technology industry demonstrate its importance to the business decision makers?

Testing, like many other practices in the IT industry, has long been the preserve of logical, structured, “left brain” thinkers - the tech heads. In truth, many of the people who drive business are the creative forces, people who are more “right brain” in their thought processes. Therefore if testing is going to take up its rightful place in driving the development of projects that actually deliver the expected results, then something has to change – it has to be made more appealing to the creative forces within business.

Consider for a moment the difference between left brain and right brain thinking and the types of thought processes they engage in:

Left Brain
Logical
Sequential
Rational
Analytical
Objective
Looks at parts

Right Brain
Random
Intuitive
Holistic
Synthesizing
Subjective
Looks at wholes

There is no doubt that testing professionals need all the “left brain” attributes, but in addition to those, they need to move beyond the robotic, structured motions of traditional testing - both the left and the right side of the brain need to be utilised. This would enable testing professionals to start thinking about business from the more strategic and creative perspectives. It would also help them to gain a firmer foothold in the boardroom, allowing them to communicate the importance and criticality of testing to the right audience.

As we know, testing is required for a very diverse range of products and systems. For example, to test a console game which is designed to stimulate emotion requires both emotional and subjective decisions, as well as random and intuitive assessment of risk. These elements require a mental attitude different to that of the traditional testing professional.

The testing industry not only needs to adopt a “whole brain” approach when testing, it needs to utilise the right side in order to engage with the board and demonstrate the added value and business benefits of testing. Jargon such as “stakeholder buy-in”, “board level sponsorship”, “grass roots support”, is forever being bandied about, but how can the testing and technology industries really engage directors, business users, and staff and make a connection which delivers the value and benefit they expect?

To engage with any of their audiences, senior decision makers in particular, testing professionals need to have a firm understanding of the business requirements. The job of a professional tester is to fulfil the requirements of all stakeholders: from the client and their board through to partners and the tester’s own employer. By fulfilling the requirements, testing is not only seen in a favourable light, but it becomes a “must have” for any project.

In order to engage with their audiences effectively, professional testers need to be connected, from an emotional standpoint, to the business and understand on a cerebral level what the business is trying to achieve. When responding to situations the right side of the brain is the reactive, emotional side – think adrenaline rushes, increasing heart rates – the left side of the brain has a more considered, logical approach. Therefore testers can harness this cognitive process to ensure they immerse themselves in the business, the requirements and the risks and dangers it faces and then use their logical, analytical abilities to come up with testing and quality assurance strategies to meet the business’s requirements.

Traditionally, testers are not always vocal about their work and the positive benefits they are bringing to the business. Using this more emotional approach, throughout delivery of the project, testers need to constantly re-engage and maintain a positive relationship with their customers by communicating and demonstrating how testing has removed the risk from the project and produced success and profit.

The connection between an emotive approach and business and technology issues in a testing environment becomes clear when assessing the success that testing professionals achieve in delivering positive outcomes for the business. Testers who are trapped in the old school thought process of testing for testing’s sake and approaching it from a box-ticking, operational perspective, fail to engage effectively with the business and thus achieve a lesser degree of success. For example they may not understand the importance of capturing information that demonstrates the value testing is bringing to the business.

Using an emotive approach to testing will also enable professional testers to bring the discipline to life – using real life examples of projects that have failed due to shortfalls in the testing and quality assurance procedures will be much more effective than the traditional “death by powerpoint” approach.
If testers can engage the business and technology industry on an emotional level, about the added value and business benefits of testing, then testing will be able to move forward. Once the testing industry embraces the “whole brain” approach, they can assume a leadership role, guiding clients through projects safely eliminating the risk and enjoying much more success than you could possibly have from a traditional, logical and structured approach.

For all professional testers convinced of how critical their role is to the success or failure of IT projects, they need to engage the business at the ideas stage, drill down effectively to determine the requirements from the project and really get to the nub of what organisations and IS communities want. In doing this, disaster can be averted and businesses will start to realise the true benefits of successful projects.

Biography
Graduating from Warwick University in 1988, Ian started his career in IT as a Junior Programmer with Barclays Bank. Ian then moved to ICI, which became Zeneca and then Astra Zeneca. Ian has also worked for PA Consulting and prior to joining IS Integration he was the Testing & Release Manager for RWE Shared Services IS (serving npower and Thames Water).

Testing - A success Story?

2006-07-24T11:39:00.000+01:00

Found this article recently " Why software testing doesn't become a success story" - interesting!

Have a read below:

Software testing essentially reveals the mistakes done by a human mind when building up a piece of code. However, in some cases software testing can become a never-ending story. Testing team completes first testing cycle, no. of defects are found, development team fixes the defects, again testing is carried out, some more defects crop up and so on.

If project development goes this way then project manager's tension builds up and the estimates goes haywire. Release date gets extended by days, weeks and sometimes by a month or two. However, this kind of situations can be avoided if few things are taken into consideration:

* Functionality of the application to be developed should be clear and well documented with a support of good change management process
* Development phase of the project should be completed
* Test cases must cover entire functionality of the application and they must be executed in a controlled environment
* A robust process for determining the severity and priority of defect
* Carrying out analysis of testing phase --> No. defects found against no. of test cases executed. If application is in second stage of testing then no. of defects reoccurred, time taken for fixing up of defects according their severity.

So what do you think how a software testing can become a success story in large no. of applications?

What kind of fish is a tester?

2006-07-10T10:00:00.000+01:00

Imagine if everybody were like you…

Would life be the better or the worse for that?

Would testing be better or worse?

This is an article from the July edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter - STARTester, from Anne Mette Jonassen Hass. You can view the complete newsletter by clicking here and dont forget to subscribe to receive future issues.

I must admit that I think if everybody were like me, (testing) life would perhaps be easier, but also dull, predictable and lacking important aspects. Finally after more than 50 years of life, i have realized that other people – and hence testers – are different from me! Other testers see the world differently and have different values. What a relief!

I’m not fast. The fact that all testers are not alike has been known since the ancient Greek philosopher Galenus defined 4 temperaments (some people like systems and order)

• Phlegmatic
• Sanguine
• Choleric
• Melancholic

Galenus also said: “We all have our share of each – in different mixtures.” Since then others have studied personalities including Freud, Jung, and Myers-Briggs. Based on Jung’s work Myers-Briggs defines sixteen personality types composed from four dimensions. The dimensions are:

• How do you get energy:
Extraversion (E) / Introversion (I)

• How do you get information and knowledge:
Sensing (S) / Intuition (N)

• How do you decide:
Thinking (T) / Feeling (F)

• How do you act:
Judging (J) / Perceptive (P)

The Greek view is quite simple, the Myers-Briggs view rather complex, and they are both concerned with the individual person as just that: an individual. In addition to this, Dr. M. Belbin has defined nine team roles. A team role as defined by Dr. M. Belbin is “A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way."

If you go around thinking that all people basically are like you, you are terribly mistaken. And that mistake can lead to misunderstandings and tensions in test teams, and may even cause test teams to break down. When working in test teams, awareness and understanding of peoples’ differences are essential.

I once worked on a team with many frictions and a fair amount of mistrust. One of the team members had heard of the Belbin roles and we all had a test. This was a true revelation to us all. The two team members with the most friction between them were very different types. They had both been completely at a loss as to why the other acted as he did. Having understood that neither had meant any harm, but that it was simply a question of being very different personalities, they worked much better together in the team.

The nine Belbin roles are:

Action-oriented roles

• Shaper
• Implementer
• Completer/Finisher

People-oriented roles

• Co-ordinator
• Team-worker
• Resource Investigator

Cerebral roles

• Plant
• Monitor/Evaluator
• Specialist

Each of the roles has some valuable contributions to the progress of the team in which it acts. They also have some weaknesses that may have an adverse effect on the team.

Two examples:

A Shaper is challenging, dynamic, and thrives on pressure.
He or she has the drive and courage to overcome obstacles.
The weaknesses are that a Shaper is prone to provocation, and may offend people's feelings.

A Team-worker is co-operative, mild, perceptive and diplomatic.
He or she listens, builds, and averts friction.
The weakness is that a Teamworker can be indecisive in crunch situations.
Everybody is a mixture of more team roles, usually with one or two being dominant. An analysis of one’s Belbin team role will give a team role profile showing the weight of each role in one’s personality.

Every person on a team should know his or hers own type and those of the others. It is done by filling in fairly simple questionnaires – not going into deep psychological searches in peoples’ minds. The aim is to provide a basic understanding of ones own and the other team members’ ways of interacting and primary values. It is not about finding out why people are like they are and not to try and change anything either.

It is the test manager’s responsibility to get the test team to work for a specific testing task. And it is the higher management’s responsibility
to choose a test manager with the right traits, skills, and capabilities to be a test manager.

There are two aspects to a team: the people and the roles assigned to the people.
Each individual person in a team has his or her personal team role profile and a
number of skills and capabilities. Each role has certain requirements toward the
person or the people who are going to fill it.

On top of that the people in the team need to be able to work together and not have too many personality conflicts. It can be quite a puzzle to form a synthesis of all this. But the idea is to choose people to match the requirements of the roles, and for them to fit together as a team.

The ideal situation is of course when the test manager or test leader can analyze the roles he or she has to find people for at the beginning of a test project, and then hire exactly the right people. Advertisements can then be tailored to the needs.
The applicants can be tested, both for their skills and capabilities and for personal traits.
The team can then be formed by the most suitable people – and ahead we go.

Unfortunately life is rarely that easy. In most cases the test manager either has an already defined group of people of which to form a team. Or he or she has a limited and specific group of people to choose from. It could also be that the manager has to find one or more new people to fill vacancies on an existing team. In all cases the knowledge of people’s team role profiles is a great advantage.

Forming teams and getting them to work is not an easy task. There is no absolute solution. But a well-formed team is a strong team, and a team tailored for the task is the strongest team you can get.

There will be more examples of types of fish – sorry testers, at EuroSTAR and examples of which Belbin roles fit the best to different test roles in test teams with different targets such as component testing and acceptance testing.
While waiting for this you can try to find out how many fish are hidden in this picture:

Biography
Mrs. Anne Mette Jonassen Hass, M.Sc.C.E. has worked in IT since 1980; since 1995 for DELTA, IT-Processes mainly in software test and software process improvement. Mrs. Hass holds ISEB Foundation and Practitioner Certificate in Software Testing and is an accredited and experienced teacher for both. Mrs. Hass is a frequent speaker and has a solid experience in teaching at many levels. Mrs. Hass has written two books, developed the team-game ”Process Contest”, and created the poster “Software Testing at a Glance – or two”.

Performance Measurement Framework for Outsourced Testing Projects

2006-07-10T09:56:00.000+01:00

This is an article from the July edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter -STARTester, from Kaylana Roa Konda, Applabs Technologies, India . You can view the complete newsletter by clicking here and dont forget to subscribe for future issues

Industry estimates peg the current global market size of outsourced testing services at around $13 billion. This is a strong indication that Outsourcing of testing processes (partially or fully) is here to stay and flourish. Out of the many varieties in outsourcing, Off-shoring is gaining momentum , in which testing activities are typically outsourced to low wage countries like India, Russia, China etc..

This new paradigm of getting the testing done at remote locations is posing significant challenges to both, client and vendor. Some of the key aspects that are demanding attention in managing testing engagements are, differences in test maturity levels, separating test teams from development teams, sharing test environments, managing test tool licenses, changes in roles and responsibilities at client side, defining SLA’s to protect business interests etc., Test outsourcing management and monitoring is indeed very crucial step in supporting and making the outsourcing engagement successful.

Key factors to be considered in managing outsourcing relationship are, business drivers, different outsourcing test scenarios, and potential expectations from the client. Lack of performance measurement framework can often lead to the below situation.

> Excessive communication
> Micro management by client
> Supplier spends too much time in reporting
> Every stakeholder feeling out of control

There is a strong need for performance measurement framework that can prevent the above potential mishaps. A Performance Measurement Framework (PMF) is an essential part of any test-outsourcing project. It defines the boundaries of the project in terms of the services that the service provider will offer to their clients, the volume of work that will be accepted and delivered, and acceptance criteria for responsiveness and the quality of deliverables. A well-defined PMF correctly sets expectations for both sides of the relationship and provides targets for accurately measuring performance against those objectives. At the heart of an effective PMF is its performance metrics. During the course of the test outsourcing engagement, these metrics will be used to measure the service provider's performance and determine whether the service provider is meeting its commitments or not.

‘5P’ performance measurement framework is introduced to establish accountability on both the sides (Client and Vendor), jointly manage and achieve a win-win situation. The 5P’s are - product, project, process, people and price. ‘5P’ performance measurement framework is easy to apply, proven and practical in nature and was developed based on knowledge and experience. This framework provides collection of metrics to choose from multiple dimensions of the testing engagement namely project, process, product, price and people. Metrics can be provided that can cater to wide variety of testing engagements namely test automation, performance testing, certification testing, functional system testing, white box testing, security testing etc.,

Sample metrics against each category are mentioned below to give you some ideas on direction to think about.

• Project: Test effort Vs development effort, Productivity.
• Process: Cycle time improvement, defect leakage index.
• Product: Time to find a defect, test coverage.
• People: Attrition, average experience.
• Price: $ amount saved, Price variance.

Vendor and client have to understand the business drivers of the testing engagement. Identification of the key results areas have to be done based on the business drivers. Appropriate test metrics selection happens based on the nature of the project, test types, test phases etc., Metrics selection is based on the principle that every metric in isolation gives information to track business drivers. The idea of multiple measurements is to put together a pattern of information that collectively gives a complete and accurate picture of the system. Install a metric system in place that allows you to collect the needed information to measure and analyze information and steer projects into the right direction.

Benefits of the model:

Implementation of proper performance measurement framework for outsourced test activities has numerous benefits. Few of them are listed below.

• Helps companies manage their test service providers in an optimal manner for win-win relationships.
• Proper visibility on the return on investment by the outsourced service provider.
• Consideration of all the quality measures into account while analyzing the performance.
• Introduction of a standard evaluation process across the company.
• Identification of the potential risk areas that affect the productivity of the test team.
• Higher level of abstraction with carefully choosen test metrics and the presentation format enabled management to spot the critical issues quickly.
• Past history of the results from the framework can help the success probability of future projects.

Biography

Kalyana Rao Konda is a senior technical services manager at AppLabs Technologies India Pvt Ltd, a company that provides development and testing services. He has been interested in testing from the beginning of his career. He has immense experience in managing product testing groups and also providing test services to clients world-wide. He has a proven track record of managing large scale test automation projects across various technologies, test tools for wide variety of organizations. He has published papers and spoken at international testing conferences and leading web-sites. He holds PMP and CSQA certifications.. He holds a B.tech in Electronics and Communications Engineering.

Collaborative Practices for the Dream Team

2006-07-10T09:20:00.000+01:00

Fran O'Hara, Insight Test Services, Ireland

This is an article from the August edition of the EuroSTAR newsletter.
Click here to view the entire Newsletter and to subscribe for future editions.

What are the best team-based practices to help testers and developers collaborate to deliver better software more quickly and less expensively? This article will highlight and provide insight into two high value practices that are both practical and proven in industry.

(Note these and other team based practices such as collaborative planning, project reviews, agile practices, etc. will be expanded upon in Fran O’Hara’s tutorial of the same title at EuroSTAR 2006)

1. Reviews.

Reviews are a key team-based practice that helps develop better collaboration between developers and testers…. if they are well executed. Appropriate use of an efficient and effective review process (one that finds a high percentage of important problems quickly and which also promotes learning) is the best way to gain cultural acceptance and facilitate collaboration. Testers need knowledge to test – reviews are a practical way to gain much of that requirements/system knowledge. Testers are also excellent at finding documentation faults so their involvement adds considerable value. Key documents that benefit significantly from collaborative review involving developers, business analysts, users and testers include User Requirements and Functional Specifications as well as Test Strategies and Plans.

Typical pitfalls with reviews include:

1. Reviews aren’t planned into the project schedule so they have to be done for free in zero time! Without enough time to prepare or indeed without having the right review team, reviews will not find a sufficient percentage of important problems.

2. Review meetings drag on and aren’t well managed. Trivial issues like spelling mistakes are raised, discussions about solutions occur and conflicts arise about the severity of problems or which solution is best.

3. A ‘review everything’ mandate has come from management. When too much has to be reviewed together, the natural tendency is to check the documents quickly just to get through them. This results in finding the more obvious and trivial problems but many of the more subtle and important problems are missed.

4. A ‘one size fits all’ process is being used. Sometimes this is too formal and rigorous for what is really required or indeed for the existing level of maturity of the organisation. This can then result in going through the motions with reviews – this lack of buy-in is often fatal for the process.

5. Review leader role is not emphasized (e.g. no training provided) – leading to poorly planned preparation and poor management of the review meeting – see point b. above. The review leader role is there to ensure efficient and effective reviews by maintaining the team’s focus on finding major defects.

A sample practical peer review process which avoids the above pitfalls will be presented and practiced at the upcoming EuroSTAR conference tutorial.

2. Risk based testing practices.
Risk-based testing provides a common language between all stakeholders including test, development, management and customers/users. Workshops where key stakeholders collaborate to identify and analyse risks and then develop a full lifecycle risk-based test strategy are powerful collaborative activities. They unite development and test in a collaborative approach to testing and addressing risk (including the go/no-go decisions on release). The knowledge transfer and shared vision resulting from such collaborations go a long way to helping ensure a successful project.

Risk-based testing typically involves:

1. Identifying and analyzing/prioritising product risks that can be addressed by testing. This is best done in collaboration with customers/users that can provide business risks and developers who can provide system/technical risks. Examples of business risks include critical functions/features that the users need to do their job. System/technical risks could include core system functions, performance, security or other issues that are critical from a system operational viewpoint. Workshops are an effective approach to use here.

2. Developing a testing strategy that can mitigate these prioritised risks. This may involve assigning critical features to be tested in particular stages or iterations of testing (ranging from static testing such as peer reviews of designs/code to dynamic testing such as functional system testing). Again, focused workshops facilitate this collaboration and agreement on the testing approach throughout the full lifecycle for best results.

3. Designing tests within each test stage that extensively check the allocated high risk elements with less testing of lower risk elements. The result is a prioritised set of test cases agreed by project stakeholders to address the most important product risks.

4. Executing the tests in order of priority.

5. Reporting progress on the basis of risks addressed and residual risks remaining.

Users have their concerns addressed and are provided with information in a language they understand i.e. risk. Developers provide input on technical risk identification as well as executing their part of an integrated test strategy. Testers gain valuable knowledge to help ensure they add significant value to the project.

In summary, at Insight Test Services (www.insight-test.com ) our experience in multiple environments and domains has been that the above two team-based collaborative practices are both practical and highly beneficial in terms of project success. Properly planned and managed reviews used throughout the complete lifecycle make a significant contribution to quality of the final product. The deployment of our risk-based methodology Test Control™ on projects has helped to ensure the positive involvement and collaboration of all stakeholders on a wide range of projects of different size and complexity.

Biography

Fran O’Hara is European director of RPI Alliance,Ltd, (www.rpialliance.com) an alliance of consulting companies collaborating to deliver advanced process improvement technologies. In 1996, he formed Insight Consulting (www.insight.ie) providing Process Improvement services. In 2002, he co-founded Insight Test Services providing managed test/validation services. He is a co-founder and ex-chairman of the Irish Software Testing SIG, SoftTest Ireland (www.softtest.ie), a fellow of the Irish Computer Society and a regular presenter at international conferences and seminars.

Learning testing through analogies

2006-07-06T04:38:00.000+01:00

Hi Reader,

Learning something new is always a challenge and learning testing is like challenge of challenge. When I started learning testing, I found it challenging not only because that learning testing was a challenge but every individual had their own opinion of testing, its methodologies, its branches, its definitions, its vocabulary, its guru's.

"How do I learn testing or from whom do I learn testing and how do I know who is right?" .. were the questions running in my mind.

It was indeed a tough phase of life for me. I happened to be misguided by all the people whom I ask "What is ..... in testing?".

One such basic question I asked was "What is regression testing?" and the answers that confused me are "It is execution of all test cases" , "It is a selective re-testing" , "It is the cycle of testing where all cases should pass", "It is a product qualification test", "It is a combination of Sanity, Comprehensive and Extended set of test cases"... ( goes on )

Well I am lucky to have worked with many organizations in a short period of time. Why I term it "lucky" because, I got a chance to get more confused about what testing is all about. In some places they referred to me as a Quality Assurance personnel and in some other places I was referred to as Test Engineer. Of course, I did ask myself "Who am I?" because I did testing, irrespective of some organization calling me a QA guy or a Test Engineer.

Fed up with the confusions, getting inspired by James Bach, developing passion towards learning testing, I started to think on my own.... to find the answers.

3 years passed ....

Now let me take you to present tense ...

Recently a tester in India contacted me to know the difference between Load and Stress testing and this is how I explained ...

_ Learning testing through analogies __

Ok, so you would want to know the difference in Load and Stress testing and how can it be done, well let us start thinking then...

Assume you are asked to test a chair that can take a load of 50 kilos. For a chair Load and Stress tests are the most important ones as it will be subjected to either of these at usage.

Now let us take up a dictionary and find what the meaning of load is?
Word Web says "Weight to be borne or conveyed" is load.

Ok the next step as a tester is to think of use cases, test cases and test content.

Let us make it brief by starting off with the collection of test content, i.e 10 kilos * 5 bars, 1 kilo * 10 bars, 100 grams * 10 bars, 10 grams * 100 bars.....

Now start testing with a minimum load of say 10 kilos and gradually keep increasing the load in equal steps till 40 kilos. Once you have reached 40 start using 1 kilo bars up to 45 and then later till 49 use the 100 gram and as you near the required load bearing capacity add the weight in smaller steps.

Once the chair is loaded for 50 kilos, allow it for sometime and check for deformations if any on the chair legs.

If the chair takes 50 kilos comfortably then try adding more weight, again, in very smaller steps to see where it breaks. This does not mean you are breaking the system but to give a data that, a system expected to take 50 kilos load is designed to take more and hence the cost has increased.

OK, you are done with load testing and now let us shift our focus to stress testing.
Word Web says "force that produces strain on a physical body"

A very common question or confusion people have is "Is adding more load a stress test", the answer out of my research on this topic is "Need not be".

Well, I could use the same 50 kilos load to stress the system. How ?

There are different ways you can apply a load -

a) Axial Load - The whole load is concentrated on the axis of the chair. By applying a load to the chair in such a manner is a stress test. Use case - A person standing on the chair by putting his entire weight on the toe. People usually do this when they want to stretch for something which is still not rechable after using a chair to reach that ( book or something).

b) Truss - This kind of load becomes a stress where the the mass is not equally distributed over the chair. One leg of the chair could have to take more weight than the other and hence this too becomes a stress test. Use case - 2 children made to sit on the same chair. (Atleast, it happens in India)

c) .... (the only limitation is your imagination)

"Wow, I got a clear picture of Load and Stress testing and using this example, now I can think, how to load and stress test web application." was the reply I got from the person who asked me the question of load and stress testing.

Now, that is how I learn't some of the testing concepts, perhaps that is how I have been learning/teaching it and will continue to learn in the same way unless I see a better way.

_ Learning testing through analogies __

"To know what Stress Testing is say.. *Stress Testing Stress Testing ...* continously without gap..."

Regards,

Pradeep Soundararajan
Tester Tested !
pradeep.srajan@gmail.com

Hurrah for Automation, But Neglect Manual Testing at High Cost

2006-06-22T16:07:00.000+01:00

This is an article from John Scarborough which appears in the 3rd Edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter entitled 'Hurrah for Automation, but neglect Manual Testing at High Cost'

The article was published in the EuroSTAR Newsletter. Click here to view the entire newsletter and to subscribe to future issues

Hurrah for Automation, but neglect Manual Testing at High Cost

A few months ago I talked with the VP of Engineering for a $50+M software producer whose flagship product, Buckflow (not its real name), was in serious trouble. His team had followed the same Quality Assurance (QA) routine for a few years without running into serious problems, but customer deployment of their last upgrade, which contained patches for 20 customer-reported problems, had resulted in an uproar. At a few sites, Buckflow would not initialize. At another site, a key workflow management tool had been disabled. More patches were scheduled, and a major dot release was scheduled to come out in the summer.

Their board of directors had been alarmed by the report of deployment failures, and was adamant in insisting that this should never happen again. Because of the number of customizations, and because of the frequency of upgrades, the VP believed that the only solution was full automation. He understood that this could only be a long-term goal, but he wanted my company’s help in making it happen, along with whatever bridge solutions were required between now and then.

Their routine for QA and testing, which until now had worked satisfactorily, lacked sophistication. Their development team provided unit testing, and business analysts provided acceptance testing. Their small QA team of four full-time test engineers spent all their time developing and executing test cases for features or fixes that were to be rolled into the next scheduled monthly patch. A week before its scheduled release, everyone in the product development group installed the release candidate patch on their machines and for a couple of days ran certain scenarios selected from a distributed list. The test team barely had time to run their new test cases. They did not have modular tests; and they had stopped running regression tests at least two years ago.

Lack of sophistication in test strategy, the obvious problem at Buckflow, is not unusual. I pointed out that bugs found in the design stage are far less expensive to fix than bugs found during product integration testing. Also – especially applicable to Buckflow – every bug fix is a weak link because the product’s original design did not address it, and therefore must be tested in every release. The VP nodded with evident regret, and said that they had thought that disciplined development combined with unit testing would be sufficient.

It’s also not unusual to find companies who continue to have naive faith in automation, in spite of evidence against such disturbingly resilient illusions as:

* automation eliminates human errors that result from fatigue, boredom, and disinterest;
* automation can be re-used indefinitely (write once, run many);
* automation provides more coverage than manual testing
* automation eliminates the need for costly manual testing;

Every one of the above statements makes sense if properly qualified. Automation may eliminate some or all of the errors that result from manual testers growing weary, but it may also introduce other errors that are equally due to fatigue, boredom and disinterest, arising here in the people who develop automation.

Automation can be re-used indefinitely, provided that the application or system under test does not change, and that nothing else changes that might affect execution, such as common libraries or runtime environments (e.g. Java). Whatever return on investment may have been realized from automation will be quickly wiped out by maintenance costs, at which point the only advantages of automation are strategic, not economic.

If “coverage” means “test coverage” (rather than “code coverage”), then yes, automation can even provide 100% coverage: one need only automate all available test cases. A more significant data point however is the degree of code function or code path coverage provided by available test cases. While achieving 80% code path coverage may be better than 70%, a more significant consideration is what has not been covered, and why.

To avoid manual testing at all costs would be the costliest option, because only in manual testing can all of a test engineer’s understanding, probity, logic, and cleverness be put to work. Security testing of Buckflow at the application level, for example, depends on how the application was developed, where it stores its cookies, what scripts it runs during initialization and various transactions, how stateful connections are established in the inherently stateless HTTP protocol, etc.

While there are commercial test tools that can verify an application’s defense against cookie-cutter varieties of denial of service, or even 50% of the threat model for most applications, interoperation with new applications and with new versions of underlying technologies requires at least a significant investment in manual testing.

More obvious needs for manual testing include penetration testing, usability testing, and localization testing. But Buckflow had a particularly acute need for testing massively configurable applications in diverse environments. While there was room to talk about keyword-driven automation, it was clear that only manual testing would be able to identify configuration issues. In the end, we agreed that the best approach would be a combination of carefully orchestrated automated tests with rigorous manual testing.

Biography

As VP of System Engineering for Aztecsoft, John Scarborough manages and orchestrates pre-sales processes across Sales, Proposal Engineering, and Delivery, from project-based needs analysis to solution design to estimation to retrospective analysis of completed projects. He is also responsible for providing access across Aztecsoft to project-based operational knowledge. Scarborough previously served as Aztecsoft's Principal System Engineer and Quality Architect. Areas covered by his published papers include interoperability testing for web services, model-based estimation, and capability assessment in Agile environments.
Prior to his joining us in 2001, Scarborough was at Microsoft for 11 years, where he built and managed large teams in the test division of its Windows Operating Systems group, including system integration testing, application compatibility, user-context automation, and system validation.

A Software Testing Body of Knowledge?

2006-06-22T16:03:00.000+01:00

This is an article from Stuart Reid which appeared in the 3rd Edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter entitled - A Software Testing Body of Knowledge?

A Software Testing Body of Knowledge?

So, what is a Body of Knowledge or BOK?
A BOK describes the generally accepted knowledge for a particular discipline; it is a formal inventory of the intellectual content of the field. A BOK is thus one way of defining a profession. For a BOK to be accepted there should be widespread consensus within the community that the knowledge and practices within the BOK are both valuable and useful, and applicable to most projects most of the time. The BOK provides the basis for the regulation of the profession; it also defines its boundaries.

Example BOKS in the IT area cover disciplines such as Project Management (APM and PMI variants) and Configuration Management (CMBOK). There is also the IEEE Software Engineering BOK (SWEBOK), which includes a chapter on software testing. The SWEBOK is being advanced to ISO status, but has been dogged by disagreements and, so far, has not been widely accepted by the community.

Who uses a BOK?

Unsurprisingly, a BOK has various stakeholders. New entrants to a field can use it to identify what they need to know, while practitioners can use it as an essential source of information on topics that they only need to reference infrequently. Certification (and licensing) bodies and academics may use it in the form of a syllabus as the basis for qualifications, which, in turn, will mean that training providers and students are also users. Does a Software Testing BOK already exist? Although the authors may disagree, it seems clear that the discipline already includes a number of ‘pseudo’ BOKS. By this I mean that there are several well-used software testing resources, but not one that covers the complete discipline and there is also not one in which there is general consensus. Examples of these ‘pseudo’ BOKs are:

* qualification syllabi created by certification bodies such as ISEB/ISTQB;
* approaches to testing such as TMap®;
* test process improvement models such as TPI® and TMMi™;
* well-regarded text books such as Glen Myer’s original edition of The Arts of Software Testing;
* standards on software testing, such as IEEE 829 and BS 7925; and
* the software testing chapter of the SWEBOK.

Although providing various levels of coverage of the field of software testing, not one of these ‘pseudo’ BOKs on it own satisfies the criteria of becoming the single BOK for the industry. This is because none of them provides broad enough coverage of the discipline of software testing. Neither do any of them appear to command the respect and trust of a large enough proportion of the software testing community to be considered as representing a true consensus.

Is the discipline of software testing ready for a BOK?
Implicitly many contributors to the ‘pseudo’ BOKs appear to believe so; however there is also a strongly-held opposing point of view. Let’s consider the opponents’ view first. Some consider that a BOK acts as a barrier in a number of ways. They feel that BOKs are, by nature, inert and rarely evolve, restricting new thinking and debate on currently accepted ‘truths’. They also point to the continuous stream of project failures and the apparent lack of ‘engineering’ in software testing where scientific theories are not backed-up by solid empirical data. Both points are presented as evidence of the field’s immaturity.

Another argument presented against a software testing BOK is that the discipline is too diffused and changes from domain to domain. Detractors question whether there are enough generally good practices in software testing that apply to most projects and suggest that many good practices are only applicable to specific application domains. For instance, they say that the generally useful practices applied to testing safety-critical system may not be appropriate for the testing of low integrity commercial applications.

The supporters of a software testing BOK point to the benefit of certification in providing a means of regulating the industry and defining training for new entrants. They argue that certification also lends software testing credibility with both customers and developers, while the availability of a single consensus BOK would encourage academics (even those with little interest in, or knowledge of testing) to adopt it. Another suggested advantage of a BOK is that it provides guidance to practitioners on how to improve their current practices. Many of those who feel that software testing should be considered a legitimate engineering discipline see a BOK as a necessary stepping stone to a profession of software testing.

Should a software testing BOK be created?

If the industry decides that a BOK is needed for software testing then it is most important (and probably very difficult) to ensure that consensus is reached. Any initiative must be an inclusive, multi-national effort and care must be taken to ensure that the stakeholders in the previously-mentioned ‘pseudo’ BOKs are invited to join the development process. Ownership of a new BOK could be difficult to manage, and although it is often argued that anything provided for free may be considered worthless by the recipient, I believe that any newly-created software testing BOK should be made freely available to the whole community.

Developers of a BOK must ensure that it does not include practices that are new and unproven with no evidence of their efficacy. A BOK should embody achievable good practice and not simply be a reiteration of academic texts, which may have little connection with the real world. The speed of evolution of the software testing discipline means that its BOK must carry with it the requirement for its continual review and revision. Although a difficult task, I believe that simply by attempting to build a BOK the software testing industry will continue to expand its knowledge of the discipline and so add value to the testing community.

EuroSTAR 2006 Workshop

The topic of a software testing BOK will be covered by an advanced workshop at the EuroSTAR conference in December. The aim is to open up debate on whether the industry should support its creation (with all the attendant questions) or wait until we have more obviously reached maturity. If you feel you would like to contribute to the discussion then please make a note to attend in your diary.

Biography

Stuart Reid has spent the last 17 years involved in software testing, having previously worked on high-integrity systems. He is Chair of the BCS SIGiST and its Standards Working Party and was Chair of the ISEB Software Testing Board and founder of the ISTQB.

Thinking like a Tester

2006-06-20T11:50:00.000+01:00

Found this on the useful software testing advice site -

I liked it, hope you do:

Welcome Everyone Who: Wants: To do right things right first time.

Does not want: To do things without value.

Knows that: Testing never ends, it just stops.

Quality does not happen by accident; it has to be planned.

Believes that: There's always one more bug. Testing is the art of thinking.

Looking for Testers in France

2006-06-15T15:03:00.000+01:00

I was curious if there are any testers located in Paris France. Email me a resume at lshackel@cisco.com if you are interested in an 18 to 24 month contract.

Thanks..

Software Testing

2006-06-08T12:04:00.000+01:00

The VERIFY 2006 International Software Testing Conference is now just around the corner, and Early Bird discount ends on June 30th.

http://www.effectivesoftwaretesting.com/Conference_Verify.aspx

VERIFY consists solely of front line experts in software development, security and testing. Presentations and tutorials are delivered by industry leaders who daily face real-world challenges, work real-world projects and face difficult implementation timelines.

A sample of the background and skills of VERIFY speakers and presenters:

> Co-Inventor of Adaptive Automated Testing Technique
> Industry Leaders in Test Driven Development (TDD)
> Security experts for .NET based Applications
> Successful Automated Testing on mission critical applications
> Inventor of Automated Test Lifecycle Methodology (ATLM)
> Early Pioneers of Automated Software Testing
> Co-Author of Java Testing Patterns
> Software Security Testing for COTS Products (at Symantec Corporation)
> Authors of books on Software Architecture and Continuous Software Integration
> Author of Best Practices for Formal Software Testing Process
> Experts on Opensource Development
> Author of Rational Guide to IT Project Management
> Software Security Testing for Embedded Systems (lottery systems, cell phones, casino gaming, and smart cards)
> Inventor of Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDL)
> Author of Tester’s Guide to .NET Programming
> Software Engineering & Testing for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
> Security Experts on Application Penetration Tests & Application Security Standards
> Industry Leaders on Introducing Successful Automated Testing Programs
> Co-Author of Testing Extreme Programming

Register now and save money.

Sincerely
Jeff Rashka
VERIFY 2006Serving Software Professionals
http://www.effectivesoftwaretesting.com/

Recommendations for Testing Books

2006-06-02T14:46:00.000+01:00

Hi,

It would be great to establish a list of recommended books for test professionals
Just click on the comments link below and let us know what you enjoyed reading.

Randy Rice recommended Sudoko for testers on his blog - so really it can be anything you found beneficial

Cheers,

Who would want to be a tester?

2006-05-31T12:29:00.000+01:00

Well, i have been very busy over the past 2/3 weeks - a good grievance but a grievance none the less :-) promised myself some time ago that i would dedicate upwards of an hour or so a week to reading articles connected to testing, thinking outside the box and maybe in the process, learning something new along the way - a worthy pursuit but i have become sidetracked a little.

This week i have found some interesting articles & presentations which got me thinking - Who would want to be a tester? did i want to be a tester 10 years ago - hell no, didnt know what a tester was... I won't bore you all with my youthful fantasties of employment but testing, IT etc.. didnt make my list back then - so what changed??

Went to college - completed a broadly based IT course
Tried to get a job - any job!!
any of this sound familiar...
Fell into Testing and now here we are

I do genuinely like my profession and have a passion for it - more than most can say about their jobs, so i do think of myself as somewhat fortunate in that regard but my question is do people strive to become testers or do we just fall into it as a route to somewhere and get lost along the way? Where do testers come from? I would like to hear any tester's tale of how they became a tester and importantly - any regrets??

Anyhows, the article that got me thinking is by Cem Kaner - the past & future of SW testing
Hope you like it and leave me some comments on how you became testers - im intrigued..

Why Testing needs a community ?

2006-05-30T11:56:00.000+01:00

Hi Reader,

I am Pradeep Soundararajan from Bangalore, India working as a Senior Software Engineer at Flextronics Software and Systems. I have been considered as a passionate tester by the people who have worked with me and also by those people who have gone through my Testing Blog. I am also proud to be a student of James Bach and have aimed at becoming one of the best Tester's in the near future. I am thankful to Kevin Byrne of EUROSTAR for inviting me to join this community.

Let me now start sharing something that I think/feel, as a Tester from India.

__ Why Testing needs a community ? __

When was Testing born ? Where was it born ? How was it born ? .....
Do you have answers for the above ?

Well, we realized that there is a scientific approach called "testing" especailly after doing Testing sub-consciously. Right from our child hood we have done testing but still every tester feels he is yet to learn completely about testing. Why is that ?

The answer could be : When one form of testing was born in your mind , the other form was born in mine and some other form in someone's brain and we finally end to have a count of whole population of the world giving birth to their own form of Testing.

"Now I don't believe this" by any chance if you feel/say so, I am sorry, whatsoever your native language, was formed only after borrowing a few words from other languages. Had you uttered the above sentence, its time to say "I have started to believe".

Well as many expert like Cem Kaner, James Bach, Jerry Weinberg, Jhonathon Kohl... feel, Testing even maps to epistemology which in turn refers to the study of how people think. Of course you now agree that different people think different from each other. If still you dont agree, that shows we both are thinking different from one another.

I can answer one question for you "How has testing grown and how can it grow in the future?" ,if you think I haven't answered well the questions I put up at first ( vice versa too :P )

Whatever so called definition-methodologies-documents-books-strategies-types of testing we have today, are evolved by people having a passion for testing coming together ( of course after doing some research ) discussing and framing an agreeable standard of defining an aspect of testing. Any process/protocol you take has never been framed by a single person , its people coming together , rather I should call such process/protocols have bought like minded people together.

I can be somewhat satisfied that I know something good in testing, only after mingling with ( or learning from ) Testers coming from a different community, country, relegion, caste...

Take a look at every Test Expert we currently have, they are the people who have travelled across the world, meeting up testers, presenting their ideas and also learning from their juniors.

Why do they do so ?
I think they have realized that Testing can be learnt well only through a community and the community they need to look for making themselves best testers is the ..... whole world.

So when are you going to explore the community ( the whole world, I mean) ?

__End of __Why testing needs a community ? __

"Atlast relegion/caste is useful, in bringing people together to discuss their dimension of Testing"

Thanks and Regards,

Pradeep Soundararajan

Look for more at Tester Tested! or ping me.

The Schools of Software Testers

2006-05-24T16:14:00.000+01:00

So, i have learned that there are essentially 4 schools of software testing:

- Analytic School - sees testing as rigourous and technical with many proponents in academia
- Quality School - Emphasises Process, Policing Developers and acting as the Gamekeeper
- Factory School - sees testing as a way to measure progress with emphasis on cost and repeatable standards
- Context Driven School - Emphasises People, setting out to find the bugs that will be most important to stakeholders

Personally, i found this interesting and pondered for a little while before deciding which school i fell into - To be honest im fairly split between Analytic & Context Driven but as a judge of myself, perhaps i am more than a little biased :-)

I would be interested to see what others felt and how they selected which school was theirs!!
Have a read of this article and let me know

No More Second Class Testers

2006-05-19T12:57:00.000+01:00

I found this article from the excellent Johanna Rithman site - The article is entitled No More Second Class Testers highlighting how we can work to ensure that we are in some cases heard, listened to & importantly our recommendations are put into action.

The article can be read here - Its a good read, well written and i hope you like it!

There are other articles on the site but unfortunately, i haven't had much of a chance to read through them - Ive actually started a new job and it really is taking up the vast majority (in my view - far too much) of my time and energies! Anyways, enough of that, the site can be found here

A New Programme is Born

2006-05-08T17:12:00.000+01:00

The EuroSTAR programme was announced on May 2nd and below is an article from EuroSTAR 2006 programme chair, Jens Pas outlining the highlights of the programme and what to expect from EuroSTAR 2006.

The article was published in the EuroSTAR Newsletter. Click here to view the entire newsletter and to subscribe to future issues

Allow me to introduce to you the keynote speakers:
We open the conference with Filip Gydé, Senior Vice President of CTG Europe who will tell us about how CTG has literally invested a lot in people. He will tell us about being awarded the Investors in People certificate and how for the third time in a row, they became “Best Employer in Belgium”, elected by employees. He will link this investment to their software testers and testify how this that positively impacted on the company’s bottom line.
Those who attended EuroSTAR 2005, will remember Thorkil Sonne from Denmark, who presented a track session on his company “Specialisterne”. He told us his very moving and personal story about his life and the birth of his son who was diagnosed as autistic. Based on a series of events Thorkil made a bold decision and turned his career around. He founded a company to help autistic people by providing them with rewarding jobs as software testers. You may have read his story already in the first issue of this newsletter. Thorkil ‘s session was voted Best Track Session in 2005 and he has agreed to keynote at this year’s conference.

Flying over from the States is Scott Barber, who specialises in Performance Testing. This area of testing is becoming more important then ever, given the high speed at which the whole world is getting online.
We have a special keynote session on Thursday, I won’t say too much as I would prefer not to give away the surprise. All I can say is that James Lyndsay as host, will have a nice chat with a real senior reference in software testing, someone who, throughout his career has trained over 20,000 testers! Be prepared for a different approach to waking up at a conference in Manchester. Senior experience will be shared with the audience. New insights will be held against historical evidence. If you want a history lesson in testing, Thursday will be the day.

We end the conference with a speaker many of our delegates have asked for: Paul Gerrard of Systeme Evolutif. Many of you know Paul and some might also know that Paul is a highly committed rowing coach. Paul will share his experiences of coaching a rowing team and how this can give original and provoking insights into managing and developing a Test Dream Team.
So, I hope these keynote speakers are to your liking. Each of them are definitely experienced testers, witty speakers and just great people to have around.

Next to these keynotes, we added a couple of new refreshing things to the program to enhance the networking at the conference and to facilitate the assembly of a Dream Team. You’ll have a chance to do some “speed dating” with other testers, more details will come later. We will organise a contest which involves assembling the Greatest Dream Team. A bit like the Harlem Globetrotters of Testing!

I also invite you to have a look at the tutorials that we provide prior to the conference, on Monday 5th and Tuesday morning 6th of December. Some of the top trainers in software testing will be there to teach you the ins and outs of software testing. There will be sessions for junior testers, but also for experienced professionals. I won’t go over all the names, but I do like to point out that Martin will be there as well. You all know Martin Pol, Program Chair 2005. Martin is probably the most warm-hearted software tester I know. He embodies the essence of what it takes to make a Dream Team. Meet Martin and the other teachers in Manchester.

If all this is not enough, we have also arranged for an excellent venue for the after-show party.... a Gala Evening in Old Trafford, home of Manchester United. Who would want to miss this?

So I hope you’ll like what we have compiled for you this year. For those who submitted proposals and did not get selected, I do understand your disappointment at not being on the program. I sincerely regret that we could not give each and every one of you a slot. Many proposals were lovely stories I would love to have shared.
A final word perhaps on the Program Committee. Stefan Steurs, Clive Bates and Geoff Thompson who not only reviewed all the proposals, but also did a great job at reviewing and rearranging the program and making it nicely balanced. Thanks a lot guys for all your great help.

I’ll be talking to you in a next issue of this newsletter or meeting you all of course in Manchester.

Best Regards,

Jens Pas
Programme Chair

Click here for EuroSTAR 2006 Programme.

Operational Excellence through Efficient Software Testing Metrics

2006-05-08T17:02:00.000+01:00

Below is an article from Ramesh Pusala asking why do we need software testing metrics. It's a interesting perspective & I hope you enjoy it! The article was published in the first edition of the New EuroSTAR newsletter.

Click here to view the entire EuroSTAR newsltter and to subscribe to future monthly editions.

Why do we need software testing metrics?

As we all know a major percentage of Software projects run over schedule and budget, yet they still have quality problems. Software testing is one activity that can provide visibility into product and process quality. Test metrics are among the "facts" that project managers can use to understand their current position and prioritize their activities, so that they can reduce the risk (or impact) of running out of time before the software is ready for release. Test metrics can be a very powerful risk management tool. Metrics help you measure your current performance and allow you to use the data to enhance your future work estimates and quality levels, otherwise those estimates will just be guesses!

What Metrics do we need?

Only collect data that you will actually use (to make informed decisions and alter your strategy). That is, if you were not going to change your strategy regardless of the findings, your time would be better spent doing more testing.

Do not base decisions solely on data that is variable or can be manipulated. For example, measuring testers on the number of tests they write per day could actually reward them for speeding through superficial tests or punish them for tackling trickier functionality.

Use statistical analysis methods to get a better understanding of the data.

Some of the key benefits of having good metrics are:

* Test Metrics Data Collection is a balanced, leading initiative which guides in predicting the direction and scope of an organization in the long term and helps to gain a more holistic view of business and identify high-level goals.
* Provide a Basis for Estimating and facilitates planning for closure of the performance gap.
* Provide a Means of Control / Status Reporting.
* Identify Risky Areas That Require More Testing.
* Provide Meters to Flag Actions - this helps make faster, more informed decisions.
* Quickly identifies and helps resolve potential problems and identify areas of improvement.
* Test Metrics are mechanisms to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of testing quantitatively.
* Supports the collection of usage data and metrics for particular business needs.
* A process is appropriate and is critical to success when it identifies measurement strategic objectives and measures against those using technology and industry accepted methodology.

Challenges in implementation of Metrics Program:

Ø Management Commitment:

Ø Measuring Too Much, Too Soon:

Ø Measuring Too Little, Too Late

Ø Wrong Metrics

Ø Vague Metrics Definitions

Ø Using Metrics Data to Evaluate Individuals

Ø Using Metrics to Motivate, Rather than to Understand

Ø Collecting Data That Is Not Used

Ø Lack of Communication and Training

o Explain why

o Share the results

o Define Data Items and Procedures

o Obtain "buy-in

Ø Misinterpreting Metrics Data

Suggested Metrics Lifestyle:

Goal-Question-Metric (GQM)
The key to efficient measurement is to first determine which goals you are striving to accomplish and which problems you are attacking. Many organizations waste time and money by measuring more things than are necessary. Before beginning a measurement strategy, determine the goals for your measurement. GQM is an excellent technique for selecting appropriate metrics to meet your needs. With GQM, you begin by selecting a few project or organizational goals. Then state the goals to be as quantitative and measurable as you can, then ask questions as to what is it that you want to change to reach the goal, then finally define what is it that you want to measure to quantify your progress towards achieving the goal.

The Testing Boom

2006-04-25T16:22:00.000+01:00

Found a few articles on testing and how the world is waking up to software testing inherent, long ignored essential function - to make sure things work! be it software, sports, hobbies - we need to test everything i.e code, tactics, new approaches in each. So, my question or more to the point, observation is why are we testers now so 'important'???

Computer Weekly has an article on the critical importance of the human element in Software Testing, talks abit about the Testing boom, 7.5billion seemingly - time for a pay rise :-) but it also refers to some 'software disasters' - Toyota & the Tokyo stock exchange. have a read here

Again CIO.com is highlighting software disasters too in particular a funny story from a casino, hope you like it, read it here The article is very good giving some general overviews on testings and how we should or strive to approach it and also highlights towards the end the high cost of flawed testing which is interesting, well to me anyway!

Anyway, if anyone has any tips on how to implement a Plan B as mentioned in the CIO article, let me know..

Specially Motivated Test Resource

2006-04-18T10:54:00.000+01:00

Below is an article from Thorkil Sonne telling the amazing story of Specialisterne, his company and how he hopes to reverse the terms of normality. It's a great story & I hope you enjoy it! The article was published in the first edition of the New EuroSTAR newsletter.

Clcik here to view the entire EuroSTAR newsltter and to subscribe to future monthly editions.

A fragile world

6 years ago my youngest son was diagnosed with autism (Autism Spectrum Disorder). I was given a chance to get a glimpse of the fragile world of autism.

My son frequently impresses me with his skills derived from strong memory, attention to detail, motivation for tasks, correctness in communication and learning ability.

But he also worries me, as he does not comply with the social requirements in society. As an IT-professional with 15 years background, I can see that his skills are potentially valuable to the corporate sector. After 3 years as president of a local branch of Autism Denmark, I can see that my son will only have a very small chance to use his special skills in a job situation.

Someone has to make a difference - so I quit my job as CTO to establish a company for persons with valuable skills and who are non-compliant with the social requirements of most companies.

Specialisterne

To get a job in most ‘normal’ companies, you have to comply with social requirements like: flexibility, social skills, team player, humour with flair for irony and a high stress threshold. If you do not match the social requirements – then you are left out.

At Specialisterne we reverse the terms of ‘normality’.

We define ‘normality’ as ‘whatever the majority decides it to be’. In our company the employees are the majority and thereby set the standards of ‘normality’.

We expect our candidates to stick to planning, schedules and agreements, require special working conditions, are strong individuals, have attention to detail and concentrate on doing what they are good at.

By being accepted as ‘normal’ at Specialisterne our employees build up their self esteem and put their full efforts into providing unparalleled quality in testing for corporate customers.

The customers

The customers of Specialisterne are small, large and global companies with high test standards. We perform any kind of test, where domain knowledge is not a requirement.

For different customers we perform tasks like:

* test management
* establish or improve test documentation
* static, dynamic, beta and system tests

Our customers will have ISEB test certified project managers as single point of contact to make sure, that it is easy for the customer to get access to the special skills of our employees with no risk to the customer.

Our customers are positively surprised by the skills of our employees and present us with high scores on the satisfaction evaluation report and we frequently see comments like: “The Specialisterne employees have impressed us with their ability to maintain attention to detail throughout the entire test, giving us a thorough result.”

Perspectives

The Specialisterne concept is a success in Denmark where so far 27 employees with the mild form of autism, Aspergers Syndrome, have found a niche to perform tests for corporate customers.

The needs for motivated testers are the same internationally – and so are the needs for alternatives for persons who do not fit into standards of ‘normality’.

I intend to reuse the experiences gained at Specialisterne to spread the concept internationally and build bridges between the corporate sector and the potential of specialist resources worldwide.

The roll out will take place where Specialisterne can join efforts with large and global companies to benefit from adding a new brick to the puzzle of setting up Test Dream Teams.

EuroSTAR 2006

At EuroSTAR 2005 I had the privilege to present the paper ‘Adding Autism Competencies to Testing’. I told about our vision, skills and experiences so far. The presentation was awarded ‘Best Presentation’.

I am very happy for the invitation to do a key-note presentation at EuroSTAR 2006.

I will present to you the Specialisterne concept, experiences, and references – and discuss the perspectives of how you can benefit from the experiences gained at Specialisterne.

Best regards

Thorkil Sonne
Founder and CEO
thso@specialisterne.dk
www.specialisterne.dk/english

It’s About People!

2006-04-18T10:45:00.000+01:00

This is an article from Jens Pas, the EuroSTAR programme chair for 2006 which was published in the first edition of the EuroSTAR Newsletter. It is entitled 'It's about people' and pays special attention to the importance of people issues within the testing profession.

You can view the entire EuroSTAR newsletter by clicking here

My biggest surprise when reading all the submissions was that so many people really sent in proposals very closely related the theme of the conference “Assembling the Dream Team”. Many of you have a lot of experience to share when we talk about people issues. Thank you for providing us with all this real life experience. You allow us to offer our delegates a very interesting and, most important, “human” conference.

Aside from the submissions, I also experienced what people can be and can do. As I already said, 20 reviewers and a Program Committee have voluntarily processed the submissions. In addition, many have provided us with great ideas we might want to incorporate into the conference to make it even more interesting, fun and innovative. Combine the lively EuroSTAR-community with the professional team of Qualtech, who manage this event, and you have a highly energizing cocktail. Everybody is very motivated to make this conference ‘the’ event of the year for the European Testing Community. It is this testing community that has given me the energy to try to distill a program that, I hope, you will appreciate. It’s a luxury to be able to work under these pleasant conditions.

If we look more closely at the topics people are proposing, you’ll notice a lot is about communication and the ‘issues’ this generates. It seems that, as opposed to the clear and well defined TCP/IP standards computers use to communicate, we, humans have a lot of trouble in understanding each other. When a computer has a communication hick-up, such as packet-collision, it simply sends the information again. When humans collide…well, they collide… and that’s about it. Communication stops.

On top of that, we seem to live in different worlds. IT professionals have their language, business people use another. Developers even have a different dialect it seems, compared to testers. So, we not only have the challenge of managing a communication process, we have compatibility issues.

I guess everyone has experienced what I describe above. This is confirmed by the vast amount of testimonials that came in with the presentation proposals. As I read through all these papers I saw that many people have found their own way of dealing with this challenge. Some use discussion techniques, such as the Six Thinking Hats of De Bono. We will address the use of the Hats for testing at the conference. Others perform a team analysis to improve communication and co-operation. And again others discuss the infrastructure that we need to be able to optimally work together. They propose frameworks for value setting of the team allowing organisations to assemble a team that has a compatible set of working values. There are even standards and certificates which can be deployed in your organisation to improve the interaction between people. All this will be discussed in Manchester.

Each of these solutions contributes to making a group of people a team that generate value. 1+ 1 = 3 as they say.

In the next edition of this newsletter, I look forward to being able to announce the official conference programme. Names will appear and I hope you’ll like them. After all, it’s all about people.

Let me conclude this first article by repeating a metaphor I used in Copenhagen, last year, when I invited you to come to Manchester:

Take two glasses of water, half filled. Pour the water of one glass into the other glass. You now have one full glass of water. The beauty is that you cannot see anymore which water came from which glass. They are stirred, not shaken, into a transparent homogeneous drink. Wouldn’t it be great if our software team would be like this glass of water, a Dream Team assembling great software.

I look forward meeting you in Manchester.
Best Regards

Jens

Read the entire EuroSTAR Newsletter by clicking here

Ready to Ship? – Using Release Readiness Metrics

2006-04-18T10:34:00.000+01:00

This is an article from John Fodeh which was published in the first edition of the new EuroSTAR newsletter. This article is an excerpt from John’s 2005 Tutorial in Copenhagen entitled "Establishing an Effective Test Metrics Programme". This tutorial sold out in advance of the conference.

To view this article and all other articles, view the EuroSTAR newsletter here

Why Measure?

A metric is a measure. "Measurement is the process by which numbers or symbols are assigned to attributes of entities in the real world in such a way to describe them according to clearly defined rules" (Fenton, Pfleeger). As you know, metrics play a crucial role in the advancement of all sciences. This should also include computer science. Tom DeMarco stated, "You cannot control what you cannot measure". In software development and testing we use metrics to:

* Understand: Gain insight into the applied processes and identify relationships. We use measurements to establish a baseline and goals for future assessment.
* Assess: Determine status with respect to plans and goals, and then monitor progress.
* Predict: Detect bottlenecks, early warnings of problems and determine what tradeoffs can be made.
* Improve: Identify root causes and learn from historical data.
* Communicate: Visualize status and trends, and share the knowledge with the rest of the team.

What Metrics Are Needed

Some organisations select a single or a few isolated "golden" metrics to collect and monitor. However, most metrics are not useful when used separately. For example, the number of defects found during testing has limited value until it is combined with other data such as the severity, type and root cause of the defects, the number of defects fixed, the type and effort of testing, the number of defects found by the end-users, etc.

On the other hand, having too many metrics to collect, analyse and report can be infeasible and problematic. There are numerous aspects in software development and testing that can be measured and it can be tempting to do so. However, spamming your team with tons of metrics is certainly not the answer (and will probably not be appreciated as well).

Instead of spending your time on a multitude of metrics that you or someone else might find useful sometime in the future, your time is much better spent doing more testing. The solution is a suite of key metrics. This set of metrics should be simple and balanced and help you track progress toward your target, i.e. release readiness.In this respect, applying a metric paradigm such as Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) can be very effective. GQM provides a formalised framework for developing a metrics programme, prompting you to think; "what information do I need?" instead of "what is easy to measure?" In other words, to derive your set of metrics you need to know what you need to know.

The following describes some basic metrics that you can use and include in your set of release readiness metrics.

Test progress

Test progress metrics include information concerning the status with respect to the plans, e.g. how many of the planned tests have been run? What is the pass rate of the tests? Throughout development this information will show the current status and help detect bottlenecks and early warnings of trouble, e.g. if we have only completed a fraction of the planned tests and the pass rate is low, is it still possible to finish on time with the available resources? When approaching release this metric will speak for itself; can we release the system with the current test completion status?

Obtained coverage

Coverage metrics hold vital information regarding the thoroughness and completeness of the testing. Coverage can be expressed in terms of requirements, code or risks and provide the means for quantifying the portion of the requirements/code/risks that is exercised by the applied testing. A low value reveals an insufficient test effort and the risk of potential latent defects. This metric is typically used in conjunction with the test progress metrics and can reveal details not seen from the progress data. An example could be the situations where many tests have been completed while critical requirements or high risk areas remain untested.

System quality factors

Data about system quality factors contain information on different aspects of the product, such as functionality, performance, reliability, installability and conformance to standards (you might also consider using ISO 9126). I prefer to show the test completeness of these quality factors combined with information about the defect density. In this way I can monitor progress in the different areas and detect if some deserve special attention.

Found defects

Defect metrics are usually collected by applying the appropriate queries in the defect reports database. The metrics typically include the total number of defects reported and categorised in open and closed (fixed and verified) defects, sorted according to their severity.

This data delivers a snap shot of the system state at release time, making it possible to take into account the risk and consequence of releasing the system e.g. If the data reveals a large number of open high-severity or non-verified defects, then it clearly shows that releasing the system at this moment is a high-risk decision. By depicting the found defects over time (or test effort) it is possible to create a defect trend. A defect trend is a graph showing the accumulated number of reported defects as a function of test effort (expressed in terms of test days).

This graph is typically S-shaped. When testing is started, the defect-finding rate is low, as the functionality of the software is restricted to few areas and because showstoppers might prevent testing in some areas. The defect-finding rate increases with the addition of new functionality and the correction of already found defects. As the software matures, the defect-finding rate starts decreasing, as it becomes harder to find new defects. Ultimately, the graph flattens. Finding further defects at this stage requires a huge test effort and shows that the software is possibly ready for release (or that the limitation of the applied testing technique has been reached).

Monitoring the status on the S-curve helps to determine when to stop testing, i.e. is the curve starting to flatten?
It is even possible to extrapolate the graph, providing a predictive evolution of the defect-finding rate and a means of estimating the number of unknown defects.

Customer feedback

User feedback during development is of major importance. During testing we normally verify that the system performs as specified, i.e. "are we building the system right?" The user evaluation data helps you answer the question: "are we building the right system?"

Summary

Successful test management involves making complex decisions. These decisions need to be based on solid, quantitative data and well-calculated risk. Using a simple set of metrics you can get a snapshot of the system state and quality that is useful throughout the entire development process. However, in the closing stages, possessing the right metrics has a tremendous value, in particular when you need to find the proper timing for release.

To view the EuroSTAR Newletter, click here

The EuroSTAR Newsletter

2006-04-11T16:45:00.000+01:00

As you may know, EuroSTAR have begun to send a monthly newsletter to tester's throughout Europe. This all new Software Test focused newsletter will contain a variety of articles from some of the industry's leading visionaries in Software Testing.

This months's articles include "Ready to Ship? - Using Release Readiness Metrics" from John Fodeh, and "Specially Motivated Test Resource" from Thorkil Sonne, winner of the best presentation award at EuroSTAR 2005 who tells a remarkable story. There are also articles from the EuroSTAR 2006 programme chair, Jens Pas "It's all about people" and further information on the Free EuroSTAR mini events taking place in the UK & Holland in early May.

To receive the 1st edition of the EuroSTAR newsletter and further monthly editions, Sign up to the EuroSTAR Newsletter

Testing "Big Picture"?

2006-04-10T09:18:00.000+01:00

Hi all!

First let me introduce myself: my name is Erkki Pöyhönen (or Poyhonen for those with keyboards without funny dotted characters :-) and I come from Helsinki, Finland. Some might remember me as the EuroSTAR programme chair of 2004. I recently moved back into a consulting role after few years in a R&D management role.

I really enjoyed some of the posts in here, especially the one about the maturity. For most of the past decade I've been concerned about testing competence. That's why I'd like to share my recent quest to the testing big picture.

In large companies test teams or units grow an internal testing culture. It is a natural way to manage complexity: based on our experiences we learn self-evident ideas, what is important, what is possible, and so on. This means that after a while two organisations in different contexts (differing business situations, working with different technologies or producing different products) have developed different sets of axioms -- "self-evidents".

I suppose this really is natural and good for individuals and teams in general. The hard part comes from having to co-operate with other organisations or adapting to the changing conditions. If testers are not aware of their culture or their context, they might totally devaluate everything coming from a person from different organisation. This can be seen in attitudes into literature, training or cross-organisation co-operation; it is easy to dismiss quite valid outside information saying simply "that was not relevant for us; it is made for another organisations; we are special". BTW: good, welded teams share that elite feeling, so feeling special is not bad as such. It becomes a problem only when it prevents us to learn from others for being different in a vague way.

As discussed not so long ago in software-testing mailing list (a wonderful email list of the context-driven testing school with rather high S/N ratio; somewhat slanted to agile thinking) it might be more useful to have 5 times one year experience of different organisations than having a 5-year experience working in similar projects. I agree. And I'd add that working for both product and project organisations is useful, and working both in industrial setting and high-tech IT industry.

Working with one product year, year out (like in Telecoms used to be quite common) allows both testers and developers to optimise their approach and practices for efficiency. But for example changing into another technology can be a disaster. Or a test team might work parallel in tens of different projects for many customers in varied businesses. Of course the focus would be more into adaptability and learning, but achieving repeatable practices or sustained organisational improvement might be harder.

My newest project is building a repository of generic testing information that is useful for induction, competence development and process improvement. Building such a beast for any certain context is simpler: find the relevant sources and then assume this is good for us to know. Trying to be useful for a wider audience means: identifying context behind all sources and material, highlighting the assumed context-dependencies and sourcing the generic ideas from context-specific material.

Suddenly many common words are not so common any longer. Example: a test plan is for many "a reviewed text document, based on a template and that nobody reads". For others it can be a wall in the team meeting room. Or if the main constraint is delivery date it can be very unproductive to assume that quality is the driving factor.

Good news is that we need not fight over certain testing terms with religious intensity, if we identify we come from different contexts. It becomes more important to learn the "one step up" definition - what does this thing really mean, and not focus on how does it look like in different organisations, or "what do we ideologically hope this should mean for everybody".

It is easier to look for material supporting my current view than take the small extra effort to learn from sources of other contexts. But sticking to a strict "one testing" viewpoint takes energy, is counter-productive and prevents us from developing our industry forward. Widening my horizons and listening to (and getting to know) people from different industries has exactly been the biggest pay-back for me from attending testing conferences. And where else to do this better than in EuroSTAR again next December?

Testing Ourselves; Comfort Zones

2006-04-03T09:48:00.000+01:00

Do we as testers test ourselves enough?
Or are we content to remain doing what we are familiar with, what we are not afraid of, what does not challenge us! Does this make us better testers? or Stagnant tester?

I believe that if we all stay firmly rooted in our own self acquired comfort zones, that we will never progress, never move up a level, and ultimately never reach our full potential. This is as true for life as is it for testing - Is moving away from our comfort zone a bad move??

Should we look at tasks, projects in different, perhaps radical ways - remember inventions weren't just invented, they were tested.. Is testing a set science, where a method can be pre-determined or can we endeavour to experiment, dare to be different, infact, dare to be daring!

Testing as a profession is booming but are we as testers, real testers doing enough to ensure this remains the case? Testers need to test themselves - contribute to an open source project, start blogging here or anywhere, submit papers/articles for publications, conferences etc..., network with other testers, discuss/debate testing issues and maybe join a special interest group in your country - possibilities are endless!! Go on test yourself..

Article " Inside the Software Testing Quagmire"

2006-03-29T09:26:00.000+01:00

Great article looking at testing from CIO magazine!

Have a look - it's a good read - Inside the Software Testing Quagmire

Tester maturity

2006-03-24T15:55:00.000Z

Someone asked me the other day 'What makes a mature tester'? Which set me thinking, as these things do.

Maturity in cheese or wine means age - if kept in the right conditions. A mature cheese or wire is differentiated by a certain quality of smell, taste or appearance that is hard to achieve in any other way. A deepening, a richness, a complex subtlety amalgamating into a coherent whole. This is valued. Sometimes, the dulled mess is only valued because maturity takes time to achieve, and because rareness and maturity are linked. The process of maturing can change, with maturity or inappropriate conditions, into one of spoiling.

For testers, as with cheese, I believe that length of experience is less important than the conditions in which that experience is gained. Maturity is not just experience, but, perhaps, expertise tempered by perspective. I do hope it's not a certain smell.

Maturity in testers might be characterised by a coherent vision, based on a deep and diverse set of experiences and sources. Perhaps there is a process of over-maturing, perhaps a hardening or vinegary sharpness about some testers. Unlike cheese or wine, however, testers can reverse this process.

There are plenty of ways of gaining expertise and developing perspective - the most important for me, so far, have been to do with practice and communication: working in a wide range of businesses; engaging in discussions with other testers, designers, coders and users; showing people why and how I've made a particular decision. There's a difference, of course, between what _makes_ a mature tester, and what _marks_ a mature tester. Training doesn't make a mature tester. Certification doesn't mark a mature tester. There's no vintage certification on testers, or use-by date on their ideas.

Am I a 'mature' tester? Do I want to be? I'd rather be a tester who reverses the process occasionally, and goes back to the fundamental, rapid and joyful changes of immaturity. Hence this half-baked post; I'm going to learn about blogging, and see where I get. I have a handful of other things I'm learning about this year, too - perhaps one will grow to some sort of maturity, but I hope I'll learn from them all.

CSTE Quiz

2006-03-24T14:04:00.000Z

Hey

Found this quiz online (been googling alot :-))
It is focused on CSTE Technique, have a look - i enjoyed it

Maura Shortridge made some sample quizzes online for each knowledge domain in CSTE. Visit http://school.discovery.com/quizzes32/mshortri/TestTechniques.html as "student" with password "cste". She made up the questions from the study guide, and she was sure that 99% of questions are having correct answers.
Here are the URL's to the other quizzes she've made so far - the login ID would be the same for all (student/cste):
Quality assurance versus Quality control: http://school.discovery.com/quizzes32/mshortri/QAvsQC.html

Signing off 4now

Interesting Article On Agile Testing

2006-03-23T11:55:00.000Z

Hello,

New to blogging and think it is a good idea.
Found this article on Agile Testing which i found interesting.

Agile Testing Article

Hope you all find it as interesting as me.

Bye for now.

Anybody out there applying TPI and CMMi ?

2006-03-22T15:30:00.000Z

Hello,

being involved in a project to improve the practices in a testing organisation according to TPI and CMMi in parallel I would like to share experience.

Actually we are busy to bring test maturity to stage 5 (controlled) and reach CMMi Level 2 (managed) including VER and VAL of Level 3. There is an interesting treatise about this by van Schijndel/Robben TPI, CMMi and Testing at www.iquip.nl

Of course the mapping parts and offset parts are somewhat difficult to identify in detail (depending of the organisation as well).

Is there anybody who has done a similar challenge?

BTW: The new blog for testers is a very fine idea.
Thank you.

Short Intro

2006-03-22T11:27:00.000Z

Hi all!
As my parents always told me to introduce yourself politely to other people, I would like to use my first post to do so.
I'm Erik Boelen, working as a Test Manager/Test Consultant for the company CTG in Belgium.
This is my sixth year in the testing world, and still learning a lot every day over and over again. Therefore, I decided to subscribe to this blog, as its intention is to share experiences, knowledge, ideas and who knows, maybe even dreams about testing!!
Concerning Eurostar, I've had the honour to be a speaker once, in 2003, with the subject 'The Agile Way to Success'. This year, I sent in another proposal and really hope to be selected again.
For me, Eurostar was a learning and fun experience, to put it very simply. I met people from all over Europe who have different opinions about testing and how to deal with it. This resulted in very interesting discussions during the day and very funny outcomes during the "evening sessions".
My personal interest goes out to Agile Testing. Currently, I'm responsible for this area within my company and hope to receive and share some interesting ideas about the subject through this blog.

Cheers!
Erik

Welcome to the offical EuroSTAR blog

2006-03-14T15:58:00.000Z

Hi,

Thank you for taking the time to investigate this, the new EuroSTAR blog dedicated to the European software testing community and in particular, those testers that have or intend to attend EuroSTAR in the future.

We hope that this initiative will create an online meeting point for European software testing professionals where you can share your individual EuroSTAR experiences, thoughts and importantly ideas for the future. Also, we aim to facilitate continous interaction between those of you that met at EuroSTAR so that you may continue your discussions, debates or even differences of opinion long after the curtain has fallen over the final EuroSTAR session of that year.

Our aim at EuroSTAR is to create the conference you want to attend, to have the speakers you want to hear and the companies you want to speak with. With this in mind, please feel free to let us know what we can do to improve in order to make EuroSTAR an even better experience for the entire European software testing community.

Read through some of the posts below to see what other's have to say about their own EuroSTAR experiences.

Please remember to email us at kevin@qualtechconferences.com so that We can invite you to become a member of the offical EuroSTAR blog. We look forward to hearing from you!

Happy blogging,

The EuroSTAR Team

What's it really like?

2006-03-14T11:36:00.000Z

My EuroStar conference experience started back in 1998 in a cold and snowy Munich. Since then I have been fortunate enough to attend all but the one held in Barcelona, either as an attendee or speaker. So I suppose the conference holds special memories for me having been attending them for so long. It’s always encouraging to see how many people still come back year after year for more, but also the way it can attract people who have never been to the conference before.

There is always the opportunity to either make new acquaintances in the industry or meet up with existing contacts, which is always an important part of the event. However, it is equally valuable as an informative and challenging conference. It’s the type of place where you can learn from people’s successes and also maybe their honesty of failures. There are practical ideas you can take back to your workplace on a variety of topics, or new ideas to be learned about from other practitioners or “experts” in the field. But don’t take my word for it, make sure you put the date in the diary now so you can be sure to experience the conference first hand.

This year I will be more involved in EuroStar as I’m taking on different roles as one of the UK country Co-ordinator’s (so if you have any questions drop me an email) and also part of the program committee.

I look forward to seeing you in Manchester.

Days gone by, Days to come...

2006-03-06T12:00:00.000Z

I'd like to encourage you to get involved in EuroSTAR 2006, and beyond. In my case, after being involved for 4 fun years I'm ready to enjoy many more years of the conference.

For 2006 I have no idea how I'll be involved yet, although I need to decide whether to submit a proposal or not fairly soon as the submission deadline is close. However I expect I'll be at the conference one way or another :-)

I'm looking forward to the event, which promises to offer:

the chance to meet lots of friends, new and old, from across Europe and further afield
some great sessions for everyone
the opportunity to meet up after hours for the 'important' discussions that don't always fit directly in the flow of the main event e.g. because of time constraints

From my experiences of EuroSTAR, and various other events, I expect EuroSTAR will continue to offer attendees the chance to develop themselves while helping others, and the industry, to improve.

I hope to see you at this and future events

Julian Harty
UK

PS: In case you are interested, here is a summary of my involvement so far. I hope it encourages you to get involved as well.

I was first introduced to EuroSTAR by Steve Allott in 2001 when I replaced a speaker who had to cancel. Despite the short, cold dark days in Sweden I really enjoyed the event, the first time I'd presented to a large International audience.

In 2003, in Amsterdam, I met some old friends and again had the great opportunity to speak at the event again, this time on security testing.

In 2004, I was shocked to receive a phone call from Erkki Poyhonen, the programme chair, who asked me whether I was willing to give a keynote - with some trepidation I accepted, and although I was initially worried about presenting to over 300 people, the warmth and support of the audience allowed me to deliver a fun presentation. The feedback from this session encouraged Lee Copeland in the USA, who organises the STAREast and STARWest conferences to invite me over to give a keynote to an even larger audience at STAREast 2005.

For 2005 Martin Pol asked me to join the programme committee - something that sounded time-consuming and without much reward, but a challenge, so I accepted. However I found I really enjoyed reviewing the 450+ submissions, communicating with about 50 of the speakers, organising the track chairs for the conference, etc. I hope I met quite a few of you during the actual conference, although to be honest I found I had little time to attend the presentations this time, as there were various jobs that had to be sorted out for the track sessions, etc.

Of the presentations I did attend, Thorkil Sonne's special session on autism was magnetising, showing how a 'disability' could be turned into a special, marketable skill. He has personally developed a viable, responsible business which is an inspiration to many who learn about it. I hope others will be able to follow his lead in future. As he is giving a keynote at EuroSTAR 2006 you'll have the chance to hear of the great work he's performed :-)

In the end, I realised how much I'd benefited from being involved in the programme committee, by being able to learn from the 100's of people who had contributed to the event.

Thank you!

Reflections of a Programme Chair

2006-02-20T10:49:00.000Z

Hi, I'm Martin Pol and I was programme chair for EuroSTAR 2005 in Copenhagen.

2006 will witness the 14th EuroSTAR to be held in Manchester, UK. As last year's programme chair, I have been asked to share some of my thoughts about EuroSTAR and what it represents.

I have been fortunate enough to attend 12 EuroSTAR's to date and I am proud to have been programme chair for three of these. EuroSTAR represents quality, networking and socialising with fellow professionals while importantly it offers the testing community the best meeting plaza to exchange experiences in what is a rapidly changing testing scene. It also offers each tester the opportunity of world class training and to learn from the very best practitioners in the field!

Over the course of my association with EuroSTAR, I have met many like-minded people. discussed many challenges with them, had a great time and lots of fun and what is significant made numerous friends over the years. I have witnessed pioneers and innovators take their first steps in presenting to an audience, I have seen their nerves and I have seen them make excellent keynotes in the proceeding EuroSTAR's. I would encourage each tester who is passionate about their profession to get involved and present your contribution or experiences, the call for papers is now open for 2006, so why not take the plunge and submit??

The networking element of EuroSTAR is of huge importance as it is a forum to:

Bridge practise and theory from the academic world
Discuss solutions with top experts
Debate the content of books with the authors the authors themselves
See how testing is approached in other organisations/countries
Actively participate in forums and workshops

In addition, the exhibition is home to all of the main players in the testing market and is an excellent place to gather information on the newest tools and most up to date method's, discuss partnership possibilities and to view what is available in the marketplace that would best serve your specific needs. The exhibition is also an excellent chance to showcase your own testing tools and services.

The face of software testing is changing, as a profession it is growing and as a result EuroSTAR has become even more important. I hope to see you all in Manchester this December to discover the solutions to the mutual challenges we face as testers and to share our individual dissapointments and successes - See You There..

Martin Pol