Tuesday Afternoon Conference Sessions

PSQT

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Requirement Management

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Process Management

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Test Process I

Test Process II

Web Testing

Test Automation

12 Steps to Useful Software Metrics

Linda Westfall

A Resource-Constrained White-Box Test Automation Methodology (B)Masa Maeda
Ramon Felciano
Mike Carl

Testing Black Box for Portfolio Management: Results based on case study (B)
Rakesh AgarwalSanjita BohidarBhaskar Ghosh

RapidSQA: Web Testing At The Speed Of The Internet (I)

Eric Patel

Distributed Test Automation – Developing Solutions Through Patterns (B)

Jamie Mitchell

12 Steps to Useful Software Metrics introduces a practical process for establishing and tailoring a software metrics program that focuses on goals and information needs. The process provides a practical, systematic, start-to-finish method of selecting, designing and implementing software metrics. It outlines a cookbook method that can be used to simplify the journey from software metrics in concept to delivered information.

·         What are Software Metrics?
·         Some Basic Measurement Theory
·         Introduction to the Twelve Steps
·         Step 1 – Identify Metrics Customers
·         Step 2 – Target Goals
·         Step 3 – Ask Questions
·         Step 4 – Select Metrics
·         Step 5 – Standardize Definitions
·         Step 6 – Choose a Model
·         Step 7 – Establish Counting Criteria
·         Step 8 – Decide What’s Good
·         Step 9 – Define Reporting Mechanisms
·         Step 10 – Determine Additional Qualifiers
·         Step 11 – Collect Data
·         Step 12 – The People Side of the Metrics Equation

·        Identify customer who need software metrics information
·        Select software metrics based on goals
·        Design and tailor the selected metrics to match your information needs
·        Determine what data to collect and who should collect it
·         Minimize the impact of human factors on your selected metrics

Linda Westfall is the President of The Westfall Team which provides Software Metrics and Software Quality Engineering training and consulting services. Linda has twenty years of experience in real time software engineering, quality and metrics. She has worked as a Software Engineer, Systems Analyst, Software Process Engineer and Manager of Production Software.

Organizations are often confronted with limited time and engineering resources to satisfy time-to-market product requirements. Two commonly adopted courses of action are to delay the product release day, or reduce the time allocated to software quality testing, thereby reducing the scope of such testing. This presentation proposes a third approach, which temporarily redistributes existing engineering resources in an unconventional manner that allows for and efficient and effective software testing process. This practice, coined “White Box Days”, has been put in place at InGenuity Systems in Alviso, California and has been used to deliver core technology products on time without sacrificing the quality of the software or the development process. This presentation discusses this approach.

·         Courses of action in testing under strong time and staff constraints
·         Building a better team.
·         The importance of management
·         Alternative methodology for testing core technologies
·         Everyone wins
·         Conclusions

·         A white-box test automation methodology that allows full testing of core-technologies under strong time and staff constraints
·         The need to redefine the underlying philosophies on the creation of development and QA teams
·         How developers can be benefited from assisting testing
·         The advantages of strong, close relationship between QA and development
·         It is possible to avoid sacrificing testing in order to deliver on time

Masa Maeda is a Senior QA Engineer at InGenuity Systems in Alviso, California.

The automation of the testing process for components is not only desirable, but in fact it is a necessity given the demands of the current market. A number of automated test tools have been developed but they require a lot of knowledge in the procedure to be used to take care of effective testing. This presentation provides a clear understanding of what is actually required to successfully implement cost-effective testing for black box. It focuses on developing a user-oriented testing framework, which is based on general software engineering (SE) principles, and considers development-oriented testing expertise of black box testing in portfolio management.

·        Business background
·        Portfolio management
·        Component management
·        Rules engine
·        Testing methodology
·        Objectives of testing
·        Life cycles of testing
·        Important features of web based testing

·         Testing methodology
·         Black box - object
·         Portfolio testing
·         SE principles
·         Testing framework

Sanjita Bohidar has been working at Infosys Technologies Limited, India, for the past four years. She has vast experience in project management and implementation. She has worked in several projects with various customers in the U.S. and Europe. This presentation is a result of her last project, which is currently in the finishing stages for a leading financial institution in the US.

Rakesh Agarwal is working with Infosys Technologies Limited, India, in the Education and Research Department for the past three years and heads the E&R department of one of its development centers. He has published more than sixty papers in leading conferences and journals. He has thirteen years of experience in IT.

The demand for high quality websites in business, especially for e-commerce, has led to the reengineering of traditional testing practices in order to keep up with this e-business pace. Business pressures have mandated the QA organization to test more software, in more complex environments, in abbreviated (and often unrealistic) timeframes, while maintaining high quality. This iterative, rapid release schedule has called for an optimized, rapid testing strategy. Rapid Software Quality Assurance (RapidSQA) is a modified testing methodology containing best practices for optimizing Web testing.

·         The Challenges of Web Testing
·         Typical e-Business Configurations
·         Web of Quality
·         RapidSQA
·        Philosophy
·        Goals
·         Program
·         Test Sequence
·         Defect Management
·         Metrics
·         Release Criteria

·         What differentiates web testing
·         Web application architecture
·         What quality attributes are important in web testing
·         RapidSQA philosophy, goals, and program elements
·         Defect management, metrics, and release criteria for web testing

As Director of Quality Assurance for SourceGate Systems, Eric Patel leads the strategic direction of the Quality Assurance Department in Burlington, MA. Eric has over 9 years of experience in test engineering, management, and software quality assurance. He is the creator of the RapidSQAÔ methodology for Web testing. Eric holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Vermont. He is a reviewer for Software Quality Professional and is a Certified Quality Manager (CQM) through the American Society for Quality.

Test automation tools, absent all of the bells and whistles, are really nothing more than programming languages. The problem most test organizations have, however, are that they are not staffed with programmers to use these tools.

We may never be able to completely eliminate the complexity of programming; for sure we cannot simply ignore it. One of the reasons that automation projects fail so often is that we try to ignore the programming of scripts by letting the tool generate all of the code (via the recording facilities.)

Well, if we must program (and we must) then let’s find the easiest ways to do it. It turns out that much of the complexity of programming can be reduced by recognizing and taking advantage of the patterns of behavior exhibited by manual testers and patterns of execution inherent in software. This presentation will illustrate a variety of patterns that are useful to automation and develop programming templates for utilizing them in scripts.

·         What automation tools actually are and how they work
·         Understand why automation tool recording technology is not enough
·         How to develop a script template pattern
·         Functional decomposition and infrastructure patterns
·         Visual cue patterns
·         Web patterns

Jamie L. Mitchell is a Senior Test Automation Consultant at BenchmarkQA. in Minneapolis, MN. He is a contributing editor and columnist for “The Journal of Software Test Professionals.” He previously was a Senior Consultant at CornerStone Consulting, and the Lead Automation Engineer for Distributed Integration Testing / Global for American Express Technologies Organization. He has long been involved in test automation as automator, designer, architect, and mentor. He has worked in test automation since the first automation tools were released in Windows 3.0, including stints with Prudential Insurance, IBM AS/400 division, and ShowCase Corporation. He earned the Master of Computer Science degree in 1992 from Lehigh University and is a QAI Certified Software Test Engineer. He resides in Farmington, MN, and is an active member of the Twin Cities Quality Assurance Association.