Verify/ATI Conference Site

Linda Hayes, Worksoft, Inc

Agile iterations present a special challenge for testers who must deal with cumulative functionality within a fixed time frame. Automation seems like the ideal solution, but most companies resist implementing it until the software is stable, reasoning that any savings from automation will be offset by the maintenance required to keep up with changes. Further, traditional record/script/replay approaches can’t be implemented until the code is functional, which is too late to be useful in an agile development environment. This tutorial will describe an incremental approach to test automation that allows automated tests to be written before the code, then rapidly updated as changes are introduced. This enables agile projects to deliver higher quality solutions more quickly by involving all team members in a coordinated and automated effort.

Dorothy Graham, Software Test Consultant

Many organizations never achieve the significant benefits that are promised from automated test execution tools. What are the secrets to test automation success? There are no secrets, but the paths to success are not commonly understood. Dorothy Graham describes the most important automation issues that you must address, both management and technical, and helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use.

If you don’t begin with good objectives for your automation, you will set yourself up for failure later. If you don’t show Return on Investment from automation, your automation efforts may be doomed, no matter how good they are technically. Join Dorothy to learn how to identify achievable and realistic objectives for automation, show ROI from automation, understand technical issues such as testware architecture and staffing issues, pick up useful tips, learn what works in practice, and devise an effective automation strategy.

Bob Galen, iContact

The move from traditional tester to agile tester can be Extreme (pun intended). There are a wide variety of new skills that need to be acquired. But there are also established techniques that need to be re-honed or adapted as well. Beyond the specific skills however is a larger and more fundamental change-as the very mind of the agile tester is different!
You must move from independent tester to quality advocate. You can't simply verify requirements, but need to elicit and evolve them with your business stakeholders. If you are primarily a functional or manual tester, you'll need to significantly broaden your skills across all areas of software testing. In addition, your "courage" needs to change with respect to organizational and team dynamics. You can't simply be a wallflower who try's to "test in quality". In a word, everything shifts or changes. Join experienced agile coach & tester Bob Galen as we explore the key skill areas, both hard and soft, that you'll need to adjust in order to survive and thrive within agile teams.

Dharmalingam Ganesan & Mikael Lindvall, Fraunhofer CESE

Software testing is an important quality assurance activity. In practice, software testing consumes at least 50% of the development effort. Many engineers consider software testing a low-profile and boring task. For example, Java Software engineers manually write JUnit programs to test the system, which can be both tedious and error-prone. An analysis of such JUnit tests reveals that they typically follow a certain pattern. So why don't we generate JUnit tests? By the way, why stop there, why don't we generate all kinds of unit tests (i.e. xUnit)? In this tutorial, we introduce the Fraunhofer Approach for Software Testing (FAST) that has the capability to make testing a fun and a high-profile task by generating xUnit test cases. The goal of the FAST approach is to automatically generate ready-to-run executable test cases from lightweight models. The FAST approach has been applied to test case generation for a wide variety of systems including a) module-level testing of middle-ware, b) requirements testing of web-based systems, and c) testing of GUI-based standalone systems. We will present industrial experiences of generating xUnit tests using the FAST approach. In this tutorial, the participant can expect to learn state-of-the-art testing methods and tools that they can use in their jobs to make testing more fun, efficient and effective.