Software Testing: Line By Line

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What is the current state of software testing? Complete the survey and help us find out.

The challenge in understanding the current state of testing is to bypass conventional wisdom or educated guesses, and rely instead on actual data. http://www.logigear.com/michael/survey.asp

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LogiGear announces a Test/QA Survey- Final 2 weeks!

Complete the survey and have your voice heard!
Also, be entered into a drawing for an Apple iTouch.
http://www.logigear.com/michael/survey.asp

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What about the V-Model?

The V-Model for Software Development specifies 4 kinds of testing:
• Unit Testing
• Integration Testing
• System Testing
• Acceptance Testing

What I’m finding is that of those only the Unit Testing is clear to me. The other kinds maybe good phases in a project, but for test design it doesn’t help much. It is hard to say which tests should go in a system test, an integration test or an acceptance test.

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Centralize? Decentralize? Concentralize!

As I wrote in various articles, organization is one of the 3 key requisites for successful automated testing, the other two being test design and automation architecture.

A question coming up quite commonly in larger corporations and organizations is whether to centralize the test automation, either at division or corporate level, or whether to decentralize: distribute over the various groups and projects.

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Microsoft the next General Motors?

I was reading an article a few months ago entitled, “is Silicon Valley the next Detroit…”, and I found it very interesting.

It was a little backwater Newsweek article (you can read it here) and probably didn’t get much press. However sensational it was, it did reference one great industry titan that once dominated our culture, General Motors (among others as a testament to the size and scope of the Detroit Metro Area and the Auto Industry – much of this parallels Silicon Valley’s dominance in the Information Technology space).

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Have Fun Breaking Software!

My cousin was flying out of Atlanta this morning, and expected to be in San Francisco this afternoon, in time for a family get-together dinner. Unfortunately, she, along with many other travelers around the country were stuck at the airports this morning and will have to adjust their plans due to delays caused by a computer bug.

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Automation Adoption

One of the basic challenges with test automation is adoption. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cataloged licenses for a company and found out they already have many different automation software packages, none of which is being used. Traditionally I’ve been told that is because the tools don’t work and that the teams had a hard time implementing the automation.

Let’s take one thing off the table, there is NO tool problem. Most automation tools do the same thing, catalog objects, record and playback and advanced scripting abilities, so, please if you trying to organize an automation project, don’t make it a tool decision.

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Sharing Lessons Learned, Making New Friends at QA&TEST 2009 Conference in Bilbao, Spain

I just got back from the 8th International Conference on Software QA and Testing for Embedded Systems, Oct 21 – 23. This was my first time at this conference and I’d give it a high grade for the overall quality of the content and speakers, and in particular, for the people who organize this conference. They are first class. Thanks to my new friends at SQS S.A., Spain — Sander Hanenberg, Jesús M. de la Maza and Begoña Laibara — for treating me well during the conference.

My keynote “Automation Coverage Less than 50%? Don’t Do It!” explored the common excuses for failing to achieve high-volume test automation output. It also pin-pointed underlying barriers to test automation…

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IEEE Conference on Global Software Development

There was an IEEE conference in July, hosted at the University of Limerick.
International Conference on Global Software Development/Engineering
http://www.icgse.org/

I gave a tutorial on the current state of testing: Testing Teams in Globalized Software Development. There was an inquisitive group and we had a fun session. Globally, testing is not often valued as highly as it is in Silicon Valley. People were interested to see a different perspective on testing.

The conference was focused on offshoring development and not on testing. My focus was special topics in testing: various responsibilities in testing and quality, agile projects, offshoring test automation, offshore team skill building.

The most interesting thing about this conference for me was the presentation of research on various topics in offshore development…

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Impressions from Star West 2009 in Anaheim

The conference was great, good people, good discussions. The challenge I picked up is marrying theory and practice…

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