Software Testing Blog

AlterSite multi-browser test support

2011-11-17T15:29:00.004Z

SmartBear Software (testing tool supplier of QAcomplete and TestComplete) have enhanced AlertSite, their web and mobile performance monitoring solution, to support testing on IE and Firefox browsers.

"Organisations can now test, monitor and improve how their website is performing across both browsers to ensure customers are getting an optimal user experience, no matter their browser preference.

The AlertSite built-into-the-browser transaction recorder captures and plays back user events to measure the end-user experience exactly as it unfolds in the browser. Now users can record any multi-step transaction or click stream and play it back on multiple browsers to simulate user experience. Unlike other Web monitoring tools that require separate recording processes for each browser, AlertSite users can simply record once and monitor from both Firefox and Internet Explorer across multiple locations."

Soasta and Selenium

2011-11-15T18:59:00.005Z

An recent article in Dr Dobbs identified that Soasta has added Selenium-based functional testing capabilities to its branded CloudTest platform. This extends their open-source testing tool by providing test recording functionality and other features such as the ability to test in distributed environments and new analytics.

The Art of Software Testing (revisited)

2011-10-27T11:25:00.003+01:00

Only a few days now till the third edition of the Art of Software Testing is available. Publishers Wiley give a date of 8th November 2011.

The classic guide to software testing, updated

Since the first edition of The Art of Software Testing, the hardware and software of computing have changed dramatically.Yet this book has stood the test of time. Whereas most books on software testing target particular development techniques,languages, or testing methods, The Art of Software Testing,Third Edition provides a brief but powerful and comprehensive presentation of time-proven software testing approaches.

The new Third Edition applies the original classic principles to today's hot topics, including:testing apps for iPhones, iPads, BlackBerry smartphones, Android phones and tablets, and other mobile devices; collaborative (user) programming and testing for internet applications, e-commerce, and agile programming environments

Students and IT managers alike will find The Art of Software Testing, Third Edition an indispensable resource that pays for itself with the first bug you discover and fix.

2011-05-09T08:01:00.002+01:00

Topics for the International Conference on Practical Software Quality and Testing

Testing websites and e-Commerce applications
Agile approaches for testing
Static testing: reviews, Inspections
Defect tracking and studies
Load, stress testing
Testing technology, process and automation
Integration, systems and regression testing
Use Cases and testing
Successful tool usage
Security testing
Risk-based testing
Certified Test Manager (CTM)
Testable requirements
Testing related topics
Managing test function and processes
Test Effort estimation
Developing, implementing standards
Risk management and mitigation
End-to-End testing
Developing, managing a test team
Requirements management, modeling
Certified Software Test Professional (CSTP)

The Art of Software Testing

2011-05-03T10:57:00.002+01:00

Long term readers of this blog may remember previous entries that referred to Glenford Myers, author of "The art of software testing", such as FAQ No. 8 and FAQ No 11 or even this entry on The art of software security testing.

Well I have just learned that the 3rd edition of The Art of Software Testing is due out towards the back end of 2011 (I think October). The new edition includes some new material covering
"how to apply the book's classic principles to today's hot topics including:

Testing apps for iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys, Androids, and other mobile devices
Collaborative (user) programming and testing
Testing for Internet applications, e-commerce, and agile programming environments"

Roll on October.

Mobile device testing

2011-04-26T18:35:00.003+01:00

If you've ever wondered about some of the problems with testing mobile applications development, then you might want to check out this article. It contains eight lessons for developers of mobile applications.Some may seem self evident (like "Expect Users to make mistakes") but its amazing how easy it is to overlook them in the heat of development.

My favourite is No 1 - Focus on User Experience. Its clear that smartphones have become mobile computing devices and are increasingly used like this. What is often overlooked is that the smaller screen size especially the small screens of some smartphones like the Blackberry mean that the applications can't be laid out as they are for web applications.

Testing the user experience (often called the customer experience for m-commerce applications) is key to ensuring that the mobile application is a success. And as the different mobile devices are running different operating platforms this means testing on a range of mobile devices.

Test performance

2011-04-25T08:58:00.004+01:00

Amongst all the positive noise about virtualization, I noticed what appeared to be a negative article here. It advised that you approach virtualization with caution. The underlying concern was that performance was not considered appropriately. And what did it recommend to address this? Why, performance testing of course.

"Performance Testing and resource consumption needs to be conducted on a few servers or workstations with a proper backup for redundancy and failure. Setup tools need to be built in order to monitor and correct performance issues."

The article goes on to fragmentation issues in the virtual environment and bottlenecks. The latter is of course another reason for performance testing. So on closer inspection, it is not so much an anti virtualization article but rather a pro performance testing article. Positive after all.

Scalability testing

2011-04-23T18:13:00.002+01:00

Reading over some of the old entries on this blog, I found an interesting article from way back in 2005 on scalability testing. It looks at 7 steps to running effective scalability tests. What surprised me most was not that the steps are still valid all this time later. What is odd is that it talks about SOA in performance testing. This shows how long it has been around. And the issue of performance dependability on external services remains as problematic today as in 2005.

Spike test

2011-04-18T17:57:00.007+01:00

Spike testing is an interesting form of performance testing. According to WIkipedia:

"Spike testing, as the name suggests is done by spiking the number of users and understanding the behaviour of the application; whether performance will suffer, the application will fail, or it will be able to handle dramatic changes in load."

I know you shouldn't use the term you are defining as part of the defintion (in this case spiking in the defintion of spike testing) but if Wikipedia is doing it, who would dare suggest this! The reason that spike testing is interesting is not to do with this defintion though. It is now commonplace for a huge number of people to visit a website when it receives media coverage or is part of a viral exercise on the web. And these huge volumes can take out a website because nobody expected such volumes and therefore didn't plan or test what would happen if they came.

Given the amount invested in web applications it is surprising that the website owners don't conduct what can be a relatively straight-forward type of load test. Maybe this is an area where a little more education on the costs of conducting high volume spike tests against the risks of not doing these performance tests would be really beneficial.

Automated testing and sins

2009-11-28T16:51:00.002Z

It's not often you see an article on software testing where the format makes it stand out, but that is the case on this article on automated software testing. An example of how it treats the sin of Pride is below.

Picture the scene: The wool has been pulled over the eyes of Brimstone Business Application Co’s CIO. He did a deal with a big IT supplier to have their quality-centred products added to his order. At the time it seemed like a good idea – he saved the company money and had a nice round of golf rolled-in to boot. He’d fallen into the superiority trap of believing that the most expensive or most prevalent solution would always be the best, but now was beginning to realise that this particular technology was not actually compatible with his company’s needs. He’d brought this solution in, so his pride was unable to take failure. Instead he persevered until it was too late and placed unrealistic goals on his QA team, who were then forced to revert back to manual testing. As a result the project time-lines slipped, applications went out the door late and bug-ridden, which proved expensive in re-work costs and built up a huge stack of technical debt. His department was now damned to an eternity of fire-fighting the latest problems.

The punishment in Hell will be: to be broken on the wheel.

Avoidance strategy: bigger isn’t always better. Look around when evaluating new solutions.

VSTS testing - Visual Studio Team System Test Edition

2009-11-15T09:19:00.004Z

If you are using Visual Studio Team System Test Edition for testing there is plenty of advice on the Microsoft site to help new testers and advanced practioners. For a start point try out Getting Started with Team System Testing Tools

This section takes you on a tour through the tools and windows of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers. You will see basic aspects of the Team System testing tools, such as how to create and work with tests, the types of tests that are available, and how to configure the testing tools.
For a range of different testing information on VSTS try the testing type information:

Working with Unit Tests Provides links to topics that describe unit tests and how to create them. Working with Web Tests Describes how to create, edit, run, and view Web tests. Working with Load Tests Describes the uses of load tests, how to edit and run them, how to collect and store load test performance data, and how to analyze load test runs. Working with Manual Tests Describes how to create and run manual tests, the only non-automated test type. Working with Generic Tests Describes how to create and run generic tests. Generic tests wrap external programs and tests that were not originally developed for use in the Team System testing tools. Working with Ordered Tests Describes how to create ordered tests, which contain other tests that are meant to be run in a specified order

Microsoft Visual Studio VSTS testing

Software Planner newsletter

2009-09-27T09:34:00.006+01:00

If your looking for an overview of test cases for testing the user interface you could start with the Software Planner newsletters from Steve Miller. For the last two news letters he has focused on this area. In August it was "20 Useful test cases for testing User Interfaces" and this month it is "15 Useful test cases for ensuring a consistent User Interface".

Examples of the test cases include:

Screen font type: Ensure that the screen font family matches from screen to screen. Mismatching fonts within the same sentence and overuse of different fonts can detract from the professionalism of your software user interface.

Screen font sizes: Ensure that the screen font sizes match from screen to screen. A good user interface will have an accompanying style guide that explicitly defines the font type and size for headers, body text, footers, etc.

Error logging: If fatal errors occur as users use your application, ensure that your applications writes those errors to a log file, event viewer or a database table for later review. Log the routine the error was in, the person logged on, and the date/time of the error.

Error messages: Ensure that error messages are informative, grammatically correct, and not condescending.

Outsourced testing webinar

2009-09-22T21:40:00.004+01:00

There is a Free Webinar on Thursday 24 September: 14.00 BST. Its entitled "Outsourced Testing – You Can Have Your Cake and Eat It".

"There are now many organisations offering managed testing and QA services, with the promise of in-depth technical and testing skills, cost savings, flexibility, accelerated delivery, and better quality.
While these contracts are entered into with the best intentions, all too often these seemingly great deals soon begin to feel expensive, inflexible, and no longer targeted to the needs of the organisation. Control of how well solutions are being tested, and the continuity of value delivery, must essentially be maintained.
Anyone considering or using outsourced testing services will want to avoid the pitfalls experienced by others via proven methods of management and working. This webinar explores some practical management techniques for setting up, or rejuvenating testing managed service arrangements, including supplier management and measurement, and tools that make outsourcing testing work a success for the customer."

Software Planner acquired by AutomatedQA

2009-09-20T17:42:00.004+01:00

This week saw the merger of AutomatedQA with Pragmatic Software. Both companies had good testing tools in complementary spaces. TestComplete serviced the automated functional testing space while Software Planner provided testing tool support for test management throughout the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). The two companies had already begun to work together to provide a more integrated solution and compete with the wider testing tool offerings from companies such as HP (the Mercury testing tools) and Micro Focus (both the Compuware and the Borland (nee Segue) testing tool set).

"For too long, Application Lifecycle Management and automated testing has been out of reach for all but the biggest software development organizations", says Derek Langone, President of AutomatedQA. "The addition of the Software Planner product suite lowers the barriers to entry of cost and complexity, so every software developer, regardless of size, can leverage the immediate advantages of ALM".

Steve Miller, President/CEO of Pragmatic Software joins AutomatedQA as Vice President of ALM Solutions. "We are excited to have Software Planner join the AutomatedQA family of outstanding quality assurance products," says Miller. "Integrating manual testing and test automation into a comprehensive software lifecycle solution will allow our clients to succeed with their software development efforts while empowering teams to become more lean and productive."

Testing DOS (Denial Of Service)

2009-08-30T11:27:00.005+01:00

If you're looking for a testing service which simulates a denial of service attack then you could try the one identified here:

Parabon, a provider of extreme-scale grid computing, is now offering to public sector organisations and private sector companies a risk-free, no-obligation "red team" test attack to help them assess the reliability of critical network assets in the face of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

The offer features a grid-based load and performance testing application that can replicate a full-scale DDoS attack. This offer is Parabon’s response to the rising incidence of DDoS attacks against U.S. websites.

It's not clear if this service extends to non US websites (such as UK web-enabled applications and websites) but it could be worth contacting them to find out.

ALM or SDLC

2009-08-23T16:10:00.003+01:00

Is ALM replacing SDLC in marketing terms? Someone asked me that the other day and I must admit I don't know the answer. I have seen quite a few press releases recently in which testing tools are placed in the ALM context rather than SDLC.

For example, on August 17th Sys-con had an article about Seapine Software testing tools (here) under the headline Seapine Software Announces TestTrack 2010. The introduction was:

"Seapine Software, a leading provider of global quality-centric application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions, today announced the release of TestTrack 2010. This software suite delivers new features, functionality, and enhancements to the popular TestTrack Pro and TestTrack TCM products, and introduces TestTrack RM, Seapine’s new requirements management solution that manages the complete requirement lifecycle, including planning, workflow, traceability, review, change management, and reporting. All three tools seamlessly integrate with one another to provide end-to-end traceability of requirements, issues, and tests."

ALM got a couple more mentions later on the article but no SDLC was anywhere to be seen.

And on August 19th EWeek carried an article on Thoughtworks tools under the headline ThoughtWorks Brings Agile to Application Lifecycle Management with Adaptive ALM

"ThoughtWorks Studios, a provider of Agile application lifecycle management solutions and software development tools, announces Adaptive ALM, a new Agile solution for enterprise developers building ALM systems.

ThoughtWorks Studios, a provider of Agile application lifecycle management solutions and software development tools, on Aug. 17 announced Adaptive ALM, a new Agile solution for enterprise developers building ALM systems."

A stack of mentions in a few sentences. And there were plenty more in the rest of the article. So on first assessment it looks a like this is the case. But two cases is not conclusive evidence so more examples are needed before a conclusion can be drawn.

Testing as a Service for contact centers

2009-07-29T15:04:00.003+01:00

I have just been reading about a new service from Empirix called “Testing as a Service”. As the name suggests its a testing service, but more specifically it’s a Quality Assurance (QA) solution for contact centers (I think these are what the good old call centre used to be) installing new plaforms or upgrading/refreshing existing technology.

The Empirix Testing as a Service, is scalable: it allows contact centres of all sizes (even to large contact centers) to determine the quality of the customer experience as well as the overall performance to ensure the ROI for a contact center. The testing service is highly adaptable and covers the complete contact center infrastructure.

Testing as a Service uses Empirix’s Hammer Test Engine., for both in and out-of-service testing and in-service monitoring basis. There is also a secure, real time reporting function to monitor the testing activities of Empirix’s Testing as a Service.

For more information you can visit Empirix

Testing center of excellence

2009-07-28T11:02:00.006+01:00

The Center of Excellence (which, as we have noted in the past, has now replaced Centre of Excellence) is a concept which has been around for some time. It has gone in and out of favour as organisations have changed and adapted to different approaches for building and delivery IT.

HP software have been using the term to cover their QA and testing offerings. HP Performance Center is performance testing software aimed at supporting a performance testing center of excellence (COE). Qualtiy Center is a test management tool for managing a QA Centre of Excellence. You can get an HP white paper on Building and Managing a Quality CoE

There is also the HP appliction security center. And Paladion have announced that they have built an Application Security Testing Centre of Excellence around this HP tool, in India. It combines an IT infrastructure with experienced security testers and best practices in using HP application security center. Its purpose it to locate and fix security vulnerabilities in computer software applications throughout the full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Acceptance Test Engineering Guide

2009-07-27T17:32:00.004+01:00

Microsoft have released a draft version of a guide on Acceptance Testing. As well as covering the testing aspects of the acceptance process it covers the collection of data in order to making a decision during the acceptance activities. It also covers preparation for acceptance testing and the approaches to acceptance testing: specifically whether you do it in a separate stage (an acecptance testing phase) or throughout the full Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). The latter they call Incremental Acceptance Testing.

You can download a copy of the Acceptance Test Engineering Guide and provide feedback on the same website in the discussion forum.

Software testing books

2009-07-26T18:26:00.003+01:00

Looking at software testing books, I came across some interesting lists at SoftwareQATest.com. As well as a list on software testing books list there were lists of automated testing books, QA books and a host of other IT topics like project management and risk management. But back to the software testing list. The top five books in the list, which are the ones most recommended by the site, had a mini review. For those interested in the choices they are:

Lessons Learned in Software Testing, by C. Kaner, J. Bach, and B. Pettichord (2001)
Testing Computer Software, by C. Kaner, J. Falk, and H. Nguyen (1999)
Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing, by G. Weinberg (2008)
How to Break Web Software, by M. Andrews and J. Whittaker (2006)
Testing Applications on the Web, by H. Nguyen, R. Johnson, and M. Hackett (2003)

If you want to see the reviews, you can visit the site. Or better still get the book and make up your own mind.

Digital Britian - Telecoms infrastructure commitments by the UK Government

2009-07-25T13:01:00.003+01:00

Digital Britian aims to connect all of Britian so that everyone can have access to 2Mbs Broadband by 2012. Its a long report at over 200 pages. So rather than try to read it all you could just go for a summary like this one which is called a tea-break guide to this planned revolution in Telecoms.

First interesting point in that article is how low Britian is in the league table of Broadband speeds. Some countries have really embraced it but the UK languishes at 21st. Then there is some information on the way the change in telecom infrastructure will be funded. But the best bit is saved to the end. It identifies not only the best word in the report (e-readiness) but also the best sentence:

"Work is well under way to create a PSN to supersede the overlapping and duplicative patchwork quilt or departmental or sectoral networks."

Sounds a good aim to me. If you want to read the other sentences you can read the full report or the executive summary at the Deparment of Culture and Media here

And for a super brief summary the two key commitments are:

"Availability of broadband has two components: the right network today and the right network tomorrow. To ensure all can access and benefit from the network of today, we confirm our intention to deliver the Universal Service Broadband Commitment at 2Mbps by 2012. This can be delivered through upgrades to the existing copper and wireless networks. We also propose public support for the network of tomorrow so that consumers in the Final Third who will not be reached by the market can enjoy next generation broadband. This will be a longer project which involves what amounts to installing a new network. The Universal Service Commitment and the Next Generation Final Third project are separate projects and need to be addressed in turn."

Software Planner: New version of SDLC management tool

2009-07-22T11:10:00.005+01:00

Software Planner has released a version with significant new enhancements for all stages of the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). New features include:

Advanced workflow support, which allows the you to configure business rules with the Software Planner SDLC testing tool, to define and manage the status and transition of data items. The example given with the new release is creating new defects: you may want to automatically assign a status of New and set mandatory requirements for some attributes (such as name and description) when a defect is raised. Once the defect has been assigned the status would change, progressing ideally to Resolved with the tool configured to require data items such as a resolution description are input before it can be closed.
The new release of Software Planner is integrated with Microsoft Visual Source Safe. Defects can be associated with the source code that was fixed due to the defect. This allows you to determine what source code models are affected by specific types of defects, making analysis of code impact easier to understand.
More robust reporting, including many new defect, test case, functional specification and project management reports. The newer reports allow trending of defects, test cases and functional specifications over time, allowing teams to spot trends and determine if the quality of their software is improving as the project progresses towards production. Software Planner has also been integrated with Business Objects Crystal Reports, so you can create your own reports and post them into Software Planner for others to use. You can also import reports from other SQL based databases (like Oracle, SQL Server, etc), allowing Software Planner to double as a full reporting solution for all areas of your business.

Governance and Silo's

2009-07-19T21:13:00.003+01:00

I read an article about governance and silos which I found interesting. The analyst was of the view that organisations were recreating new silos of governance rather than applying successful governance styles that are already proven.

In the article they use the example of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA):

"Well, SOA, for instance. If you look at an SOA project, it’s often defined by an elite group of architects and developers who are benefiting from all the lessons of 20 years of iterative development and they then develop their own processes, almost in this little vacuum.

Theoretically, a lot of organisations really have a lack of governance in their software development processes, but even if there is a lack of governance, there is some governance there. With the SOA lifecycle, we’ve actually spent a great deal of energy defining the stages of it and while they're parallel to what should be the SDLC - the software development lifecycle - very often they're instituted by a separate group and it’s kind of like parallel lives. So, in effect, we’re creating an additional layer of governance. Just what we need when IT organisations are trying to simplify lives for themselves."

Software Planner experiencing strong early demand

2009-06-15T16:05:00.001+01:00

Acutest, an independent testing company, has revealed a strong demand for Software Planner in the UK. Software Planner is an award winning application lifecycle management (ALM) tool that helps organisations manage all components of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This includes managing project deliverables, requirements, defects, test cases, test execution and help desk support.

“We had anticipated there would be a real demand for Software Planner in the UK, when we formed the partnership with Prgamatic Software, the US developer of the testing management tool, to bring it to the UK market.” said Barry Varley, Managing Director of Acutest. “But we have been surprised at the how fast interest has picked up. The recession in the UK has made many organisations cautious about spending on SDLC test tools. But the immediate value that Software Planner offers has led to a host of enquiries, particularly for the SaaS version of the product. Within a fortnight of announcing the Acutest and Pragmatic Software partnership, we’d signed up our first customer for Software Planner: HMD Clinical."

“HMD clinical is a software house developing databases and applications for the clinical trial industry. We operate in an extremely regulated industry that demands high quality, traceable requirements and needed a solution that enabled us to link activities from requirements gathering through design, build, testing and release,” a spokesman for HMD Clinical said. “On evaluating many different products, we found there was no shortage of excellent project, requirements, test and defect management solutions, but most were limited to only 1 or 2 of these functions. Software Planner was the only one that provided it all in a single package. Using Software Planner will ensure that we have clear visibility of the entire system validation process."

Software Planner provides features for managing all phases of the software development lifecycle within a single integrated tool. It supports all development methodology including Agile, Waterfall, Iterative, and Spiral. It is available in two versions: an enterprise version which a client installs in their own environment and a Software as a Service (SaaS) version which is hosted by Pragmatic Software.

IEEE 829 2008

2009-05-28T15:57:00.002+01:00

IEEE 829 2008, also known as the IEEE 829 Standard for Software Test Documentation, is an IEEE standard that specifies the form of a set of documents for use in eight defined stages of software testing, each stage potentially producing its own separate type of document.

The IEEE state that:

"Test processes determine whether the development products of a given activity conform to the requirements of that activity and whether the system and/or software satisfies its intended use and user needs.

Testing process tasks are specified for different integrity levels. These process tasks determine the appropriate breadth and depth of test documentation. The documentation elements for each type of test documentation can then be selected. The scope of testing encompasses software-based systems, computer software, hardware, and their interfaces. This standard applies to software-based systems being developed, maintained, or reused (legacy, commercial off-the-shelf, Non-Developmental Items)."

Software Testing Tool for SDLC

2009-05-25T10:05:00.004+01:00

Acutest, a leading provider of software testing services from London UK, and Pragmatic, a leading provider of application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions from Denver USA, have formed an exclusive partnership to bring Software Planner to the UK.

Software Planner is an award winning application lifecycle management (ALM) tool that helps companies manage all elements of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This includes the management of application requirements, project deliverables, testing plans, test cases, test execution, defects and help desk support. It also provides collaborative tools and interactive reporting dashboards to support change programmes spread across teams, locations and organisations. Software Planner is currently being used by over 70,000 users.

“Software Planner has helped software companies implement better software releases since 2000 and is being used in over 28 countries”, said Steve Miller, President/CEO of Pragmatic Software. “Having a local partner in the UK that are experts in software testing and automation will provide us the ability to expose Software Planner to a larger audience in the UK – backed by a local partner that can really service their testing needs. We are very excited about partnering with Acutest and our clients will be the beneficiaries of exemplary service and support”, added Miller.

“There’s real demand in the UK for an ALM tool like Software Planner”, said Barry Varley, Managing Director of Acutest. “In these difficult economic times, organisations are looking to unleash the value they have within themselves that isn’t currently hitting their bottom line. By joining up all the management, QA and testing activities throughout the whole Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Software Planner helps save time and cost whilst improving risk management and governance. What’s more, both the SaaS and Enterprise version are priced appropriately for these times of recession. “

SDLC testing tool

2009-05-16T12:29:00.002+01:00

Pragmatic Software Company, a leading provider of application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions, has partnered with Acutest as an exclusive software testing tool provider of Software Planner in the UK.

Software Planner is an award winning application lifecycle management (ALM) tool that helps programme management with all components of software development lifecylce (SDLC)including managing customer requirements, project deliverables, test cases, defects, and help desk processes. Software Planner also provides collaborative tools like document sharing, team calendars, interactive dashboards, knowledge bases and threaded discussions and integrates with most of the major automated testing tools.

"We are delighted to be partnering with Pragmatic Software to bring the Software Planner tool to the UK market: both the company and the product are very impressive," says Barry Varley, CEO of Acutest. "At Acutest we're proud of our ability to create new tailored testing service solutions, to meet the complex demands of our clients, and to deliver them quickly. Software Planner adds another very effective building block to the mix and we envisage a wide range of situations in which it will provide tremendous value."

"We are excited about having a local presence in the United Kingdom as this will provide Software Planner clients access to a knowledgeable partner that can help them maximize the use of Software Planner, says Steve Miller, President/CEO of Pragmatic Software. "When looking for a partner in the United Kingdom, we searched for a company with a solid track record of outstanding performance that is knowledgeable in testing applications under a variety of different methodologies -- including waterfall, agile, and RUP. Acutest's experience with SAP integration testing was a big plus. We are excited about offering clients in the UK an awarding winning application lifecycle management tool backed by experts in testing that service their locality.", adds Miller.

About Acutest software testing services

Acutest is a specialist software testing company based in London, UK. It provides a range of testing and quality assurance (QA) solutions to help organisations realise the benefits of technology-enabled change programmes quickly.

About Pragmatic Software

Founded in 1992, Pragmatic Software Company, Inc. based in Denver, Colorado is a software development company that provides web-based project management and team collaboration software to over 70,000 subscribers in over 24 countries. For more information on Pragmatic Software, click here

SAP performance testing

2009-03-28T18:38:00.004Z

Top 5 sites on Goolge UK for SAP performance testing:

SAP performance testing guidelines
Before you can test the performance of SAP applications, set up your test environment and incorporate these guidelines to produce reliable performance ...publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/rpthelp/v7r0m0/topic/com.ibm.rational.test.lt.sap.doc/topics/csapreqs.html

Recording an SAP performance test
You can record a SAP test from the SAP GUI . When you record, the recording wizard automatically starts the SAP GUI and records all the interactions that ...publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/rpthelp/v7r0m0/topic/com.ibm.rational.test.lt.sap.doc/topics/tsaprecordsap.html

Performance Testing - common mistakes
what happens if you do not conduct performance testing for SAP application. comment. izhar writes: 10/12/2007 #. It is good to found the techniques u have ...it.toolbox.com/blogs/sap-on-db2/performance-testing-common-mistakes

SAP performance testing
SAP performance testing, load and stress testing services and solutions for implementation projects and SAP performance tuning and monitoring. www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/sap-performance-testing

SAP - SAP Standard Application Benchmarks
Working in concert, SAP and our hardware partners developed the SAP Standard Application Benchmarks to test the hardware and database performance of SAP ...www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/index.epx

SAP R/3 Performance Monitoring and Tuning
SAP ERP Scalability and Performance Monitoring Testing Analyzing on Microsoft Windows 2000 Reference Step-by-Step Instructions Tips Tricks.www.wilsonmar.com/sap_perf.htm

Load testing for web apps

2009-03-21T15:23:00.002Z

Last year Oracle bought e-Test (a software testing suite) from Empirix. This was in order to add load and functional testing capabilities to Oracle Enterprise Manager. The e-TEST suite was aimed at testing websites and web-enabled software applications.

Since then Oracle have rebranded the suite as the ATS (Application Testing Suite) and included it as part of the SAM portfolio (Systema and Application Management).

The performance testing tool of the suite has been rebranded from e-load to Oracle Load Testing for Web Applications. What the name change loses in brevity it gains in clarity. As the product sheet from Oracle states:

"Oracle Load Testing for Web Applications is the easiest way to validate theperformance and scalability of your Web applications and Web services. It can simulate thousands of virtual users accessing the application simultaneously and measures the effect of the load on application performance without requiring a substantial hardware investment.

The realistic usage scenarios in Oracle Load Testing for Web Applications canhandle even the most complex Web applications. By utilizing a unique virtual users capability that encompasses many parameters (including configurable browser types, connection speeds, and think times), testers can interact with the Web application just like real users will to understand exactly how the application will scale under peak load conditions. The solution’s virtual users can generate multithreaded browser requests while performing rigorous functional validationunder load conditions—validation that protocol-based legacy client server testing tools cannot provide.

Oracle Load Testing for Web Applications can also be used to test the performance of Web service interfaces by simulating thousands of concurrent clients accessing SOA-based applications.

Software Testing Market forecast

2009-03-14T14:46:00.003Z

It's always interesting to see how different news services treat the same piece of news. Take for example the report by Ovum on the future of software testing. ITWire chose to run an item on it under the headline Global growth slowdown in software & systems testing services

The heady rates of growth in outsourced and in-house software and systems testing services that characterised the market over the past four years are over, but there’s still growth, albeit at a much slower rate.

Global advisory and consulting firm, Ovum, in its latest report, says that growth in outsourced testing services is outpacing that of in-house testing due to the greater cost savings, time-to-market and quality offered by outsourcers. According to the report, outsourcing currently accounts for 53% of the total worldwide testing services market and this will reach 58% in 2013.

Whereas Redorbit run the item under the headline Software Testing Market Continues To Rise

The global market for computer software testing services appears to be the IT sector with the strongest outlook, according to an industry report.

The market for testing services is expected to become a $56 billion industry by 2013, according to software consulting firm Ovum on Wednesday. Market testing services take place in order to discover any errors or bugs that may exist on computer software after production.

"Both the outsourced and in-house testing services markets will grow over the next four years but not at the heady rates seen over the last four years," it said.

So exactly the same story but one with a headline we have come to expect in a time of recession and one with a more positive one. I know which one I prefer.

Challenges in Telecoms Testing

2009-03-08T17:19:00.001Z

The specific challenges that the Telecoms testing market have their basis in the complexity and diversity within the Operational Support Systems (OSS) Architecture and the associated commercial and financial pressures that exist to ensure first to market products.

The Telcos (large telecommunications service providers) are moving towards a standardised Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that has an emphasis on reusability and common capabilities in order to deliver consistent customer experience. These architectures will support the full range of business activities including:

Customer Care, Billing and Order Processing;
Service Execution Management;
Resource Management;
Portfolio Management;
Enterprise Information Management;
Collaborations (with Customers, Users, Employees, Partners and Suppliers).

A Telecoms tester must also possess skills and experience beyond the generic ability to write and execute tests. This is because of the varied range of functional areas that telecoms software testing encompasses:

Technical Domain and Network Access areas
Billing and payment processing
Collaborations between telecoms service providers
Customer Relation Management (CRM

There is also a need to have the relevant expertise to facilitate testing across the products and services offerings, for example:

Mobile applications
Broadband and internet applications
IPTV (Internet TV)
VOIP applications.

However, a single software tester can't be expected to possess the experience to cover all of these areas and functions. The tester must communicate effectively as it is imperative that they can converse throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) throughout the different test phases such as user acceptance testing and system integration testing.

There is also the issue of data to consider. This may result in the tester selecting or creating data for tests. Or in the case of the introduction of new platforms and data structures, there a need for data migration activities to take place, this means that the tester needs to have the capacity to understand and verify the transformed or migrated data.

And there are other trends which are also having a bearing on the future of testing software in Telecoms:

Agile Testing: Until recently the principal approach to software testing was the Waterfall or V model, Due to the scale of many projects it was not uncommon for the need for a specific product or the technology to be rendered obsolete before it was delivered. This lead to increased interest in Agile methodologies, including agile software testing, in an attempt to meet the demand for faster time to market. This change in itself has brought its own challenges in terms of managing the array of smaller agile projects and ensuring change control across the varied components, computer systems and telecom platforms.

Outsourcing quality assurance software testing: In recent years it has become popular for testing to be outsourced to offshore test factories with the aim of reduced cost and delivery timescales. The test factories provide automated regression test services which constantly run on the test environments to identify if any errors have been introduced as a result of recently delivered code.

Testing Environments: These can be complex and expensive to establish and maintain, it is common for environments to be shared by many systems and integration test teams, however this can produce a configuration management headache.

Performance testing with HP Version 9.5

2009-02-28T16:35:00.003Z

HP has released Version 9.5 of Performance Center, its integrated testing tool set for IT applications. This release of Hewlitt Packard's load and stress testing tool adds a number of new features including:

granular trend analysis across application development and implementation iterations
testing functionality for Web 2.0 applications based on Adobe's AMF
protocol detection for testing operation automation

HP have said these are to align the testing product with the changing software development market place. These include Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Rich Internet Applications (RIA). They also emphasised the growing trend to move from traditional application development approaches, such as waterfall, to agile development and testing methods.

Stress testing

2009-02-15T10:07:00.003Z

Top 5 results from searching Goolge UK pages for Stress testing software:

Software testing services - Acutest
UK software testing consultancy, providing outsourced technical and business assurance services. These include performance and load testing, user acceptance ...
www.acutest.co.uk

Stress testing services
Stress testing service for software applications, IT systems and network infrastructure (including load and performance testing, scalability and volume ...
www.acutest.co.uk/performance-testing.html

Open source performance testing tools
An open-source web site stress test tool. Simulates multiple user types and counts. .... A distributed software testing architecture based on CORBA. ...
www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php

DDN/ICI Stress Test Software - What does DISTRESS stand for ...
Definition of DDN/ICI Stress Test Software in the list of acronyms and abbreviations provided by the Free Online Dictionary and Thesaurus.
acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/DDN%2FICI+Stress+Test+Software

[PDF] Cost-effective stress testing of mission-critical web applications
stress-testing software to identify. specific areas of concern within ... Cost-effective – Most stress testing. software is prohibitively expensive and ...
www.attenda.net/downloads/factsheets/Attenda-WebLoadTest.pdf

stress testing software, web site stress testing,web server stress ... For stress testing software, web site stress testing & web server stress testing tools and applications, Elemental Creative Ltd provides a wide variety of ...
elementalcreative.co.uk/services/forecast-testing-software.html

Performance Testing Center Of Excellence

2009-02-08T11:18:00.004Z

I read about an interesting survey here. It covers performance testing centres of excellence (CoE). Well actually it covers a performance testing center of excellence but only the really pedantic would mind this slight difference. The article stated that:

having a CoE helped to prioritise, centralise, and standardise performance testing across the enterprise. They typically returned their investment in 12 months and required a modest headcount: mostly under 19, and on average 11. A CoE not only improves performance, it improves quality awareness in the organisation.

That's a great Return on Investment (ROI) particularly palatable in these recessionary times. So why aren't there more companies with these performance testing centers of excellence?

Speeding up testing

2009-01-28T15:05:00.003Z

There is an interesting article in GCN which looks at speeding up software testing in the US Department of Defence.:

One way to eliminate these barriers is to simplify the testing and certification process, and the governance that drives it, by bringing together developers, testers and users in an integrated development and testing environment. The Defense Information Systems Agency provides a good model for this with its Federated Development and Certification Environment.

Another approach is to build governance structures that increase trust, cooperation and standardization between different organisations that conduct testing and certification. Over the years, different organisations in DOD have developed their own sets of testing standards and processes, and many still don’t accept each other’s testing and certification results.

By standardising test-acceptance criteria, DOD can realise one of the biggest potential payoffs of SOA and related strategies: re-use.

Interesting that it has taken the emergence of Service Oriented Architectures to drive large government organisations away from their antiquated approach to testing and into the modern world. Hurrah for SOA.

Static testing and doing the right thing

2009-01-25T16:22:00.004Z

Read an interesting paper about static analysis and defect detention at Embedded.com.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about static analysis is not that it can detect memory leaks, buffer overflows, or incorrect pointer assignments at compile time, but rather that users of static analysis will often fail to fix such detected defects.

One of the most frequently misunderstood aspects of static analysis is that it is distinctly different from other bug finding techniques. Static analysis users are often aware of the advantages it provides in defect detection, while simultaneously failing to realise that a different approach must be taken for defect resolution.

Static analysis testing reports defects in a different way than dynamic testing and user reported defects; these differences must be understood and appreciated to effectively improve software quality with any static analysis tool.

If you're interested in learning how to take an effective approach with static analysis testing then take a look at the paper.

Software testing market

Testing SOA

2009-01-18T17:06:00.003Z

I came across an interesting article on testing SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) developments at Havemacwillblog. As well as looking at unit testing it looks at the peculiar issues of integration testing SOA applications:

In the pleasant but inefficient world of application silos, testing was relatively easy. You tested the silo. You unit tested the components of the application. Next you integration tested the whole. Then, if you had any qualms about performance, you stress tested the whole thing. Ultimately you gave it over for acceptance testing. Creating the test bed was not a problem.

The problem with SOA is that it’s end-to-end. The silos have gone and with them went the ability to easily set up a test bed. As you make your way down the SOA road, you will need to have much more versatile test-bed creation capabilities.

Stress testing/performance testing is also going to be a bit of a challenge as regards the test bed. Depending on how a new composite application is going to run, you will probably want the stress testing to be modeled around the whole set of end-to-end software that will quite probably span many different servers.

When is independent testing completely independent?

2008-12-31T12:14:00.004Z

Read an interesting headline earlier today - "Symantec Touts Independent Testing". At first glance it looks like Symantic are recommending that you use independent testing services rather than rely on the supplier to test their software - a great endorsement for the independent software testing market sector.

But when you read the story it's not really that at all.

"Symantec announced that Norton Internet Security 2009 has received a perfect score and was named the top-rated product in a comprehensive analysis of protection in security suites conducted by third-party testing organization Cascadia Labs. Recently engineered with performance as a key focus, Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton AntiVirus 2009 also received top marks in overall performance in a comprehensive test conducted by PassMark Software, beating out competitors like Avira, ESET, Kaspersky, McAfee and Trend Micro. "

So its more about comparative benchmarking carried out by an independent company. Still it is testing and it is independent, isn't it? Well, yes, of course. The fact that the exercise was commissioned by Symantic doesn't change that, does it?

If you are interested in the full story you can find it at Trading Markets

Scalable performance testing solution

2008-12-28T17:47:00.005Z

Cloud testing services seem to be proliferating at a pace. The International Business Times reported that SOASTA, a provider of Cloud-based testing solutions, has created an on-demand testing service in the Cloud, enabling affordable, highly scalable load and performance testing of web applications and web services.

"Developing and bringing to market scalable, reliable applications in an increasingly services-based world has traditionally been a time consumingand expensive undertaking. As a result, most organizations do not have the expertise and resources to test their web applications cost effectively.With SOASTA CloudTest, any organiszation can easily leverage a leading testing service combined with the power of Cloud networks for a"pay-as-you-go" testing service. SOASTA's offerings provide a dynamically scalable testing solution to simulate real world traffic and loads,uniquely backed by integrated test results and analytics - ensuring faster testing and more reliable web applications and services."

RBT - Requirements-Based Testing

2008-12-19T13:18:00.003Z

There is an interesting article in Embedded.com about requirements based testing and what it calls the "crisis in quality".

To do this, many organisations have recently embraced requirements-based testing (RBT).

Teams can be more effective using Requirements Based Testing because it enables them to target the root causes of quality issues by being tightly coupled with application requirements and integrated through various activities throughout the software lifecycle.

The challenge is to ensure these processes with existing QA and testing best practices. To that end, these suggestions to improve your RBT practices are offered.

Suggestion #1: test early and frequently, so testing becomes a parallel activity to the development process, a constant pursuit that spans all roles and makes all stakeholders aware of quality objectives.

Suggestion #2: test with your head, not your gut, to inject repeatability and method in to the test planning process, in order to make test coverage more predictable.

Suggestion #3 test with measurement and improvement in mind to quantify the status of deliverables and activities, so management can oversee quality initiatives across the IT application portfolio.

Risk-based testing

BT to start testing 2012 Olympics infrastructure in 2010

2008-12-14T16:55:00.001Z

Interesting to note that testing for the 2012 Olympics communications infrastructure will begin in two years time, according to Computing

"BT is to implement a rigorous testing and training programme to ensure the communications infrastructure supporting the London 2012 Olympics avoids disruption.

The supplier will be responsible for providing all communications services for the Games on behalf of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games. It will install 4,500km of fibre, capable of transmitting the entire content of Wikipedia every second.

BT aims to have the infrastructure ready for testing by October 2010, when the first live pilot will take place at the Olympic sailing centre in Weymouth.

One of the first areas that will be tested is the intrusion detection system, which BT will install in partnership with Atos Origin."

Telecom software testing

Business Process Testing

2008-12-07T18:07:00.001Z

Top five results from Google on searching for Business Process Testing:

1. HP Business Process Testing software - HP - BTO Software
HP Business Process Testing is a web-based software test design solution that ... HP Business Process Testing software: test automation focused on your ...
https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/display/main/hpms_content.jsp?zn=bto&cp=1-11-127-24%5E135_4000...

2. Mercury : Mercury launches Business Process Testing
To solve this business problem, Mercury has recently launched the industry’s first business process testing software - Mercury Business Process Testing™. ...
newsweaver.co.uk/mercury/e_article000331596.cfm?x=b11,0,w

3. business process testing
Business process testing is the testing of the full business process, from the start of a transaction through to the completion. Glossary defintion.
www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/business-process-testing

4. Business Process Testing - What does BPT stand for? Acronyms and ...
What does BPT stand for? Definition of Business Process Testing in the list of acronyms and abbreviations provided by the Free Online Dictionary and ...
acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/Business+Process+Testing

5. Process testing 7 Sep 2005 ...
Business process testing before implementation has become a key concern for me. Consultants can no longer design processes and then step ...
it.toolbox.com/blogs/enterprise-design/process-testing-5660

Software Testing development

2008-11-22T17:08:00.001Z

This story, from CIOL.com, clearly shows that software testing certification is on the rise.

The QAI Global Institute, which administers Software Certifications' examinations, having certified in excess of 35,000 professionals worldwide in 43 countries on the international standard for software testing practitioner certifications, Certified Software Tester (CSTE), announced the launch of their entry level certification called Certified Associate of Software Testing (CAST).

The top ten IT firms in India have been quick in creating large independent software testing practices in-house. The figures indicate that hardly 9 to 10 percent of the output from 17000 + Engineering colleges and 300 + universities are employable. This iterates the need to have standards at entry level so that the employability quotient can be increased.

For example, the graph of a testing professional could be assessed on his skills and experience at various levels. The entry level certification examination is called CAST (Certified Associate in Software Testing) after which the individual can become a CSTE (Certified Software Tester). Post that, he can get recognized as a CMST (Certified Manager of Software Testing).

UK Software testing market

2008-11-15T17:19:00.000Z

How many software testers are there in the UK? I've never seen a definitive answer to this but here is a stab at estimating it. There are approximately 350,000 software testers in the USA according to The News and Views of EddieC

'How many software testers are there?' Being editor of a magazine about software testing, that's a number I should have know cold. At the time, I offered an estimate of about 250,000. A wild guess, really; I had no idea.

As it turns out, it wasn’t all that wild. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2007, the latest year for which data is available, there were 349,140 people in the United States doing that job. The government says these people: “Research, design, develop, and test operating systems-level software, compilers, and network distribution software for medical, industrial, military, communications, aerospace, business, scientific, and general computing applications. Set operational specifications and formulate and analyze software requirements. Apply principles and techniques of computer science, engineering, and mathematical analysis.”

To all you software testers out there, does that sound anything like what you do? My guess is that it probably does. There are other similar jobs listed under the broad heading of “Computer and Mathematical Occupations,” but none included “software testing” in their description except “computer software engineers, systems software,” the job described above.

So there are that many software testers in a country with a population of 300 million. I have no idea whether the IT industries of the USA and the UK are equally proportional to the population of the two countries, but to make a stab at estimating the figure let's assume they are. The population of the UK is approxiamately 60.5 million which using the same ratio as the number of software testers in the USA would result in an estimate of about 70,000 software testers employed in the UK.

So there is a rough estimate. If you know a more accurate measure I'm sure there are a lot of people (mainly in the software testing industry) that would be interested in it.

Load and stress test

2008-10-26T20:59:00.000Z

Adax Europe, an industry leader in high performance signalling infrastructure, has announced that its HDCII-PMC solution is being deployed by Nexus Telecom to further improve the high performance of its load and stress testing system for telecom manufacturers and operators in a press release at Web IT PR.

Nexus Telecom specialises in service assurance, mediation, revenue assurance and network & service testing solutions. Following rigorous evaluation of available boards from different suppliers, Nexus chose the Adax HDCII-PMC solution over its competitors because of its ability to support Vx Works’ real-time operating system, while providing Nexus Telecom the necessary integration and flexibility required in meeting its market challenges. The Adax HDCII-PMC is a high-density, high-performance solution ideal for narrowband signalling applications.

Nexus Telecom believes Adax is highly competitive on various access technologies in the telecom market. The Adax HDCII-PMC provides the ideal foundation for test systems, with support for multiple protocols and the scalability and high performance essential to telecom manufacturers and operators conducting intense and thorough network tests.

Customer Experience Testing

2008-10-12T15:13:00.001+01:00

Top five results when searching MSN for "Customer Experience Testing"

Customer experience testing
Customer experience testing looks at the people, proceses and technology of delivery a service or product to an end customer. Customer experience testing

Customer experience services including usability testing and customer ...
Our customer experience services can help you improve your customer experience to evolve existing customers into brand advocates. Find out how our services can help you deliver ...
www.experiencesolutions.co.uk/services.html

Test & Measurement - Benchmarking customer experience
Test & Measurement - Benchmarking customer experienceWhile operators continue to sell to their end customers based on network coverage, behind the scenes monitoring of performance ... www.mobileeurope.co.uk

Software testing services - Acutest
The independent software testing consultancy is a provider of testing and technology centred change. These include cusotmer experience testing, SOA testing and managing large outsourced testing programmes. http://www.acutest.co.uk/

Customer Experience Management
Customer Experience Management Outsourced Test Sol ut ions for Next Generation Networks www.epitiro.com/assets/docs/uk_cem.pdf

Software test consultants

2008-09-28T17:25:00.000+01:00

Top 5 found by searching Google for Software test consultants

Software testing consultants - Acutest
UK software testing consultancy, providing outsourced technical and business assurance services. These include performance and load testing, user acceptance ... www.acutest.co.uk

Software testing consultancy specialising in operational readiness ...
Software Testing Consultants Limited is a small software testing services company, who specialise in Business Readiness testing and Operational Readiness ...www.stcmlimited.com/

UntitledDocument
Welcome to STC - Software Testing Consultants Ltd ! STC are a test consultancy that pride themselves on providing testing, test management, test consultancy ...www.softwaretestingconsultants.com/

Tejas Software Consulting
Tejas Software Consulting, Software testing consulting and training Danny R. Faught, proprietor faught@tejasconsulting.com office +1 817 294 3998 ...www.tejasconsulting.com/

Grove Consultants Software Testing
Specialists in Software Testing and Software Inspection, accredited for ISEB and ISTQB training at foundation and practitioner level.www.grove.co.uk/

Free Trial of Testing Magazine

2008-09-21T12:34:00.000+01:00

The IEEE has decided to offer its testing magazine on a free trial. The magazine, IEEE Design & Test of Computers, will have a free digital edition for the next four months. If you're interested in registering for this trial and are not a member of the IEEE computer society (who already receive this software testing magazine in hard copy) then go to http://www.qmags.com/DesignTest08 before 12th December 2008.

There is more information about the testing magazine trial at Ascribe:

"The digital trial will allow readers to immediately access new magazine issues by viewing an enhanced PDF or visiting a website instead of waiting for new print issues to be delivered by traditional mail. Subscribers will continue to receive their print issues during the trial, however may opt to convert to digital once the trial ends.

Conversion from print to digital will cut down on landfill waste and use of ink and packaging, as well as result in lower emissions being released into the atmosphere."

Stress testing

Best Practice and Software Testing

2008-09-12T11:37:00.001+01:00

The phrase "Best Practice" seems to incense quite a few people, particularly in the testing world. As far as I can make out the difficulty is semantic. Everyone seems to agree that some practices are better than others and that there are a body of practices that are good. What gets their goat is the idea that a practice is best. Surely a generic practice can be improved upon so how can it be best?

To avoid this you could substitute the phrase "good" for "best" and then it would allow those with a tendency for fury to attain the calm needed to learn from the practices, which must surely be the most productuve reason for reading them. I came across a library of best practices the other day at IT Managers Inbox. The idea is that there is a library of webinars that teach senior IT managers how to improve productivity and quality.

There is a range of topics including Risk Management, Software Quality (which includes one on Measuring Software Quality and Customer Satisfaction), and of course Software testing. There was an interesting sounding one there:

5 Lessons in Performance Load and Reliability Testing

Performance, load, and reliability testing are big investments, so make that investment count by applying smart, proven techniques. These tests are hard to design, hard to run, and essential in today's complex IT environments. In this webinar by Rex Black you'll learn five key do's and don't of performance, load, and reliability testing, all based on Rex's 20 years of experience.

Testing Simulator For Wireless Telecoms Now Available

2008-08-25T21:00:00.000+01:00

The Open Source movement and the drive to improve testing have once more joined forces to create a wireless testing simulater. For the full story visit The Wireless Developers Network.

The WiMAX Forum today announced the availability of its open source system level simulator to characterize applications over WiMAX networks. Available to all WiMAX Forum member companies, this NS-2 based testing application tool provides a unified simulation tool based on the WiMAX Forum’s system profiles and facilitates sharing of results and publication of technical papers.

This WiMAX Forum NS-2 Simulator enables vendors and service providers to test an applications performance over WiMAX networks, such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). The simulator will help vendors evaluate schedulder algorithms and technical solutions, in addition to helping service providers perform network planning, capacity evaluation and product evaluation. Testing in this simulated environment allows the tester to optimize the performance experienced while decreasing the costs associated with testing on a live network.

Software testing telecom sector

Testing the testers

2008-08-17T12:57:00.001+01:00

The recent debacle with the SAT marking in the UK has now reached its climax with the termination of the ETS contract. As the Guardian reported earlier this week:

"The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and ETS Europe agreed to dissolve the five-year contract to handle the national curriculum tests with immediate effect, after test results were delayed this summer. Under the deal, ETS will make a payment of £19.5m to QCA, and the watchdog will save approximately £4.6m in cancelled invoices and charges.

Full results for tests sat by 14-year-olds this year were still not available when national figures were released earlier this week.

The agreement to end the contract early has been made by both parties and there will be no payments made by QCA to ETS Europe for any future years of the contract.

QCA signed the £156m five-year contract with ETS in February last year. However, serious problems with the administration and marking of the tests this year meant the publication of results for key stage 2 and 3, which should have been released on July 8, were delayed by almost a month."

This type of story has no obvious winners. There is already an inquiry into why this situation was reached but it looks like the competence of both the QCA (in its procurement selection process) and ETS (in its operational processes) will be called into question. Hopefully the outcome will lead both procurement divisions and organisations running new processes to view testing more seriously. Testing is often viewed as an IT activity, but business process testing and regulatory requirements testing are wider in scope than just testing the technology, computers and software. It is uncertainty that testing helps eliminate not just defects. And in this case more certainty would have saved a lot of trouble.

Customer Experience Testing

2008-08-10T18:05:00.002+01:00

I've had a quick look around the web for articles about customer experience testing. There is a lot of testing articles out there and one interesting one was also one of the older ones I found. It ranks from way back in 2005 and the start of that year at that. It can be found at xchange, entitled simply enough "Testing the customer experience". Go there for the full article but the intro sets the scence well for the article:

More service providers are starting to do customer-experience testing to gain the assurance they need that new offerings won’t wreck their reputations with customers, their bottom lines or both. Traditional enterprise testing seeks to answer whether applications and technologies behind a service launch will perform as intended. Customer-experience testing moves beyond that exercise, going further to evaluate whether the people working with the systems and the business processes defined for them are likely to prove successful.

There’s a standard suite of enterprise tests -- unit testing, string testing, system testing, integration testing, user-acceptance testing, stress-and-volume testing, 508-compliance testing, etc. -- that almost every service provider relies on to ensure the systems underlying an offering will perform as intended. These application and technology tests are critically important.

But as traditionally executed, these tests fail to show whether the service can be implemented and serviced successfully. A service provider must go further and evaluate people, processes, technology and the interrelationships among all three. In doing so, the service provider can eliminate logistical uncertainties and uncover operational complexities that could undermine profitability and ruin its reputation with customers.

Customer-experience testing -- delving more deeply into the service provider’s processes and internal and external user communities -- is designed to deliver these results and benefits.

Test release processes early and review regularly

2008-08-03T11:28:00.001+01:00

There is an interesting article in CIO on 7 Ways to Improve Your Software Release Management.
Of the 7 ways the one that stood out for me was 3. Get lightweight processes in place. Test them early and review them regularly. If you are fan of agile processes this will appeal to you. It combines immediacy, flexibility and iteration - all important characteristics of agile development. To quote the article:

Lightweight processes are those that do not require lengthy bureaucratic approvals or endless meetings to get agreement. They usually require only the minimum acceptable level of inputs and outputs. What they lack in bulk and bureaucracy, they make up for in response to change and popular adoption!

Underpinning this approach is the thorny issue of documentation. You need to record what you did and how you did it. Otherwise, what do you review and how do you improve?

We don't mean the kind of documentation that endangers rain forests and puts its readers to sleep. We mean documentation that people (technical and otherwise) can read and act on.

Combining this attitude with the other 6 points in the article looks far more likely to support change than many of the inflexible and slow methods in current corporate use.

Agile testing services

Independent testing

2008-07-17T10:47:00.001+01:00

Top five results from Google for Independent Testing

Independent testing services
Acutest is an independent software testing consultancy. We concentrate solely on testing software, business processes, and IT with the goal of helping our ... http://www.acutest.co.uk/

Independent Testing Service
Our Independent Testing Service offers an extensive, comprehensive and above all, Independent Testing Service. The service offered can be performed either ...www.lm-isgs.co.uk/common/testing.htm

Bosch guarantees performance with independent testing for ...
SourceSecurity.com, the complete industry guide - Find any electronic security product from the extensive 20000 products in the database, Corporate News ...www.sourcesecurity.com/news/articles/co-289-ga.2274.html

Independent Testing Laboratory web site, latest news and contact ...
Independent Testing Laboratory - web site, address and contact details.Plus all the latest news stories from the company here on Laboratorytalk.www.laboratorytalk.com/news/iep/iep000.html

QED - Independent Testing & Consultancy Ltd - London, UK - qeditc ...
QED - Independent Testing & Consultancy Ltd - London, UK - qeditc,qed itc,independent testing and consultancy,independent testing,consultancy,london,uk ...www.qedtesting.co.uk/

Load Testing Tool

2008-07-11T21:50:00.001+01:00

Facilita, the UK’s leading developer of performance testing products, has announced the appointment of Gareth Heaton as UK Sales Manager. This role encompasses responsibility for Facilita’s UK sales operation and expansion into Europe.

Facilita’s MD spoke very highly of Gareth Heaton’s skills and experience; “We are delighted to welcome Gareth into his new role. One of Gareth's main strengths is the understanding he has of the global software market and customer needs. Prior to joining Facilita, Gareth held a very successful career at HP Software after the company acquired Mercury Interactive, considered to be the leader of the global business technology optimization market. During his career within that enterprise-level global software company, Gareth successfully demonstrated major over-achievement in several commercial roles over the past 8 years,” Gordon enthused.

Facilita develops enterprise-level IT performance and load testing tools alongside bespoke software testing solutions for a wide variety of major corporations and government institutions.

One of Facilita’s performance testing applications is Forecast, a powerful and flexible load and stress testing toolset. Facilita’s application testing tool, Forecast, easily and accurately tests performance and scalability by simulating hundreds to thousands of concurrent users, enabling the end-to-end performance of an application or system to be evaluated by applying consistent, measurable and repeatable loads.

For the full announcement visit PR.com

Automated testing tools

2008-07-06T13:11:00.001+01:00

If you are interested in software testing tools then there is a new report out which provides an annual teview of the automated test tool market and can be purchased here.

After several years of stagnation and distraction, the major testing tool vendors made substantial progress in 2007 and early 2008 in adding capabilities to their products that really matter to testers. Finally, there is renewed focus on giving testers better tools to use at all stages of the lifecycle. The vendors have come down from the lofty heights of selling a grand design for automating IT management across the board to concentrate on more pressing needs, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) testing, application security testing and a less all-encompassing IT management vision – quality management. After years of confining test automation to late lifecycle QA team testing, new requirements in the marketplace have encouraged the vendors to broaden the reach of test automation. The signs are that even better things will appear in the rest of 2008 and 2009.

Risk-based testing

Progress acquires Mindreed testing tools

2008-06-29T18:41:00.000+01:00

Another step in the consolidation of software testing tools vendors sees Mindreef, who make SOA testing tools, acquired by Progress Software (described here):

Application infrastructure vendor Progress Software has purchased Mindreef, a Hollis, New Hampshire, maker of tools for testing SOAs (service oriented architectures). Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Mindreef news follows Progress' announcement earlier this week that it plans to buy fellow SOA vendor Iona Technologies.

A Progress executive said Mindreef's catalog is complementary to its own Actional series of SOA management tools. "Mindreef has been very successful in the [SOA testing] tools and infrastructure for people in the pre-production stage," said Dan Foody, vice president of Actional products at Progress. "Actional has focused more on the production and deployment phases."

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with the SOA consultancy ZapThink, called the deal "a huge, positive move for Progress" via e-mail. "Not only does it bolster their ability to deliver high-quality SOA, but it also helps to reinforce the message that SOA is not just about Web services integration and ESBs [enterprise service buses]," he wrote. "SOA is about changing the way we think of and consume IT capabilities, and to do so in an environment of high quality requires a robust platform."

ZapThink expects other SOA platform vendors to move in the direction of quality software testing, perhaps through acquisitions of companies like as iTKO, he added.

Performance testing

2008-06-24T14:44:00.002+01:00

Top ten results searching for Performance testing services on Google:

Performance testing services
Performance testing service for software applications, IT systems and network infrastructure (including load and stress testing, scalability and volume ...
http://www.acutest.co.uk/performance-testing.html

Software testing services - Acutest
UK software testing consultancy, providing outsourced technical and business assurance services. These include performance and load testing, user acceptance
http://www.acutest.co.uk/ More results from www.acutest.co.uk »

RTTS: Testing Services - Performance/Scalability Testing
Performance testing helps determine if the environment meets requirements at set loads and mixes of transactions by testing specific business scenarios. www.rttsweb.com/services/implementation/performance/

Software & Performance Testing & Training -- PerfTestPlus
PerfTestPlus: Software and Performance Testing Professional Services, Consulting, Mentoring, Training and Assessments.www.perftestplus.com/

Cognitive Performance Testing Services
Advanced brain function testing to screen personnel for correct job placement, safety enhancement and corporate viability.cognitivetestingservices.com/

Outsourced Testing Services
Award-winning VeriTest software testing services from Lionbridge. Includes compatibility testing, performance and load testing, web application testing and ...www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-US/services/outsourced-testing.htm

Product Testing and Competitive Analysis Services
Lionbridge provides product testing services including mobile testing, web usability ... Performance testing assesses how well your product meets its stated ...www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-US/services/outsourced-testing/product-testing.htm

(h) Performance Testing Servi...
CPT Global’s Performance Testing. Services provide a range of offerings to ... Performance Testing Services. World-class experts delivering rapid ...www.cptglobal.com/pdfs/PDF%20Performance%20Testing%20Services.pdf

Software Quality Assurance - Performance Testing Services
Software Testing & Quality Assurance Services by Virtusa, includes Performance Testing, Automated Testing, Functional Testing & SQA Process Consulting.www.virtusa.com/Services/Performance-Testing-Services.asp

Software Testing & Quality Assurance Services
Software Testing & Quality Assurance Services by Virtusa, include Performance Testing, Automated Testing, Functional Testing & SQA Process Consulting.www.virtusa.com/Services/software-testing-services.asp

Data security and software testing

2008-05-31T18:23:00.000+01:00

There is an interesting article here about what it calls the unseen privacy crisis. Software testing has a key part to play in this arena and it concludes:

What can organisations do about this pending crisis? The first step is to recognise that this is in fact a problem. All of the media attention that has resulted from the inappropriate and unlawful use of private consumer data has begun to increase awareness.

Second, IT needs to understand that they are also at risk and that they must research and adopt best practices and processes to ensure the data they use to test their applications remains confidential. For existing applications, this involves masking and disguising potentially sensitive data before releasing it for use in testing. In all situations, the processes need to be documented so that an organization can demonstrate compliance.

Third, companies need to mandate their development partners and outsourcers rigorously adhere to a set of policies that eliminate the use of live sensitive data during the testing process. More and more software testing is outsourced with many of the outsourcers located offshore. This serious risk is best managed by implementing documented processes and compliance auditing.

Finally, companies at risk need to consider technological answers to meet this challenge. Technology tools designed to transform or mask sensitive or confidential data for testing purposes can eliminate the organisation’s risk without inhibiting a thorough and accurate testing process.

Testing is a mandatory step for ensuring that today’s applications work as intended.

Software testing service provider

Earned Value Management in Agile

2008-05-24T20:32:00.000+01:00

Interesting article on Dr Dobbs about Agile development and Earned Value Management

The first claim is that EVM enables you to objectively measure the value being produced by project teams. Their inherent assumption is that these project teams are actually earning value for your organization, yet in practice we know that this couldn't possibly be true. To see what the problem is, let's work through an example. Let's say that your team is part way through a project, claiming that they've achieved 65 percent earned value (EV). Your team has followed a traditional approach to development, creating a detailed requirements document, then an architecture model, then a prototype, then a design model, and now they've started working on the actual software and are about three quarters of the way through.

You claimed 14 percent EV once the requirements document was accepted, 20 percent EV at the point the architecture was accepted, 33 percent when the detailed design was signed off, and will eventually claim 85 percent EV once the programming effort ends. You've had several major code reviews and by passing them you've been allowed to make the claim that you've achieved 65 percent EV. Then, disaster strikes and you lose funding as the result of an economic downturn. Senior management asks your team to ship whatever you can, but several critical components haven't been coded yet and still need several months of development. And you would still need to perform system and user acceptance testing - another few months worth of effort. It's clear to senior management that none of their investment can be realized quickly, so the project artifacts are "put on the shelf" in the hope that some day they'll be useful to a future project team. Of course, by then the business requirements and technology platforms will have changed. In short, even though your team had claimed 65 percent EV, no actual practical value had in fact been "earned".

Data warehousing

2008-05-18T21:13:00.000+01:00

There is an interesting three part article on data warehousing on a tight budget (part two is located here). It even looks at outsourcing in these circumstances:

Going outside of the organisation is a different yet excellent way to access DW professionals. Although per-hour rates can seem steep at times, the savings from hiring a dedicated team can be substantial. Outsourcing can be a terrific way for an organization to begin a data warehousing initiative as it later takes a strong first step toward building an in-house team to manage the solution.

Another scenario where outsourcing is beneficial is when an organizational project requires extra help to fill a particular role or requires overflow capacity. If you have a business analyst, DBA, ETL developer, and BI developer available, but your organization still needs a data modeler who is capable of mapping complex source systems, outsourcing makes sense. Similarly, if the ETL development will be more substantial than your existing resources can accomplish, bringing in additional experts to supplement your team members can allow your organization to meet demands within the project plan without being concerned about having excess/idle team members at other times in the project.

Checkpoint consulting (consulting provided by an expert on a part-time basis over the life of the project) has proven to be an excellent way of benefiting from the vast experience of an enterprise DW team while paying for only a fraction of a consultant. An experienced consultant with broad and deep knowledge and experience can evaluate your existing data warehouse and business intelligence solutions, make recommendations, and, ultimately, help you leverage your existing assets.

Each of these roles is critical to the proper implementation of a data warehouse, but each is also a key aspect of the human costs associated with each DW project. Clearly, these roles are important and as much as an organization attempts to maximize its budget through cost-effective decision-making, one area where an organization must be willing to make an investment is in its DW implementation team. This is an investment, although seemingly too significant at first, which makes all of the difference when considering a project's success. When operating on a limited budget, it is the organization's responsibility to find a way to maximize its people for the benefit of a project as opposed to the detriment of it.

Testing system migration services

Test data protection solutions

2008-04-20T13:43:00.000+01:00

There has a been a lot of comment in the UK about testing with live data and the security implications. Nice to see that there is interest in other places as well such as in this article

Creating artificial data is not only time-consuming and expensive, but it does not reproduce the real environment, subsequently most companies rather use production data for testing purposes, states João de Oliveira of MigrationWare.

He says that security around personal data tends to be less stringent in the testing than it is in the production environment and companies failing to take correct measures to protect their data are putting people's personal information at risk.

In Europe, all organisations have had to implement a data protection policy. The implications of non-compliance are significant, with guilty organisations facing the possibility of being put out of business, or having their directors held personally culpable, explains De Oliveira.

Locally, government is working on the Protection of Personal Information Bill and a new body, the Information Protection Commission, will be established to monitor and enforce compliance with the Act, he says. De Oliveira suggests that companies looking to comply with future legislation should start putting into place appropriate de-identification practices to ensure sensitive personal or financial data is not at risk during software testing.

Software testing resources

Oracle buy testing tool suite

2008-04-12T08:02:00.000+01:00

The trend of large IT solution providers to add test tools to their array of offerings continues with the Oracle acquisition of the Empirix Web application testing suite, which it states it will integrate with its own Enterprise Manager and Real Application Testing solutions.

Accordiing to eWeek

[Oracle] announced March 27 that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the e-TEST product suite from Empirix, a company that provides voice and Web application testing and monitoring software.

Oracle plans to integrate the software with its Enterprise Manager and Real Application Testing portfolios. The combination, company officials said, is "expected to result in a comprehensive solution for testing packaged and custom built applications."

Oracle is also in the process of acquiring BEA Systems, which has substantial application development tools. The e-TEST suite will likely augment any application development capabilities in BEA.

"Customers are looking for automated application testing solutions that help prevent costly application performance problems, avoid unplanned outages of business-critical applications, and automate the manual steps involved in application testing," said Leng Leng Tan, vice president of applications and systems management at Oracle, in a statement.

Oracle has announced the next version of CRM On Demand. Click here to read more.

"We expect that the combination of Empirix's e-TEST suite and Oracle's Enterprise Manger will create a best-of-breed systems management portfolio spanning the full application life cycle, from development and testing to production deployment and management."

Customer Experience Testing

Risk Based Testing

2008-04-07T11:04:00.000+01:00

Top ten results from Yahoo when searching for risk-based testing:

1. Risk Based Testing for E-Business, Web and Internet
Risk based e-business testing ... Buy Risk Based E-Business Testing direct from the publisher (Also available as ... Risk Based E-Business Testing is a hands

2. Risk-based Testing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Exploratory & Risk Based Testing (2004) www.testingeducation.org, by Cem Kaner ... Most people consider James Bach to be the "father" of risk-based testing.

3. Risk based testing forum - Home
... programme managers and project managers who are practicing risk based testing. ... Risk based testing can help you prioritise or reprioritise at any point during ...www.risk-based-testing.co.uk

4. Heuristic Risk-Based Testing
Well, now that you know what risk-based testing is, I can devote the rest ... If you accept this premise, you might well wonder how the term "risk-based testing" ...www.satisfice.com/articles/hrbt.pdf

5. Software testing services - Acutest
UK software testing consultancy, providing outsourced technical and business assurance services. ... the elapsed time spent testing and the time spent on http://www.acutest.co.uk/

6. BBST Risk-Based Testing
Activity for risk-based testing (sorting out the attacks) Essay test questions ... Risk-based testing (in my view) focuses on the ways the program can fail ...www.testingeducation.org/BBST/BBSTRisk-BasedTesting.html

7. Risk based testing
Risk based testing. Prioritization for the first test © 2004 Hans Schaefer. Slide no. 12. Risk based testing. Product Risks: What to think about ...www.cs.tut.fi/tapahtumat/testaus04/schaefer.pdf

8. Site Search : Detail
... you might well wonder how the term "risk-based testing" is not merely redundant. ... Three Ways to Organize Risk-Based Testing ...stickyminds.com/sitewide.asp?ObjectId=1800&ObjectType=ART&...

9. Risk-based testing
Risk based testing: the technique used to prioritise the development and ... This is also known as risk-based testing and riskbased testing. http://www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/risk-based-testing

10. Risk-Based testing and metrics
... and processes to support the risk based approach to testing in the case project. ... level of testing per function based on the risk assessment of the ...www.amland.no/WordDocuments/EuroSTAR99Paper.doc

Pentration testing development

2008-03-29T08:56:00.000Z

Penetration testers can be very innovative people. The drive to look for new vulnerabilities or new ways of exploiting them demands this attitude. Its not good enough just to churn through a list of known issues. So it came as no surprise to hear about a development by a penetration testing company. It has produced a tool that sniffs out passwords, documents, and other sensitive data in a matter of minutes.

"DaisyDukes is a memory sniffer that resides on a USB device. A researcher can plug it into an unattended machine that is turned on but has been locked and reboot the machine off a compact operating system contained on the drive. Depending on the user's needs, it can be configured to capture the entire contents of a computer's memory, or sniff out only certain types of data - say a password to access the company network or unlock a user's private encryption key.

It turns out both Windows and Linux retain "boatloads and boatloads" of passwords in memory, said Sherri Davidoff, a security analyst with IntelGuardians, the penetration-testing firm that developed the tool. It's already been able to isolate passwords for Thunderbird, AOL Instant Messenger, GPG, SSH, Outlook, Putty and TrueCrypt, among others, and with additional research they believe they can find many more.

"The idea here is let's see if we can hit an office building, get in and out in 25 minutes or less and walk out with some interesting passwords," said Tom Liston, an IntelGuardians security consultant who along with Davidoff co-presented the tool at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver."

For a fuller article on this visit: The Register

Client side assurance services

Microsoft and accessibility testing

2008-03-25T06:59:00.000Z

Microsoft have released a number of accessability tools (including testing tools) and a new web site - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/default.aspx

The new testing tools are AccChecker and UIA Verify. Both are open source test tools and aimed at developers of applications that they wish to be more accessible to disabled people.

The aim of the Microsoft Accessibility Labs Community Portal is to keep you "up-to-date with news, events, and innovative ideas from the accessibility community. Check here to discover and download the latest accessibility-related technologies, tools, projects, and other resources for Microsoft products and platforms---and share your own. "

There is also a forum to post questions or information, although when I looked there weren't a lot of threads on it.

Service provider outsourced software testing

Software Testing Assessment and Forecast

2008-03-15T09:23:00.000Z

There is an interesting report out from NelsonHall on software testing. For a summary overview you can visit Earth Times

Some of the key findings it highlights nclude:

Specialist testing spending accounts for c. 20% of total testing spending and is happening in majority by U.S. and U.K. clients in the financial services industries and telecom. Demand is spreading across other countries such as the Netherlands, Australia/New Zealand and Nordics to sectors such as energy and utilities.
Clients are primarily adopting specialist testing services to achieve cost savings by at least 10% and to improve the quality of their software. However, external factors such as mergers and acquisitions, compliance and industry deregulation are leading clients to engage into new software development and therefore, in additional testing activities.
Specialist testing is typically sourced offshore by U.S. and to a lesser degree by U.K. companies. Clients in Continental Europe have used a different approach that is less dependent on labour arbitrage, relying more on best practices and methodologies.
A small majority of companies across the world still favour on-site delivery (staff augmentation), whether it is from offshore resources or from onshore staff. Nevertheless, demand is clearly moving towards work delivery from software testing factories both from onshore and low cost countries.
Companies predominantly purchase specialist testing services on a professional services basis in the form of time and material or fixed price projects. They are keeping ownership of their contracts and are not yet likely to award full responsibility of testing to a third party.
Managed testing services ("outsourcing") contracts are the exception in terms of number. However, they command high TCVs. Typically, most managed services contracts rely on SLAs such as timelines and headcount ramp up objectives that are relatively easy to measure. Clients and vendors are pushing towards productivity-based SLAs such as number of test scripts executed in one day. Managed testing services contracts with SLAs based on software quality commitment are very rare.
Clients purchase in majority (c. 55%) specialist testing services from onshore IT services vendors and (c. 35%) from offshore and nearshore IT services vendors. Testing pure-plays catch c. 9% of total spending.

Software testing FAQ no. 26

2008-03-09T11:32:00.005Z

What is the future of software testing?

That question came from someone called John Major. I remember a fellow called John Major predicting that the introduction of the minimum wage would lead to the collapse of the UK economy. It was one of many predictions he made that turned out to be wrong. Another was that the Conservative party would win the 1997 election . In fact, they lost, securing 165 seats to the Labour oarty's 418.

Predicting the future is a brave activity. Particularly if you publish it and you can be measured against like the former PM JM. Knowing the dangers, are there people who dare to predict the future of software testing? There certainly are. There are a mass of authoritative sounding articles going back to last century that can easily be found on the web. Hats off to the authors. Those that have made specific predictions that should be in place now can be measured on the accuracy of their vision and praised or mocked accordingly. Of course there are a mass of vague software testing predictions that can't be measured and these authors should just be mocked.

The part I enjoyed most of the predictions I read was looking at the current context at the time they were written, like this one. It's a quote attributed to Bill Gates (yes the Microsoft one) bemoaning the amount of time spent testing software and the lack of automated testing solutions. The quote is from 1996, the year before John Major's inaccurate election prediction. You'd hope that with the level of dissatisfaction he expressed that masses would have happened since then, given the might of Microsoft. Well, I recently attended a presentation by a software testing industry analyst and guess what he predicted. That software testing automation would be the next big area of improvement in software testing. I guess that it must be one of those time independent predictions.

So the short answer is I don't know the future of software testing. In fact, nobody really knows the future of software testing. But a lot of people think they do.

Software stress testing

2008-03-02T20:50:00.001Z

Top ten resutls from Google when searching for Software stress testing

15. What's the difference between load and stress testing ?
Top Document: comp.software.testing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) ... Stress testing is subjecting a system to an unreasonable load >while denying it the ...www.faqs.org/faqs/software-eng/testing-faq/section-15.html

Stress testing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In software testing, stress testing often refers to tests that put a greater emphasis on robustness, availability, and error handling under a heavy load, ...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_testing

Stress testing (software) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In software testing, stress testing refers to tests that determine the robustness of software by testing beyond the limits of normal operation. ...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_testing_(software)

Load Testing Software Stress Testing Software
OpenDemand - simple and affordable load testing tool for performance testing of ... Stress Testing Software · OpenLoad - What's New in OpenLoad V5.5 (48KB) ...www.opendemand.com/openload/features.shtml

Load Testing Tool - Web Stress Testing Software
Web performance management software and services including stress testing, performance monitoring, and professional services.www.opendemand.com/

Web Test Tools
Funkload - Web load testing, stress testing, and functional testing tool written in Python and distributed as free software under the GNU GPL. ...www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html - 182k

Software QA and Testing Resource Center - FAQ Part 1
Extensive SOFTWARE QA and TESTING FAQ; site also includes links to other resources, ... stress testing - term often used interchangeably with 'load' and ...www.softwareqatest.com/qatfaq1.html

Paessler Web server performance software - stress testing and ...
Test web server performance with Webserver Stress Tool. This software can carry out a variety of different tests that can help you identify issues that ...www.paessler.com/webstress

Software testing services - Acutest
UK software testing consultancy, providing outsourced technical and business assurance services. These include performance and load testing, user acceptance ... http://www.acutest.co.uk/

Software stress testing services
Stress testing. Testing conducted to evaluate a system or component up to ... A software tool which automates the recording of a user’s activity in an IT ... http://www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/load-testing-services

The software testing ability of people with ASD

2008-02-24T09:53:00.001Z

I've seen this news release a few times in various forms and it continues to impress me. This is the first time that I've noticed that big companies are using the services of Autistic software testers. A great achievement for the company, Soecialisterne, and the man behind it, Thorkill Sonne.

Microsoft and Computer Science Corporation are among a number of companies that are using the skills of people diagnosed with autism within their software testing processes. The companies found that people with Autistic Spectrum Disorders have a greater attention to detail than average, making them suitable for software testing.

Both companies hired staff and testing services from Specialisterne, a Danish consultant, which employs and trains people diagnosed with ASD, to provide software testing services.
Microsoft outsourced testing on its Windows Media Centre product and some of the testing of its business software to Specialisterne. IT consultants with ASD work on software testing tasks where other people would lose concentration. "This is not corporate social responsibility. We are using the service because it is comparable to other commercial testing services," said Microsoft.

CSC has hired staff with ASD to work on-site on projects including checking documentation and exploration testing. Peter Forsting, business manager at CSC, said, "{People diagnosed with ASD] have a photographic memory and notice things that we do not normally see."
In spite of having an aptitude towards working where focus and precision are beneficial skills, people diagnosed with the condition often struggle in a work environment, said Carol Evans, director of the National Autistic Society Scotland.

Thorkill Sonne, founder and chief executive officer of Specialisterne, said, "People with ASD are able to take in tasks most people hate."

He said the symptoms associated with autism, such as motivation, focus, persistence, attention to detail and a high learning ability, make them good candidates for work in software testing such as test verification, configuration management and function point counting.

Software testing FAQ - No. 25

2008-02-17T11:42:00.000Z

Is there any evidence that convergence in the Telecoms sector had any impact on testing tools?

That question was sent in by Harbhajan Singh.

Well, that is an easy question to answer. The short answer is Yes. The longer answer is:

The convergence going on in the Telecoms sector that has led to triple-play (a marketing term for the provisioning of the two broadband services, high-speed Internet access and television, and one narrowband service, telephone, over a single broadband connection: Wikipedia) and quadruple-play (throw in wireless services as well) has already had an impact on testing tool. Incidentally, I wonder why the marketers chose triple and quadruple rather than the simpler three and four. No matter.

The tool I am thinking of is the Sunset(R) Modular Test Toolkit (MTT) from Sunrise Telecom, which for the first time lets technicians validate IPTV and VoIP over DSL service. Now if that is not converged triple play impact I am a monkey's uncle. Probably not the right metaphor, all things considered. But I think it provides the emphasis I wanted.

Software testing in the Telecoms sector

Continuous Integration an Load Performance Testing

2008-02-15T12:49:00.000Z

Interesting post on Dr Dobbs about Continuous Integration and Performance Testing. Worth checking it out but here's a taster:

A continuous integration process requires (paraphrased from Fowler's paper):

A single code repository. (I use Subversion, but you could use others like CVS, Perforce, and so on.)
Automated build process with self-testing. (I use Apache Ant, you could use Maven.)
Daily code commits.
Continuous integration server that can build, integrate, and test the entire application quickly.
Ability to test in a clone of production environment.
Ability to broadcast overall build status.
Ability to automatically deploy and broadcast availability of builds.

Continuous integration processes go beyond simply ensuring that the automating build compiles cleanly. To declare a build to be successful, it must pass basic functional tests. So we do need a somewhat mature development process, where teams all work from the same code repository, write a test case for the functionality they develop, build and test their functionality locally, refactor, and verify—only then committing their changes (frequently, at least daily) to the source code repository.

The continuous integration server includes functionality that detects that code has changed, checks out the code, and then builds and tests the entire application in a clean environment, eliminating the vagaries of individual developer's environments. If the build or tests fail, developers are notified immediately, when they are most able to easily and quickly fix the problem they introduced.

load and stress testing

Testing Peoplesoft

2008-02-02T13:01:00.000Z

I found an interesting paper here about a tool for creating automated testing for Peoplesoft. The tool is called Newmerix Automate!Test™. It's principle benefits are saving time, not just in testing Peoplesoft but also in creating documentation, procedure narrative and policy language.

Even though BPD (Business Process Documentation) significantly reduces the development time, you still have to manually execute the test script which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. For instance, some years you may have six to seven tax updates that effect HR Management Systems (HRMS). The payroll process is lengthy – involving more than 80 tasks and input fields. A conservative estimate of the testing phase would require 10 users to spend two hours each testing the payroll process each time a tax update is implemented, resulting in 140 hours of testing annually. This estimate assumes that all users complete the process without a hitch. What happens, if just one user discovers a problem 10 minutes into the test? The PeopleSoft developer has to fix the problem and the user starts testing over again from square one, increasing the time it takes to rollout the update to production. Not to mention that application users are pulled away from their core job responsibilities each time a change is made to the application.
In addition to the long hours associated with manual testing, thoroughness is another concern. Do you know for certain, if end users are testing all permutations of payroll data? Most users focus on their areas of concern and test accordingly, leaving some sections unconfirmed upon rollout.
To guarantee best business practices, testing must be thorough while making the best use of resources and time. Automated testing is required to make this happen.

Virtulization and testing

2008-01-27T11:09:00.000Z

There is a lot of interest currently in testing using virtualization. An interesting article can be found here in Information Week

Because we deliver services via the software-as-a-service model, we needed to maintain our 24/7 functionality, hosting, availability, reliability, and scalability. We also wanted to maintain our reliable disaster recovery process while adding flexibility to deploy multiple environments, including test and development, sales demos, and load-testing environments. We determined that a VMware virtual infrastructure would provide us with all of these attributes at a more reasonable cost than a new physical infrastructure.
We first thought of virtualization when considering a tiered storage strategy and a disaster recovery plan across multiple environments. We determined virtualization would help us move data quickly to the right storage source depending on our needs. We also realized virtualization would make it easier to deploy redundancy in our production environment, along with providing the horsepower to run disaster recovery and other environments.
Licensing costs were a critical factor when creating our near-real-time disaster recovery center. When a near-real-time data copy is used in disaster recovery, Oracle requires the same licensing model on both sides. We discovered that IBM p570 servers using IBM Power6 processors at the database layer would let us deploy fewer but faster processors. This let us further lower our Oracle licensing costs. The IBM p570 servers have logical partitions for which we can allocate as much memory and CPU power as we want, and we can share excess capacity across the partitions. By virtualizing the logical partitions, we can scale easier. And with the databases on shared storage, we can create extra partitions for our other production server to failover to, if necessary.
Virtualization also let us configure the disaster recovery box so that while we run test and development environments, we can also run smaller Oracle partitions. If we want to conduct load testing, we just reconfigure the development partitions for true load testing service. If we have to run a disaster recovery process, we can use the whole box to run production.

Massive software testing conference

2008-01-20T15:42:00.000Z

The largest gathering of testers to date is the recent STeP-IN, an annual conference for the software testing market place, which is now in it's fifth year. The event, which took place in India was attended by over 1,100 software testers ranging from programme test managers to performance testers and test analysts. Test tool vendors were also out in force.

The software testing market place is etimated to be over $13 billion by 2010 and it is forecast that half of this will outsourced. So there must be a fair bet that the next gathering will be bigger than this one. I am going for 2010 software testers attend the 2010 conference.

If you're interested in the keynote speech a summary can be found here.

Inaugurating the conference, on Friday, the Infosys Chief Executive and
Managing Director, Mr Kris Gopalakrishnan, characterised the special feature of
the Indian software testing community – the world’s largest – as competition
going hand in hand with cooperation: they competed with each other, which made
for better quality, even while joining hands to create a brand name for Indian
testing.
“The new differentiator is user experience,” Mr Gopalakrishnan added, “Do
they (customers) like what they see? Does the product serve novice and expert,
alike?”
In his keynote address, Mr Krishna Kumar Natarajan, President and
CEO, Mindtree Consulting, felt Indian engineers should aim for at least 65 per
cent of the outsourced testing pie that would be worth $6.5 billion by 2010.
He added there was room for the ‘biggies’ like Infosys who derived up to 10
per cent of their revenues from software testing – as well as for focused,
independent test houses.
“Today the tester has won a seat on the product
management table,” he added.

Outsourced software testing services

2008-01-12T17:59:00.001Z

Top ten from Yahoo.com when searching for Outsourced software testing services

Software testing services - Acutest
UK software testing consultancy, providing outsourced technical and business assurance services. These include performance and load testing, user acceptance ... http://www.acutest.co.uk/

Crestech Software Systems - Outsourced Testing Services Corporate ...
... market leader in Outsourced Testing services providing Consulting, Resourcing, ... Functional Test Automation Service. We help you automate your business critical ...www.crestech.in

Software Testing Company A1QA - Software Quality Assurance. Benefits ...
A1QA offshore software testing firm offers software QA outsourcing, software testing services including web application testing and dedicated QA team creation.www.a1qa.com

Offshore outsourcing software testing services, Ukraine, Eastern Europe
BugHuntress QA Lab - high-quality testing of Web, WAP, mobile, wireless, ... Offshore & Nearshore Outsourcing. QA & Software Testing Services. info@BugHuntress.com ...bughuntress.com

Outsourced Testing Services
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Outsourced testing services
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Outsourcing Quality Assurance Software Testing to India
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EffectiveSoft - Software development company. Offshore development ...
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Testing services,Software testing services,Software testing training ...
... testing offers its software testing services and software ... Cover story on PureTesting by Outsource APAC in its Anniversary 2007 Issue (Vol 5 Issue 01) ...www.puretesting.com/index.html

Outsourced Software Testing Services
Software testing - tools and services for automated and manual testing of ... and Segue Software, providing a single point of service for your testing needs. ...www.aptest.com/serv.html

Has security testing just got a whole lot harder in the UK?

2008-01-05T18:09:00.000Z

A lot of people are voicing the opinion that the answer is yes - UK security testing in general will be worse off. If you've missed this furore the cause is the changes in legislation which are bans creating and distributing tools that help hackers. This post in Web Pro News succintly puts the case for no. I don't agree with the conclusion that the UK security industry is dead but it puts the case clearly:

In what could be a bad day for United Kingdom penetration testers, stress testers, and other systems security folks, the UK is getting ready to ban the creation and distribution of tools that could be used by hackers. This generally unpleasant concept could make it not only impossible to create the next nessus or nmap by anyone in the UK, it could also send them to jail for distributing the tools they make as well. This ought to set back UK computer security by decades.
The distinctions between, for example, a password cracker and a password recovery tool, or a utility designed to run denial of service attacks and one designed to stress-test a network, are subtle. The problem is that anything from nmap through wireshark to perl can be used for both legitimate and illicit purposes, in much the same way that a hammer can be used for putting up shelving or breaking into a car.
This should be quickly tested in the UK courts, the minute the ink is wet on the paper kind of legal testing. There are multiple programs, perl, c++, shell scripts in C, and other programs and tools that are made by people to do things. Dual use tools are tools that can be used for both good and evil. It will be difficult to determine the intent of the tool developer unless they leave behind incriminating e-mails saying the tool was created to rip off millions of people. Any form of distribution would also be included in the statutes, meaning the mere act of sharing a tool with your security friends could be bad for you continued security career. This is generally bad, and will hamper legitimate security workers and researchers. The state of the security industry in the UK is now dead. The hackers will win this one unfortunately, and there seems to be no way to stop this kind of legislation short of a court testing of its legitimacy.

Software test tool

2007-12-30T10:55:00.000Z

If you're the type of person who enjoys checking out demo version of software testing tools then you may be in interested in this post on PC Pro:

Product Type: Automated software testing

Target User: QA Tester/Developer

IT Problem: TestComplete is a comprehensive test automation solution for functional, regression, unit and load testing. Includes visual and scripted test generation and robust test management. Tests Windows 98-Vista, .NET, WPF, Delphi, Java, and Web applications.
IT Download Description: This IT download offers a complete solution, known as TestComplete, for automated functional, regression, unit, distributed and HTTP performance testing. Designed for use by developers and non-developers alike, TestComplete offers visual as well as programmatic ways to create robust automated software testing projects in any of 5 object-oriented scripting languages. It includes built-in data-driven, white-box testing and robust test management and supports testing of Win32, .NET, WPF, Java and Web applications on all versions of Windows from 98 to Vista.

Software test tools

Test strategy questions

2007-12-22T15:22:00.000Z

Interesting article on InformIT about the value of test strategies. Worth taking a look at. The extract below looks at the questions a test strategy should answer.

At the beginning of a software project, there are usually more questions and unknowns than answers. A long list of questions comes to mind at this stage, and working through the strategy helps to answer such questions. The test strategy should address at least the following major areas:

Scope. What do you need to test? It can be just as important to communicate what won’t be tested as what will be tested. Sometimes scope can help to answer the question, "To what extent do we test?"
Resources. Who is on the test team? Who is available to test? This information defines the testing resources. Sometimes the resources are unknown at the planning stage; perhaps resources are yet to be hired or will be outsourced. In these cases, it’s important to identify where resources are needed.
Skill set. What testing skills are needed for each component (or functional area) to be tested? Instead of planning testing based on who you have on staff, consider what skills the project needs, and determine from that information whether you need to add different skill sets and resources to your team.
Test environment. What environment will you use to test? Sometimes a test environment already exists, so the question seems extraneous. But sometimes this is one of the most difficult questions to resolve because the environment doesn’t exist, or the current environment isn’t adequate for the project.
Test data. What data will you use to test? Do you need a sampling of production data? (Can you even get your hands on a sampling of production data?) Sometimes a snapshot of production data is the normal fare for the test environment. Sometimes getting test data into the environment is one of the largest challenges for the project.
Volume. Do you need a volume of data? Planning for volume data often gets pushed aside until later in the project. But if this volume data is overlooked, resources and testing might be planned without appropriately considering volume and variety of test data.
Timeframes. When do you expect to get the first build to the test team? Timeline questions can be complicated to resolve early in the planning. High-level first-pass estimates are sometimes the best you can do. The advantage of early estimations isn’t focusing on specific dates, but rather planning ideas about how and what prerequisites might be needed to accomplish testing.
Defect process. What’s the process for reporting defects? Do you have a defect-reporting tool? Who can report a defect? You may have a well-established process but need to change it for this specific project. You may not have a process at all. If you need to build a new process or tool, I recommend referencing the process or tool in your test strategy document, but writing a separate document to address the defect process details.
Risk. What areas hold the most risk? When you peel back a product and investigate its core components, each component evolves into its own intriguing story, in which the number and types of tests begin to unfold in your mind. And with those test ideas, associated risks and impact come to light, which feeds back into the strategic planning.

Software testing UK market

Test manager job

2007-12-15T15:19:00.001Z

If you're a test manager and you are looking for statistics about test management jobs then you could visit the Jobs Watch site

As well as lots of information about trends in number of test manager job vacancies advertised (which is slightly down on the same period last year) and average test management job salaries (which is slightly up on the same period last year) there is more detailed data. Did you know that nearly half (48.02%) of all jobs listed were for test management roles in the UK were in London? Or that ISEB was mentioned in nearly a third (29.67%) of jobs for test managers.

It also covers other attributes in the descriptions of the job vacancies posted, such as methods and processes, vendors, system software, applications, development technologies, compliance and QA, programming languages (?) and qualifications. I was not surprised to see that only 0.027% of all test manager roles cited a need for MiFID experience whereas Sarbanes Oxley was mentioned in 0.43% of jobs. That's 16 times as many. Either way its good to see regulation is still a fringe area in test management.

Quality Assurance and Testing

2007-12-08T22:27:00.000Z

Top ten searches for Quality Assurance and Testing in uk.search.yahoo.com

Quality assurance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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W3C Q&A Weblogwww.w3.org/QA - 21k

Mozilla QA Home Page
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Quality control - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Testing & Quality Assurance
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Quality assurance and testing
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Quality Assurance and Testing
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OECD Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Genetic Testing
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Software quality assurance testing
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Quality Assurance
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Acceptance testing

2007-12-01T18:45:00.001Z

Top ten results searching MSN with "Acceptance testing"

acceptance testing from FOLDOC
acceptance testing <> Formal testing conducted to determine whether a system satisfies its acceptance criteria and thus whether the customer should accept the system.
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user acceptance testing from FOLDOC
user acceptance testing <> The type of testing where monitored users determine whether a system meets all their requirements, and will support the business for which it ...
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Acceptance testing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In engineering and its various subdisciplines , acceptance testing is black-box testing performed on a system (e.g. software, lots of manufactured mechanical parts, or batches of ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_ test

User Acceptance Testing training
User acceptance testing training course for anyone involved in this stage or the earlier phases that contribute to a successful UAT. It slao can cover customer acceptance testing ...
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Acceptance testing
Acceptance testing is formal testing conducted to enable an authorised entity to determine whether to accept a system or component. Glossary defintion.
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Show more results from www.acutest.co.uk

Router Acceptance Testing
Router Acceptance Testing November 2000
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User Acceptance Testing
Summary / Objectives QA-IQ's User Acceptance Testing course offers training in the methods and procedures required by staff who are engaged in the key user acceptance phase of an ...
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User Acceptance Testing
Summary / Objectives QA-IQ's User Acceptance Testing course offers training in the methods and procedures required by staff who are engaged in the key user acceptance phase of an ...
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User Acceptance Testing advice and courses
Offers website engineering, training and general web design services. Includes articles, company information on contact details.
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User Acceptance Testing training course (UAT) for operational users
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Agile test driven development or Software factory

2007-11-24T14:25:00.000Z

An interesting article here looks at two different approaches to software development and testing: Agile/Extreme Programming and the Software Factory.

"The Agile camp argues that coding is good, and that the key to quality and productivity is extensive testing. One cornerstone of the Agile world is Test Driven Development: the idea that you should write your test code, then write the code to be tested. Code you don't write is always suspect, because it's difficult or impossible to test.

The Software Factory camp argues that generating code is good, and that the overall quality of generated code is higher than the quality of handcrafted code. The less code you write, the higher the quality of your application and the higher your productivity. Rather than writing code by hand, you are better off writing code to generate your code.

The idea of software generating software isn't new. It was tried extensively 15-20 years ago with an idea called Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE). CASE tools allowed a developer to design and build their applications using high-level metaphors, often diagrams. If you look back at many of those tools, they don't look much different from the Domain Specific Language designers favored by the Software Factory advocates today. So you've got to wonder why Software Factories are going to succeed, when CASE ultimately failed.

Where things get strange is when teams try to mix Agile and Factory concepts. I've seen projects where most business code is generated, and then they also generate a bunch of tests for that generated code. Since both the code and tests come from the same meta-data and are generated by the same generator, it isn't surprising that the tests always work. This is typically done to satisfy some arbitrary requirement to achieve 90% code coverage with tests, but I question the value of tests that are generated automatically alongside the code they are testing.

So who is right? Should you stop using code-generation and handcraft both tests and all your code? Should you abandon the use of frameworks and pre-built components to ensure you can test all the code you use?"

Well you'll just have to go and read the article to find the conclusion the author draws!

Agile testing

IEEE 829 standard for software test documentation

2007-11-17T12:22:00.001Z

Top five results when searching Yahoo for IEEE 829 standard for software test documentation

IEEE 829 Documentation and how it fits in with testing
... the IEEE developed the 829 Standard for Software Test Documentation for any ... test design is the first stage in developing the tests for a software ...www.coleyconsulting.co.uk/IEEE829.htm

The Test Management Guide - IEEE Std 829-1998
IEEE Standard for Software Test Documentation. IEEE Std 829-1998 ... purpose of this standard is to describe a set of basic software test documents. ...www.ruleworks.co.uk/testguide/IEEE-std-829-1998.htm

IEEE 829 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
IEEE 829-1998, also known as the 829 Standard for Software Test Documentation, ... standards that may be referred to when documenting according to IEEE 829 ...
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Information Database - IEEE Standards Status
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Software test documentation
The IEEE 829 standard for test documentation provides an internationally recognised set of templates for test planning documentation. This is an outline description of the 8 document types. http://www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/ieee829

Migration of CRM

2007-11-10T11:50:00.000Z

An interesting article on migration here looking in particular at CRM migration. It re-inforces the view that success depends upon the collaboration between business and IT staff rather than the excellence of one and the abscene of the other.

The critical first step is to gain an understanding of the data. Profiling customer information destined for a new CRM system is essential to gain a measure of its quality. If, for instance, this identifies an uneven distribution of dates of birth, it may highlight the fact that default or dummy values have been entered to circumvent a mandatory field in the source system. Simply knowing this is valuable – even if it’s not something you can fix - will inform the way that you use the migrated information.

It isn’t reasonable, or realistic, to expect your CRM data to be perfect. However, an Information Quality Assessment (IQA) that includes profiling of the source data (as well as analysing how the information is collected and used) provides valuable insight that can make the difference between the success and failure of any migration project. An IQA uses profiling to identify possible shortcomings of the data and answers questions about how the data was captured and how it can be used. It should be a short sharp exercise the value of which far exceeds the cost of conducting it, but all too often no such exercise is undertaken or it is left far too late in the migration project.

Performing an IQA at an early stage in the migration project brings significant benefits by:

Identifying deficiencies in the target system that may require custom development.
Providing critical measures for the data, allowing you to plan how best to exploit it.
Enabling improvement of data in the source or during the migration to maximise its value.
Assuring the delivery of the application migration on time and on budget.

And what of the role of the CRM manager during migrations? CRM managers play a critical role in the migration to a new CRM system. As the 'owner' of the customer relationship, they should be involved at every stage, not just the beginning (application selection) and end (user acceptance testing).

As custodian of customer data, they should insist that an IQA is performed right at the outset of the project so that there are no 'unknown unknowns' in the data. Defining rules for transforming and improving data should also involve business users.

Whilst some of the transformations may be technical in nature, any that concern the logical content of the data should be owned by the business. For instance, decisions about whether and how to split compound names (eg Mr & Mrs E A Wintle t/a Abbey Cars) and rules about matching individual and business names should rightfully be made by the CRM team, not left to somebody in IT - who is scared of the project anyway.

Test management job

2007-11-02T17:51:00.000Z

Top ten results found searching for Test Management Job in Google.co.uk

Test Manager Jobs, Average Salary for Test Manager Jobs
Test Manager Jobs, Average Salary for Test Manager Jobs.www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/test%20manager.do

Software test consulting job board
Software testing jobs and vacancies with UK testing consultancy. ... We are looking for an experienced test manager who has successfully led the testing ...http://www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/careers-specific

Software testing jobs
Test manager for large projects or programmes. You have the finest motivational, people and task management skills as well as excellent communication skills ...www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/careers-general - 9k

Test Manager Jobs at reed.co.uk
reed.co.uk - the UK's biggest job site. ... Test Manager Jobs (76 jobs from the last 7 days) ... Contract Non Functional Test Manager - Blackpool ...www.reed.co.uk/Job/SearchResults.aspx?jto=False&s=1646&set=2&SearchID=-2147483648&EpdId=-...

Test Manager Jobs at reed.co.uk
E-Commerce, Internet or Intranet, UAT Test Manager required for Commercial Bank based near Heathrow. You will have proven history in UAT test strategies ...www.reed.co.uk/Job/SearchResults.aspx?jto=False&s=1646&jt=2&set=2&SearchID=-2147483648...

Test Manager - ISEB - ( Mercury Test Director ) - London Job
Test Manager - ISEB - ( Mercury Test Director ) - London Jobs from IT Executive Group. Job search more Test Manager - ISEB - ( Mercury Test Director ...www.executivesontheweb.com/uk/job_search/job_details.cfm?id=182553

Test Manager, Systems Integration Job
Test Manager, Systems Integration Jobs from Excelerate. Job search more Test Manager, Systems Integration Jobs at Executives on the Web.www.executivesontheweb.com/uk/job_search/job_details.cfm?id=181070

Test Manager job
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Test Manager job
Test Manager job - Test Manager job - IT & Internet job - Tester job in London.www.careers-jobs.eu/job/t-test-manager-zrjhyflp.html

Global Test manager Jobs London
Global Test manager Jobs in London, contract and permanent IT Jobs online.www.itjobs-online.com/job-details-jid-37421-sts-res-asd-desc-ord-date_added.html

Testing solutions for network equipment

2007-10-27T20:12:00.000+01:00

News was released earlier this week from Fanfare, who deliver innovative testing solutions to network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) and service providers (SPs), that it has launched its latest test automation software product -- Fanfare iTest(TM) Team.
iTest Team isthe latest product offering in the iTest suite of products designed to simplify and accelerate product and system testing. Using iTest Team, SPs can test and verify the functionality,performance and behaviour of a device or group of devices purchased from NEMs. SPs can now perform complex system testing by executing simultaneous commands to a multitude of different devices in their network to simulate real-life network testing.
In addition, iTest Team's Test Audit feature captures and records all testing information. This allows testers to go back in time and access, re-create and re-run every test, action and command that was entered -saving valuable time and resources.
iTest Team is designed to simplify and accelerate device and network testing throughout development and Quality Assurance (QA) teams and between companies. iTest Team provides a communication platform that overcomes barriers such as language, location, and non-existent reporting templates that have made the basic communication of finding and reporting a bug,reproducing it, and verifying the fix a challenge. Fanfare's products serve as the common language between feature testers and developers, enabling them to seamlessly share test assets to quickly improve product quality and speed the deployment of new equipment and services to market.
Additional features of iTest Team include:

Multi-platform support for Windows, Linux and Solaris
Multi-threading for complex system testing
Plug-ins for developers using Eclipse, bringing this emerging platform to commercial use
Support of SNMP, Web and SSH protocols that enable testers of all skill levels to build automated test scripts for capture/replay capabilities.

ISEB Software testing qualification changes

2007-10-20T08:52:00.000+01:00

ISEB software testing qualifications are changing. It used to be just two: the ISEB foundation certificate in software testing and the practitioner certificate in software testing. But on reflection ISEB have decided that there was too big a gap between these two levels and the latter tried to cover to much. So what was the practitioner is being replaced with three courses.

First up is the Intermediate Certificate in Software Testing. This certificate is the next level up from the foundation qualification and covers the key topics which are needed as a prerequisite for either of the two new practitioner level exams. It's just becoming available with a lot less organisations currently able to offer this course.

The next level up has been split into two:

Practitioner Certificate in Test Management - this certificate examines knowledge and skills required for the management of Software Testing.
Practitioner Certificate in Test Analysis - this certificate examines knowledge and skills required for the technical analysis of Software Testing.

Why two? Well not all software testers want to be test managers but they still want to gain more advanced skills in this field and have them recognised.

You'll need to obtain the intermediate certificate in software testing before you can sit these exams. Incidentally, both of these exams are available (so you can sit them) but you'll be hard pressed to find a training course covering them at the moment.

If you want to know more about these changes try the BCS site or this PDF which covers a whole host of frequently asked questions about these software testing qualification changes. It also covers the differences and aims of ISEB software testing qualification framework and those of ISTQB.

Testing with OpenTTCN

2007-10-06T09:54:00.000+01:00

OpenTTCN have announced here the launch of a new OpenTTCN Trinamite TTCN-3 testing tool. OpenTTCN Trinamite is an affordable TTCN-3 development and run-time environment for creating in-house test systems using standardized TTCN-3 testing and test control language and programming TTCN-3 adapters using, for example, C# programming language.

OpenTTCN Trinamite product offers a number of key benefits for testers and test system programmers including increased productivity when creating new test cases using standardized high-level TTCN-3 testing language requiring fewer statements for expressing the same test logic, possibility to re-use test cases programmed by others with TTCN-3 and also publicly available test suites, and sharing user's own test cases. A simple to use test management for running test cases reduces the need for training, when starting to use the software.

OpenTTCN Trinamite allows the user to run automated test campaign executing TTCN-3 test cases for testing reactive systems. The testing tool produces a detailed test log that helps to keep record of performed testing and in case of errors it helps to determine the cause of any errors found using the provided analysis capabilities. The testing tool allows user to connect diverse set of System Under Tests to the testing tool using a user programmed SUT adapter and network or software connection.

Volume testing company

Careers in software testing

2007-09-29T09:34:00.000+01:00

Top ten results searching Yahoo.co.uk with "careers software testing":

Software testing careers
If you interesting in a career rather than just a job in software testing in the UK, contact Acutest, an independent testing consultancy www.acutest.co.uk/testing-careers.html

Welcome to Career Testers – Affordable Software Testing Courses – Half The Price!
Do you want to succeed in a sought after and rewarding software testing career? Software Testing is a process used to identify the correctness, completeness and ...www.careertesters.com

Amazon.com: Software Testing: Books: Ron Patton
Amazon.com: Software Testing: Books: Ron Patton by Ron Patton ... geared for people beginning or thinking of beginning a software testing career. ...www.amazon.com/Software-Testing-Ron-Patton/dp/0672319837

IT Testing Training Course - IT Test Analyst Career Opportunities
... Training Programme that leads to an IT career as a Java or C#.NET Developer, ... The objective of FDM Academy's software testing training course is to provide ...www.fdmacademy.com/academy-training/testing

Portal:Software Testing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Microsoft Careers — Technical — Software Testing
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Bret Pettichord's Software Testing Hotlist
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Intense testing
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Bug hunting is not a career : Software Testing & Solutions : BCS Review 2006 Online : BCS
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Software & systems test courses to advance your career
specialist courses in software testing and related topics ... Software Testing Test Automation SQL Fundamentals Career Clinic ...www.testingacademy.com

Stress testing

2007-09-23T16:14:00.000+01:00

Top results when searching MSN.co.uk for Stress Testing

Liquidity Stress Testing & Scenario Analysis
FSA Liquidity Stress Testing & Scenario Analysis With STB: FSA prudential requirements include appropriate proactive stress testing of liquidity. At the moment the format this action should take is ...
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Accelerated Stress Testing
Accelerated Stress Testing ... Accelerated Stress Testing. Intertek Solutions to Accelerated Stress Testing (AST)
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stress testing from FOLDOC
stress testing <> Testing aimed at investigating the behaviour of a software or hardware equipment in out of ordinary operating conditions. (1998-03-27)
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Infoline-Stress Testing
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Incisive Media Events
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Intertek Automotive - Accelerated Stress Testing
Intertek Automotive - Accelerated Stress Testing. Intertek offers the widest range of Accelerated Stress Testing methodologies, including Failure Mode Verification Testing (FMVT), HALT/HASS ...
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Basel II Consultancy - Scenario Analysis and Stress Testing
Basel II requires a capacity to stress test loan books under alternative scenarios. ... In the aftermath of the 1989-1991 recession in the housing market, the widespread introduction of ...
www.acadametrics.co.uk/scenarioStressTesting.php?PHPSESSID=30d120e3a41c598805aa1386ddd5c5f...

Stress Testing
Stress Testing Page ... Objectives of Stress Testing. Stress tests have one primary objective, and that is to determine the ...
www.sigterm.co.uk/index.php?page=stress_testing.php
· 21/09/2007

Stress testing
Stress testing definition, including other non-functional testing types such as scalability, load ... Stress testing and other non-functional testing terms. Load testing is often used as a synonym for ...
www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/load-testing-services

Software testing outsourcing
The independent software testing company that supplies outsourced assurance services for change programmes and IT development projects.
http://www.acutest.co.uk/

Software testing qualifications

2007-09-15T09:28:00.000+01:00

Interesting article in Computer World about the value of Software Testing qualifications. At a recent visit to NZ, the president of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (R. Black), told an audience of testers about his doubts over testing qualifications constructed by a single vendor or a few experts.

They look like an attempt to equip trainees to work with only one particular software suite or, even worse, a scheme to enable the sole source to sell software testing training courses, he said. Black went so far as to mention one purveyor of a testing qualification he doesn’t think cuts the mustard, QAI and its founder, William Perry. Missing parts of the syllabus showed this organisation was unacquainted with some decades of work in the field, Black said. “It basically represents Bill Perry’s ideas.”
However, Perry disagrees. “The software-testing certification is based upon the collective knowledge of the 1,000-plus IT organisations affiliated with QAI,” he wrote in an email to Computerworld New Zealand. “This knowledge is combined into a software testing CBOK (common body of knowledge) under the direction of an independent certification board. The current CBOK is now under revision and an updated version will be issued during mid-2008. Our CBOK has been compared independently with other software testing standards and includes almost all topics in these standards. “I am flattered that you think I alone was the only person involved in this effort. That is unfair to the many contributors.” Testers qualified on the basis of a limited pool of expertise would probably not acquit themselves well in a job where people have to collaborate with others trained using a more representative syllabus.
This sparked a discussion on how a trainee could judge the merit of a particular qualification. Look for openness, said Black. By this he meant a large body of people with mixed skills — from software developers and trainers to academics — who converse with and listen to one another, and are sometimes persuaded to change their opinions. This is a “marketplace of ideas” that is involved in the continuous evolution of the body of knowledge.
A poor qualification, on the other hand, usually reflects only “two or three people’s opinions”, he says — people who may be close associates and mutual admirers too.

Software Testing Code of Best Practice

2007-09-09T08:25:00.000+01:00

Intellect have produced a software testing code of best practice which has already been signed up to by a number of large organisations (including Microsoft, BT Group, British Computer Society) as well as independent consultants. The code is produced as part of the drive to improve the ROI in IT and help make software testing programmes a success.

In the words of John Higgens (Director General of Intellect) "The code embodies standards of professionalism that all providers of testing services should endeavour to achieve. It reflects the verysignificant changes that are taking place in the field of software testing and will result in closer and more open customer-supplier relationships.

You can find a copy of the Software Testing Code of Best Practice here. In summary the code covers 10 commitments

Requriements and specifications
Types and Levels of testing
Resourcing and professionalism
Communication of progress and completeness
Responsibilities and relationships
Test completeness
Testing independence
Use of clearly defined processes
Evidence of test progress
Continuous improvement

Jobs software testing

2007-08-25T14:05:00.000+01:00

The results of searching for jobs software testing on MSN

Software Tester Jobs System Testing Recruitment
For software tester jobs and all system testing recruitment, visit Leysen Associates specialists in ... 3-6/12/07 EUROSTAR Stockholm - The European System Testing Analysis and Review

Software testing jobs
Software testing vancancise for test managers, testing strategy consultants and performance and load ... Software testing vacancies Ideally you will have more than ten years experience in testing and ...
http://www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/careers-general

Software testing services
UK software testing consultancy, that provides outsourced technical and business assurance services. ... Testing jobs Specific job vacancies
http://www.acutest.co.uk/

+Show more results from www.acutest.co.uk

Simply Software Testing Jobs (powered by Joard
We are celebrating our launch - free job postings with this promocode: dqaintro
jobs.drivenqa.com

IT Security Jobs - Software testing
IT Risk & Fraud, the latest jobs and news in the IT security industry, specialised recruitment ... Systems testing is an integral part of change control management.
www.ssrpersonnel.co.uk/itsecurityjobs/software_testing.htm

Software Testing Jobs Centre4 Testing
Review our jobs board for current software testing contract opportunities. ... Our Clients Say... “I would not hesitate to use Centre4 Testing for our future requirements and ...
www.centre4testing.co.uk/jobboard/ testing-jobs.php

Jobs for Software Engineer - Testing: Olive Global UK
Jobs for Jobs for Software Engineer - Testing, web designers, developers, search engine ranking ... You would be responsible for preparation of Test Cases, Test Data and Test Scripts ;to execute test ...
www.oliveglobal.co.uk/software_ engineer.html

testing_links [SoftwareTestingWiki]
Wilson Mar: Software testing notes: Software Testing Jobs: Software Testing Jobs: TRS Test Blog: TRS Test Forum Blog: Software Testing Job Board: Software Testing Job Board
www.softwaretestingwiki.com/ doku.php?id=testing_ links

communities [SoftwareTestingWiki]
Probably the biggest Quality Assurance and Software Testing forum, along with a download section, jobs, news and links. http://forums.adventnet.com/viewforum.php?f=25: Forums to ...
www.softwaretestingwiki.com/ doku.php?id=communities

+Show more results from www.softwaretestingwiki.com

Software Testing Jobs in Hyderabad India QA Jobs
Testing Jobs Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune, Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon QA Jobs. ...
testingjobs.in/India/ hyderabad

Software Testing Jobs from MNCs in Bangalore Hyderabad Delhi Mumbai ...
Testing Jobs Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon QA Jobs. ...
testingjobs.in/India/ mncs

+Show more results from testingjobs.in

Software testing jobs from Mission Assurance and Testing
Online application for software testing jobs in the UK and Europe. Offers vacancies from Junior Tester to Senior Test Manager.
www.testing-jobs.com

UK software testing job
If you interesting in a career rather than just a job in software testing in the UK, contact Acutest ... General testing jobs; Specific job vacancies
http://www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/testing-careers

UK software testing consultancy
Contact information for software testing consultancy, Acutest, and the main office in London UK ... Testing jobs Specific job vacancies
http://www.acutest.co.uk/software-testing-company.html

+Show more results from www.acutest.com

Software Testing Jobs In Kolkata, QA Jobs in Web Spiders
Software Testing and Software Quality Assurance Jobs in Kolkata.Web Spiders is an extremely fast ... Web Spiders is an extremely fast-paced, high growth and innovative company.
www.webspiders.com/jobs

Software Testing - Look It Up - UK Search
Software Testing Jobs Software Testing Interview Questions Software Testing Life Cycle ... How to Break Web Software: Functional and Security Testing of Web Applications and Web ...
www.lookitup.co.uk/AB-software-testing.html

Software testing material

2007-08-18T08:42:00.001+01:00

Found an interesting blog here. It provides a great list of material that I guess has been collated by the Center for Software Testing Education & Research's coviering Software Testing Training Videos, Course Notes, and Articles.

Some useful links are:

Black Box Software Testing course page
Performance testing tools
Collection of Software Testing Course Notes:
Certified Software Quality Engineer Examination
Software Testing Articles and Papers
Software Testing Conference Materials
Test Methodology Documents
Testing Articles
Testing Presentations

Technical testing and continous performance management

2007-08-11T08:44:00.000+01:00

There is an interesting paper on best practices for continous performance management here. You will need to register to access the paper, which covers code profiling, integration performance testing and load testing as part of a continuous build environment.

The author, Steven Haines, examines the concepts of Ant, test driven development and the creation of a continuous build environment using Cruisecontrol. He also reviews the inclusion of load testing in the continuous build environment, using JMeter as an example of measuring load, and using the artefacts generated by the tests to programmatically check response times against a service level agreement.

In summary, Steven demonstrates by example the importance of bringing performance testing right to the forefront of the development cycle, rather than an activity at the end, and in the context of the cost of not doing so, makes the point that not only should this be best practice, but standard practice.

The importance of penetration testing

2007-07-29T08:42:00.000+01:00

Interesting article on penetration testing at Server Watch Okay, so its got a sensational headline but it is a good article raising the importance of pen testing.

Forget "Thursday is the new Friday" and "brown is the new black." When it comes to servers, the really important message is this: "Penetration testing is the new vulnerability scanning."

Joe Pescatore, a security analyst at Gartner, explained. "Previously, companies needed to do vulnerability scanning on their network before attackers did, but since attackers have moved from vulnerability scanning to fairly targeted penetration testing, companies now need to carry out penetration testing before the attackers do," he told ServerWatch.
Pescatore recommends that any company involved with online transactions, which allows inbound connections and potentially exposing customer information, have an outside consultancy perform penetration testing at least once a year. Larger companies should carry out additional tests on their servers more frequently, either through a consultant or with automated penetration testing tools.
Penetration testing tools have really come of age in the past 12 months or so, both commercial products aimed at the corporate market place, and free tools like Metasploit framework 3. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that the power of Metasploit has really moved the goalposts, making it far easier for hackers to carry out their own penetration "tests."
Having said that, there's no doubt that the best way to pen test your network is to employ a good outside consultant. A skilled human is more likely to find a way in than even the best software tool will; an outsider is likely to be more effective because familiarity with your own network can leave you blinkered to possible vulnerabilities. "There is an issue that when internal people test things, because they fall in to a pattern of testing and tend not find paths through less-valuable assets," said Pescatore.

Risk-based testing

2007-07-21T08:58:00.000+01:00

Top ten results from Google.co.uk for risk-based testing:

[PDF] Heuristic Risk-Based Testing
Well, now that you know what risk-based testing is, I can devote the rest ..... deal with the risk of poor risk analysis, don’t let risk-based testing be ...www.satisfice.com/articles/hrbt.pdf - Similar pages

[PDF] Troubleshooting Risk-Based Testing
Risk-based testing is a skill. It’s not easy to know the ways that a product ... Often when I hear someone talk about risk-based testing, they seem to be ...www.satisfice.com/articles/rbt-trouble.pdf - Similar pages

Article info : A Strategy for Risk-Based Testing
The fact that you test an application extensively does not itself render the application more stable. However, NOT testing an application increases the risk ...www.stickyminds.com/se/S7566.asp - 44k - 19 Jul 2007 - Similar pages

Site Search : Detail
Well, now that you know what risk-based testing is, I can devote the rest of the ..... This is probably the simplest way to organize risk-based testing. ...www.stickyminds.com/sitewide.asp?ObjectId=1800&ObjectType=ART&Function=edetail - 72k - 19 Jul 2007 - Similar pages[ More results from www.stickyminds.com ]

[PDF] Risk based testing
Risk based testing. Strategy. Objective: Find the most important defects as early ..... James Bach, Risk Based Testing, STQEMagazine, Vol1, No. 6, ...www.cs.tut.fi/tapahtumat/testaus04/schaefer.pdf - Similar pages

[DOC]Risk-Based Testing and Metrics
The risk based test approach is highly dependent on using qualified testers, i.e. testers with experience within the application area and preferable with ...www.amland.no/WordDocuments/EuroSTAR99Paper.doc - Similar pages

Risk Based Testing for E-Business, Web and Internet
Risk Based E-Business Testing is a hands-on guide for business, project and test managers and test practitioners presents an effective approach for using ...www.riskbasedtesting.com/ - 9k - Similar pages

BBST Risk-Based Testing
Risk-based testing (in my view) focuses on the ways the program can fail--imagine how the program can fail and design tests to trigger those failures. ...www.testingeducation.org/BBST/BBSTRisk-BasedTesting.html - 11k - Similar pages

[PDF] Theory and practice of risk-based testing
This paper extends a theory of risk-based test planning that was outlined in a .... for safety risk analysis, this set is likely to cover risk-based testing ...www.csr.ncl.ac.uk/FELIX_Web/1B.R-BT%202.pdf - Similar pages

Software testing services - Acutest
The independent software testing consultancy specialising in testing IT and technology centred change offers risk based testing services for development and deployment initiatives,..www.acutest.co.uk/ - 8k - Similar pages

Need for independent software testing companies

2007-07-07T13:03:00.000+01:00

I read an old article recently on independent software testing. It was in about the Indian testing market but much of it related to the UK software testing market as well.

Need for Independent Software Testing Companies

You can't let a fox guard the henhouse. How often have we heard developers say "It works on my machine, you must be doing something wrong!" to dismiss reported defects? According to Arindum Basu, VP and head of Independent Testing Practice, Kanbay, the rigor, incisiveness and `nothing is holy belief' ensures that defects are trapped before they hit the clients. Sharad Sharma, vice president, product operations, Veritas Software India says, "the need of independent software testing firms is required by the market space".
Independent testing brings many advantages to companies, asserts V Chandrashekaran, CEO, Aztec Software and Technology Services. For one, it brings in objectivity, rigor and transparency to the testing and defect reporting process. In the process, companies can also gain time-to-market by outsourcing parallel activities in the product life cycle development. Most importantly, it provides checks and balances against the development team by being the 'eyes and ears' of the end-user/client. Aztec Software and Technology Services recently acquired Disha Technologies-a software product testing company.
India has around 8 to 10 independent software testing firms. SNS Technologies, for instance, has focused purely on product testing since 1989. Managing director Ashish Shah has big plans for his company. His company hopes to touch the 250 people mark by 2005, and is targeting the UK market this year.

For the full article visit: http://www.dqindia.com/content/special/2005/105012501.asp

Integration testing

2007-07-01T14:49:00.000+01:00

Top 5 results when searching for Integration testing on MSN.co.uk

Living Glossary
... during program execution. instrumenter: A software tool used to carry out instrumentation . integration: The process of combining component s into larger assemblies . integration testing: Testing ...
www.testingstandards.co.uk/living_glossary.htm
· Cached page

Integration Testing White Papers, Integration Testing Webcasts ...
Find Integration Testing white papers, case studies, webcasts and product information to help you ... Your request for Integration Testing resources returned limited or no results.
research.pcpro.co.uk/rlist/term/Integration-Testing.html
· 28/06/2007
· Cached page

Software testing services - Acutest
The independent software testing consultancy specialising in testing IT and technology centred change offers services, clients, careers, out of hours and a location map.
www.acutest.co.uk
· Cached page

System Integration Testing (S.I.T.)
System Integration Testing and Verification ... System Integration Testing (S.I.T.) is the testing of the sub-systems, as a whole, to ensure that ...
www.sharpy.dircon.co.uk/index_files/SystemIntegrationTesting.htm
· 28/06/2007
· Cached page

integration testing from FOLDOC
integration testing <> A type of testing in which software and/or hardware components are combined and tested to confirm that they interact according to their requirements.
foldoc.org/?integration+testing
· Cached page