Resources

When I talk to senior project and product stakeholders outside of test teams, confidence in the system—especially, confidence that it will have a sufficient level of quality—is one benefit they want from a test team involved in system and system integration testing. Another key benefit such stakeholders commonly mention is providing timely, credible information about quality, including our level of confidence in system quality. 

Reporting their level of confidence in system quality often proves difficult to many testers. Some testers resort to reporting confidence in terms of their gut feel. Next to major functional areas, they draw smiley faces and frowny faces on a whiteboard, and say things like, “I’ve got a bad feeling about function XYZ.” When management decides to release the product anyway, the hapless testers either suffer the Curse of Cassandra if function XYZ fails in production, or watch their credibility evaporate if there are no problems with function XYZ in production.

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You hear people talk about “coverage” a lot in testing, but what exactly do they mean? Three different people could mean three—or more—different things when they use this word. It’s not that those different meanings are wrong, they’re just—different. Test coverage is a powerful and important topic, and it’s time we all got clear on what it means and how to use it. So, in this free webinar, Rex will explore the various dimensions of test coverage and how you can make those dimensions work for you on your next testing project.

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If you’ve been testing for any length of time, you know that the number of possible test cases is enormous if you try to test all possible combinations of inputs, configuration values, types of data, and so forth. It’s like the mythical monster, the many-headed Hydra, which would sprout two or more new heads for each head that was cut off. Two simple approaches to dealing with combinatorial explosions such as this are equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis, but those techniques don’t check for interactions between factors. A reasonable, manageable way to test combinations is called pairwise testing, but to do it you’ll need a tool.  In this inaugural One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate the use of a free tool, ACTS, built by the US NIST and available for download worldwide. We can’t promise to turn you into Hercules, but you will definitely walk away able to slay the combinatorial Hydra.

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If you’ve been testing for any length of time, you know that the number of possible test cases is enormous if you try to test all possible combinations of inputs, configuration values, types of data, and so forth. It’s like the mythical monster, the many-headed Hydra, which would sprout two or more new heads for each head that was cut off. Two simple approaches to dealing with combinatorial explosions such as this are equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis, but those techniques don’t check for interactions between factors. A reasonable, manageable way to test combinations is called pairwise testing, but to do it you’ll need a tool.  In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate the use of a free tool, ACTS, built by the US NIST and available for download worldwide. We can’t promise to turn you into Hercules, but you will definitely walk away able to slay the combinatorial Hydra.

Listen now →

Test case metrics. Defect metrics. Requirements coverage metrics. Code coverage metrics. Metrics, metrics, metrics: yep, we got metrics in software testing, but do we use them properly? 

Following up on his popular keynote and webinar, “Stupid Metrics Tricks and How to Avoid Them,” testing metrics advocate Rex Black decided to have a discussion about how we use and, all too often, misuse metrics in software with fellow testing professional Dawn Haynes, a testing metrics skeptic. There are sure to be some interesting disagreements as well as some unexpected agreements. 

Join Dawn and Rex for a lively back-and-forth on the topic of metrics, followed by a Q&A opportunity.

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