Resources

Rex Black was asked recently be a client to write a brief article regarding why to become a Software Tester. The target audience was high school students. RBCS is committed to "spreading the word" about testing and we all  enjoy the opportunity to encourage future testers.

Talking to high school students about testing requires that we communicate on their level and in a way that might intrigue them. As any parent or educator knows, this is not always an easy task. Read on to see how Rex Black man gages just that.

I bet this week you used more software than you even know. Did you use a smart phone? Did you ride in a car? Did you play a video game? Did you send an e-mail on your tablet or PC? Did you fly on an airplane? Did you go SCUBA diving? Did you go from one floor to another in an elevator while at the mall? Every one of these activities involves using software. In fact, most of the software used in those activities are more complex and sophisticated than the software used in the Apollo moon mission, and often even more so than the software used by the Space Shuttle.

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An ISTQB certification is a nice thing to have. It decorates your office. It tells your co-workers that you have pursued education and have achieved a level of knowledge in testing. At the Advanced level, it shows that you have selected an area of specialization and have demonstrated your knowledge. At the Expert level, it provides evidence that you have set yourself apart from others-that you have acquired and demonstrated expertise in a particular area. But, are you really using your knowledge and expertise? Let’s look at how the benefits of the certification can be used in your regular job and your career.

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If you’re a professional tester, test manager, quality assurance staff member, or programmer responsible for testing your own code, you have already discovered that, far from being trivial and straightforward, testing is hard. There’s a lot to know. Unfortunately, most practitioners tend to carry out testing as if it were 1978, not 2008. Common practices lag best practices by around 30 years. ISTQB certification is about raising common practices to the level of best practices. 

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We asked some clients, associates, and colleagues what some of their top New Year’s resolutions were. While we can’t share them all, you won’t be surprised to find one of the top “to dos” for 2008 is to find practical ways to improve testing. So, if you’re like most testers, you are time constrained and need to make improvements quickly that show fast results. Here I present three practical ideas which you can put into action in just two weeks, which will make a noticeable difference to get your testing year started off right. 

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• One development manager once called testers “depraved minds..usefully employed”
• So, are we devils or angels?
• Alternative viewpoints on testers
  • We find bugs and tactfully point them out.
  • We provide essential insight to manage quality risks
  • We advocate the customer’s experience of quality
  • Rex Black Consulting Services motto: “We help our clients make better software and hardware by breaking it for them.”
  • James Bach: “We light the way….The testing process focuses light where it’s needed to help developers and management know where they are, where they ought to go, and when they have arrived.”

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As the demand for new technological products grows apace, many companies have adopted Agile methodologies for their software development activity.

The demands on a tester working on projects using Agile methodologies are different to those faced on a traditional software project. Testers on Agile projects, in addition to excellent testing skills, must be able to communicate effectively, interact and collaborate constantly with colleagues, liaise closely with business representatives and work as part of a whole-team responding to early and frequent customer feedback.

To work as part of an Agile software team, testers must first understand the principles and values underpinning the Agile development approach. This section looks at the essential components of Agile software development, explains the advantages of the whole-team approach used in Agile projects and demonstrates the benefits of receiving early and frequent customer feedback.

An excerpt from Agile Testing edited by Rex Black due to be published by BCS Learning & Development in Spring 2017 (subject to change). Section 1.1 by Gerry Coleman. All material is provisional and may be subject to change.

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If you are a software tester, programmer, or manager, you probably know that developing secure software is no longer simply desirable—it’s completely essential.  

Some might assume that most security problems arise from the operating system or networking layers, well below the application code they are working on.  However, figures for Web-based applications show that over three-quarters of security exploits arose from applications. 

So, you know you need secure code, but how to get there? What are your security risks?  What security failures and bugs do you have?  What do these security risks, failures, and bugs mean?  How can you reduce security risk in a way that doesn’t create new problems?  How do you monitor my progress over time?  This article will outline seven steps that will allow you to answer these and other questions as you improve your software’s security.

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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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In our inaugural One Key Idea session, we looked at how use pairwise testing to examine combinations of inputs, configuration values, types of data, and the like. This is a great technique when the interaction between these factors is unpredictable. However, in some cases, specific business rules govern these interactions. How can we model these business rules and use that model to develop a reasonable set of tests? Simple: decision tables. In this One Key Idea session, Rex will explain the basics of this fundamental technique.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn how to create and use these straightforward, table-based representations of business logic in your daily work.

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For nearly ten years, RBCS has run a highly successful free webinar series.  In 2018, we’re adding the Two Points of View at Two series to our monthly webinar rotation. In each of these sessions, Rex Black will talk with another software luminary about topics of mutual interest, where the two have some different views, and then Rex opens the floor to questions. 

In this inaugural session, Rex is happy to welcome Maaret Pyhäjärvi .  Maaret’s bio describes her as feedback fairy with a day job at F-Secure, where they call her a Lead Quality Engineer. She identifies as empirical technologist, tester and programmer, catalyst for improvement, author and speaker, and community facilitator and conference organizer. You can catch her latest thoughts on her blog at http://visible-quality.blogspot.fi

In this session, Rex and Maaret will discuss tester-developer collaboration and the relationships between testers and developers.  How to approach developers for collaboration? How do testers-developers ratios affect relationships? What about people who move between tester and developer roles? Join Rex and Maaret to hear their thoughts and ask your questions.

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Hiring and managing distributed, international test teams

Phil Lew, President of XBOSoft, an international software testing firm, joins Rex Black to discuss the critical topics of hiring and managing teams of testers who work around the world.  How do distance, culture, and language create challenges, and how have Phil and Rex dealt with those challenges in the past?  You won’t want to miss Phil and Rex’s points of view on these important topics.

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The ISTQB provides extensive support for the test professional’s career path. There are so many options, in fact, that some people get confused and have questions.  Well, in this One Key Idea session, Rex is here to make the career path clear and answer your questions.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll understand how the ISTQB career path can support your progress throughout your professional testing life.

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All too often, people believe that they have to run all their system tests through the GUI, and that includes automated tests.  However, it is possible to run automated system tests through a variety of interfaces, such as command lines, APIs, data layers, network services, and more. In this webinar, Rex will give two such examples of sophisticated automated system test platforms capable of quickly running thousands of tests with very low false positive rates, flaky test rates, and test maintenance rates. One tested a data layer interface, the other a network services interface.  Each used a flexible and maintainable keyword driven architecture.  Come ready to open your mind to new ways of automating system testing, and leave with ideas you can apply to automating your tests away from the GUI.

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If you are a hiring manager, you might already know that a bad hiring decision is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. One easy mistake to make is hiring someone who tells a convincing story about their abilities, but can’t actually do the work.  How can you separate the glib talker from the accomplished doer?  Well, in this One Key Idea session, Rex will explain how to use audition interviews, illustrating the concept with case studies.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll gain a powerful tool for making smarter hiring decisions.

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Exploratory testing is a name given for a technique of using knowledge, experience, and skills to test software in a non-linear, investigatory fashion. Is it a powerful and important part of each professional tester’s repertoire, or actually magic quality pixie dust? Is this the only real way of testing, or is there room for other forms of validation as well as verification? What are the origins of exploratory testing, and who actually invented the technique (as opposed to coining the current name)? Does it always degrade into an unmanageable, unaccountable, random bug hunt, or are there ways to instill order, measure coverage, and build confidence with it? In this webinar, Rex will explore and burst some of the myths of exploratory testing.

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In the 2010s, the software testing profession made a lot of big strides. Testing skills expanded significantly across the set of practitioners, and the number of professional testers grew.  However, there remains one place where testing remains challenged, and was unable to surmount that challenge in the 2010s. Tune in to learn what that challenge is, and to get Rex’s thoughts on how to succeed in the 2020s decade, which starts just two days later!

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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.

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Isn’t it amazing? Stakeholders drop software on our desk and expect us to test it with no requirements, no design and no product knowledge whatsoever. About the only clear thing is the absurd and unrealistic deadline. We are expected to bend over backward, spread magic pixie dust and heroically test quality into a product we never heard of before.

But testing in the dark is not impossible – and as Rob Sabourin shows it can even be a very valuable and fun experience.

Learn strategies to emerge from a murky fog into clear meaningful quality insights. Leverage unlikely sources about what stakeholder’s care about and what users really need the software to do.

Join Rob’s quest to find important bugs fast, let “testing in the dark” illuminate you!

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In many ways, leading a test team is like leading any other team. After all, people are people, no matter what work they do or where they live. Of course, there are some aspects that are specific to managing technical teams. And there are a few aspects that are specific to managing a test team. Given a good team, which you’ve developed carefully, how can you get the best work from them and keep them engaged and motivated? Rex will explore some ideas, and take your questions, in this free webinar. 

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