February 2016

Welcome to RBCS, Inc.

Dear Reader,

Well, 2016 is off to an interesting start. For those of you who follow US politics, you'll have noticed that the circus that started in 2015 continues unabated, which at least ensures that reporters are kept busy!

We're pretty busy here ourselves.  We are thrilled to be publishing our 50th bi-monthly newsletter and, at the same time, staying on top of course development, assessments, and consulting work.   We are finishing updates to a couple of our Advanced e-learning courses, which should release shortly.

With those course updates completed, I've found time--and two qualified co-authors--to resume work on the Expert Test Manager book, long delayed by the need to respond to changes in the ISTQB Advanced syllabi, the release of ISTQB's Foundation Extension Agile Tester syllabus and our courses for that, and the release of the ASTQB's Foundation Mobile Tester and our courses for that. Expect the new book to come out later this year, at long last! 

In addition to the new syllabi on agile and mobile testing released over the last couple years, the ISTQB released a Foundation Model-based Tester syllabus. This has lead to questions about what model-based testing is and how it works. To give you an example, we're re-running an article from a few years ago, "Engineering Quality Goes Bananas." I hope you find it enlightening. Let us know if you think we should have a course on this topic. If we get enough positive responses, we'll put it on our courseware development schedule.

If you're in the New York area, and can get free on Friday the 26th, I have a suggestion for you: Come hear me give a couple talks at the Agile Testing and Test Automation Summit in New York City. Details can be found below.

And finally, our 2016 webinar schedule is up to date on our website. I'm developing the presentations this month, and hope to have them done by the time I return from New York. We have some interesting and in some cases provocative topics coming up, and, of course, these continue to be 100% free, as they always have been. 

Regards,

Engineering Quality Goes Bananas

By Rex Black 
   

[Note: With the ISTQB's release of their new Model-based Testing Foundation Extension syllabus, lots of people have been asking us, "Have you ever seen this done in real life?" In fact, we have. Rex has worked with a client to build a model-based testing tool, and this article describes how it works.]

Arrowhead Electronic Healthcare has been creating eDiarys on handheld devices since 1999. Arrowhead helps pharmaceutical research and marketing organizations document important information about how their products are being used in patients' homes.

ePRO-LOG is Arrowhead's third generation eDiary product. The primary design goal of ePRO-LOG is to be able to rapidly deploy dairies used for data collection in clinical trials and disease management programs.

A typical diary may include 100 forms translated in 15 or more languages, and used in several locales. This results in a large number of software builds and configurations.  As a result, we needed an automated test tool to address potential risks and to automate common tasks.

The most important quality risks we wanted to address were:

We needed an automated test tool with the following capabilities and features:

This is a case study in how we reduced our risks and achieved our test automation objectives in just a few months on a total tools outlay of $0.

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