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Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

admin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:36:03 +0000

This is one of the best books explaining the testing in an agile development. It is written by two industry’s best agile testing practitioners: Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory. We would recommend this book to agile testers, agile teams, and the customer. It addresses the following important aspects:

What exactly an “Agile Tester” means?
Qualities/skills/expertise required in an agile tester
Need of team members with QA background in agile team
How to get test engineers engaged in agile development environments?
How to move from traditional software development to agile development
Completing testing activities in short duration iterations
Where testers can fit into agile team

This book is divided into six parts with a total of 21 chapters:

Part 1 – Introduction: This part contains two chapters explaining basics of agile testing, agile values, roles & activities of development team & customer, Tradition vs agile testing, principles for agile testing.

Part 2 – Organizational Challenges: It explains Quality philosophy, Barriers to Successful Agile Adoption by Test Teams & how to overcome these, structure of agile teams, ration of developer & tester, how to integrate testers into agile project, skills required for an agile tester, lean metrics & measurements, practical insights of defect tracking & tools, test strategy and test planning. At the end of this part, audits, framework, models and standards are explained.

Part 3 – The Agile Testing Quadrants: It explains the purpose of testing, technology & facing tests that supports the team, foundation for agile testing, source code control, IDEs, build automation tools, unit testing tools, how to drive development with business facing tests, testability & automation, tools for business facing tests, strategies for writing tests, testability & test management, scenario testing, Exploratory Testing, Session-Based Testing, Automation and Exploratory Testing, Usability Testing, API & web services testing, test documentation in agile development, In the 11^th and 12^th chapters, it describes Security, Maintainability, Interoperability, Compatibility, Reliability, Installability, Performance, Load, Stress, & Scalability Testing, Tests Driving Development, Automation, The End-to-End Tests and User Acceptance Testing.

Part 4 – Automation: This part of the books talks about the test automation for the projects using agile methodology. Why automate, Barriers to Automation, Automation Test Categories in agile approach, what should be and what should not be automate, developing the automation test strategy, how to apply agile principles to test automation.

Part 5 – An Iteration in the Life of a Tester: Activities / responsibilities of the tester in release and test planning, Creating Testable Stories, High Level Test case & Examples, combining coding & testing, how to deal with bugs, regression testing, metrics for the iteration or sprint, planning enough time for testing, testing the final to be released product, testing on staging, UAT and post delivery testing cycles are the main topics covered in this part.

Part 6 – Summary: In the summary, it talks about the some important success factors for projects using agile development approach.

Other Information:

Author: Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
Paperback: 533 pages
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Language: English
ISBN: 0321534468
ISBN-13: 9780321534460, 978-0321534460

Software Testing by Ron Patton

admin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:58:31 +0000

This book on Software Testing is for new or aspiring software test professionals who want to learn about software testing process, models and methodologies. The complexity and size of today’s software makes writing bug-free code extremely difficult, even for highly experienced programmers. This book will provide you a basic road map for becoming successful software test professional and assuring that you uncover critical bugs before the customers or end users do.

This book is divided into six parts containing a total of 22 chapters:

Part 1 – The Big Picture: This part covers topics like Software Testing Background, various development models, error case studies, verification & validation, testing & quality, quality & reliability and some other basic realities of software testing.

Part 2 – Testing Fundamentals: The topics covered in this part are: Black-box box testing, static & dynamic testing, high & low level specifications, equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, reviews, walkthroughs, inspections, types of errors in code, white box testing, data coverage, code coverage, examining the code and some essentials of testing the software application.

Part 3 – Applying your testing skills: Here, some testing types and documentation testing are discussed. It described configuration testing, compatibility testing, foreign language & localization testing, usability testing, security testing and website testing.

Part 4 – Supplementing your testing: It covers basics of automated testing and test tools. It talks about viewers, monitors, drivers, stubs, stress & load tools, analysis tools, random testing, bug bashes and beta testing etc.

Part 5 – Working with Test Documentation: Planning your test effort, test plan, test strategy, writing and tracking test cases, bug reporting and test metrics are the topics covered in this part.

Part 6 – The Future: It talks about some basics of Software Quality Assurance like CMMi, ISO 9001 and career as a software tester.

Other Information:

Author: Ron Patton
Paperback: 408 pages
Publisher: Sams
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0672327988
ISBN-13: 978-0672327988

You may buy this from Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Software-Testing-2nd-Ron-Patton/dp/0672327988/

Configuring LoadRunner Monitors on the Controller

duke — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:15:12 +0000

To use the following monitors, you must first install or configure monitoring components on the server machine:

COM+, Citrix, DB2, IBM WebSphere MQ, iPlanet (NAS), J2EE & .NET Diagnostics, Network Delay, Oracle, PeopleSoft (Tuxedo), SAPGUI, SAP Portal, SAP CCMS, Siebel Server Manager, Siebel Web Server, SiteScope, Tuxedo, UNIX, WebLogic (JMX), WebSphere Application Server.

To obtain performance data for a monitor, you need to configure the monitor from the Controller, and indicate which statistics and measurements you want to monitor. You select these counters using the monitor’s Add Measurements dialog box.

To set up a monitor, you need to perform the following:

Add a monitored server to the Controller by selecting the server whose monitors you want to configure
For SiteScope monitors, configure the remote server
Configure the monitor by selecting the measurements that you want to monitor

Creating a Vuser Script with Visual C

Raveen Sharma — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:00:50 +0000

Vuser scripts can be created using Visual C 6.0 or higher. To create a Vuser script with Visual C, please follow the below steps:

In Visual C, create a new project – dynamic link library (dll). Select File > New and click the Projects tab.
In the Wizard, select empty dll

Add a new cpp file with 3 exported function: init, run, end
Add library file lrun50.lib
Select the C/C++ tab and select Code generation (Category) > Use Run Time library (List). Change it to: Multithreaded dll
Select the C/C++ tab and select Preprocessor (Category) > Preprocessor definitions (edit field) Remove _DEBUG
Add code from your client application, or program as you normally would
Enhance your script with Vuser API functions. For example, lr_output_message to issue messages, lr_start_transaction to mark transactions, and so forth
Build the project. The output will be a DLL
Create a directory with the same name as the DLL and copy the DLL to this directory
In the lrvuser.usr file in the Template directory, Update the USR file key BinVuser with the DLL name: BinVuser=<DLL_name>

In the following example, the lr_output_messsage function issues messages indicating which section is being executed. The lr_eval_string function retrieves the name of the user. To use the following sample, verify that the path to the Vuser API include file, lrun.h is correct

#include “c:\lrun_5\include\lrun.h”

extern “C” {

int __declspec(dllexport) Init (void *p)

{

lr_output_message(“in init”);

return 0;

}

int __declspec(dllexport) Run (void *p)

{

const char *str = lr_eval_string(“”);

lr_output_message(“in run and parameter is %s”, str);

return 0;

}

int __declspec(dllexport) End (void *p)

{

lr_output_message(“in end”);

return 0;

}

} //extern C end

Objectives of Software Testing

duke — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:12:30 +0000

Below are not the only objectives of Software Testing:

- Software Testing is designed to establish that the software is working satisfactorily as per the requirements.
- Software Testing is a process designed to prove that the program is error free.
- Software The job of testing is to certify that the software does its job correctly and can be used in production.

Because, with these as the guidelines, one would tend to operate the system in a normal manner to see if it works and one would unconsciously choose such normal/correct test data as would prevent the system from failing. Besides, it is any way not possible to certify that a software has no errors, simply because it is almost impossible to detect all errors.

In a way, we can say that software testing is basically a task of locating errors.

From the objective point of view, testing can be done in two ways:

Positive Testing: Operate application or software as it should be operated. Use proper variety of test data, including data values at boundries to test if it fails. Check actual test results with the expected and see

- Does it behave normally?
- Are results correct?
- Does the software function correctly?

Negative Testing: Test for abnormal operations. Test with illegal / abnormal test data. Intentionally attempt to make things go wrong and to discover / detect and see

- Does the system fail / crash?
- Does the program do what it should not?
- Does it fail to do what it should?

Positive view of Negative Testing: The job of testing is to discover errors before the user does. A good tester is one who is successfull in making the system fail. Mentality of the tester has to be destructive – opposite to that of the creator / developer which should be constructive.