RBCS Software Testing Podcast Episodes: Recent Episodes
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The RBCS podcast allows you to stay current on important topics in software testing and training. Subscribe for the RBCS software testing podcast and, about twice a month, you'll learn something new and interesting. Rex will share important lessons learned from RBCS' consulting, training, and outsourcing engagements. Listen while exercising, going for a walk, shopping, or driving, and become a more informed software tester.
If you have been in software engineering for awhile—or in fact just in the working world in general for a while—you’veprobably seen someone do something stupid with metrics. Such mistakes raise awhole bunch of interesting questions. What are the most common metricsmistakes? Why are they mistakes? Why do people make these mistakes? Are youmaking these mistakes? Why use metrics at all, when there are so many mistakes?In this talk, Rex will give real-world examples of these mistakes, explain themanagement and economic theories behind metrics, and help you find ways toimplement metrics that aren’t stupid.
Is the V model dead, crushed by the onset of agile methods? In the age of agile, are those who talk about the V model anachronistic dinosaurs? Or was the V model actually ahead of its time, illuminating best practices that now form the core of agile testing? In this talk, Rex will show how the fundamental principles of the V model can be successfully applied in the context of an agile development effort, and how the application of those principles make agile software development even more agile. Sure to stir some controversy, attend Rex’s webinar, submit questions and comments, and make up your own mind.
Perhaps you, likemany software testers and test managers, are enjoying the benefits ofincorporating a lightweight analytical risk-based testing strategy such asRBCS’ Pragmatic Risk Analysis and Management (PRAM) technique into your testapproach. What if your organization is adopting an agilemethodology? Can you still use PRAM and other similar analyticalrisk-based testing strategies? Absolutely. In this webinar, Rexwill explain the process for integrating quality risk identification andassessment into the release and iteration planning processes, and forintegrating quality risk mitigation into each iteration. You’ll return towork with a proven method for injecting risk-based testing into your agileprocesses.
What would John Connor, son of Sarah Connor, hero of the resistance in the “Terminator” movie series, say about the Internet of things, the ubiquity of mobile devices, the fact that we almost ran out of IP addresses, software that updates itself, and other signs of the coming computer apocalypse? He’d probably tell us to pull the plug, quickly! Beyond the nightmare scenario of the “Terminator” films, what are the implications of quality, and lack of quality, for the now-real situation that everything is connected to everything else? Will it be Neuromancer, “Terminator,” androids dreaming of electric sheep, or something more benign? Join us for some fun and interesting speculation and prediction on the future of limitless connectivity.
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.
Did you ever wonder why your colleagues sometimes look at you funny when you’re explaining your test results, or ask you strange questions like, “Why don’t you find all the bugs in testing?” Maybe they don’t understand what you do or even why you do what you do. In this podcast, Rex will reveal ten common misunderstandings that your fellow software professionals have about testing, and discuss ways to resolve those misunderstandings to promote better communication.
So many test tools are bought, downloaded for free, built, or otherwise acquired in a given year, but how many of those tools are still successfully in use four or five years later? It’s a depressingly small percentage. Many times, the root cause of tool failure was failing to understand the problem you were trying to solve with the tool in the first place. In this webinar, Rex will describe a straightforward process that you can use to ensure that you capture a detailed set of requirements for your test tool, which can be used to evaluate tools and vendors. By applying this process, you can improve your chances of avoiding the “failed test tool” syndrome!
In this month’s webinar, we are happy to welcome guest speaker, Adam Leon Smith. Adam is CTO of Dragonfly and is focused on testing, quality and AI. With two decades experience in environments, development, testing, quality and project delivery in addition to commercial experience, he is the chair of the British Computer Society's Special Interest Group in software testing, and works with international standardization committees developing AI and quality-related standards.
AI is a complex topic and is the biggest technical renaissance to impact testing for at least two decades. Adam will talk about intrinsic quality issues with AI, challenges in testing AI-based systems, and new techniques and methods. In addition, he will cover emerging AI-enhanced testing tools that are yet to get much coverage.
How many times have you heard statements like, “How did we miss this in test”, “This defect doesn’t happen on my machine”, “We do not need automation”, or “We are waiting on testing to give us the green light”? Far too often, teams are spending a lot of time diving into discussions that they no longer need to have. This builds frustration, affects team alignment, and can potentially impact the quality and milestones of the project. Through the years, we have seen a need for processes, tools, and old-school approaches to change. Discussions we needed to have years ago are no longer the same now. There is a need for strategic changes in how we operate within a project and how we communicate across teams.
With over 25 years of experience in IT, Mike Lyles has held various roles: from developer, project management office, development management, and ultimately testing. He has witnessed the paradigm shift required to measure success on teams and the speed at which we must reach goals as compared to the past. And most importantly, he has taken part in discussions which are losing their relevancy and need a major overhaul in our workforce today.
Join the discussion, between Rex and Mike, as they discuss many of the well-known phrases, philosophies, and theories around testing of years past, and how that we must overcome the obstacles to be successful today.
We are inundated by scads of mixed messages about software development, testing, quality, and delivery today. There are the Agile Manifesto and principles, SCRUM, Kanban, Scaled Agile Framework, the book - How Google Tests Software, the tech talk - Test is Dead, murmurs about achieving 100% automation, goals of delivering faster and more frequently to customers, the idea that we can solve every problem with DevOps, and so on. Some of these messages leave organizations confused about the value of testing, and testers wondering if they have a career path at all. We indeed are at a critical juncture in the quality and testing space, and if we aren't careful, we could be joining the dodo and the dinosaurs.
How will we survive all this? Dawn believes the heart of the issue is in becoming truly agile in our beliefs, approaches, and attitudes about testing. Without the flexibility to serve the needs of our teams and organizations TODAY (and tomorrow!), we should be concerned. So, what is the true meaning of agility for testers? Does it mean doing "Agile" things? Following SCRUM? Doing DevOps? Etc.? Dawn doesn't think so. Please join Dawn to take a deep dive into what true agility could look like for testers and teams moving forward!
In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex welcomes Gio Lodi to discuss how to adopt a Test-Driven Development mindset followed by a Q&A opportunity. We changed the start time of this month’s webinar to 5:00 PM Central in order to allow for this multi-continent session. After all, it’s 2 o’clock somewhere!
Test-Driven Development (TDD), is a software development technique that flips the testing process on its head: rather than testing after the product is done, developers build tests first and use the failure as a guide to write the necessary code. TDD's immediate benefit is that it gives better test coverage, but there are more beneficial second order effects that come when applying it consistently. Moving in this step-by-step, feedback driven process improves the team productivity and results in a malleable software design. In this presentation, we'll look at how to bring this mindset that focuses on iteration and feedback in all the areas of software and product development.
Gio Lodi is the author of Test-Driven Development in Swift. He's been exploring testing and automation since 2011, when he encountered TDD while working on a startup with his University housemates. Gio publishes his findings in his blog and with presentations such as this one. He lives in an Australian beach town with his wife and two little children, and works remotely as mobile infrastructure engineer at Automattic, where he helps teams working on apps such as WordPress ship quality code on a schedule.
“What Gets Measured Gets Managed.” Jamie Mitchell explains, “I have heard this since the first day I got into software. Management wants metrics. The managers would tell us that it allowed them to maximize our effort and the organizational profits. The more cynical of us always said that it was to make sure we were not sitting around drinking coffee instead of working.”
Not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything that we can measure matters. And this applies to software test automation more than in most software endeavors.
As an automator of almost 30 years, Jamie has struggled with the demand for metrics from management for most of his career. Most of the metrics that he has been forced to collect were—in his humble opinion—not only worthless, but also misleading and subject to manipulation by those who wanted to prove their point (no matter what that point was.)
Join the discussion, between Rex and Jamie, as they cover various kinds of metrics that have been suggested for automation.
Shift left. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Continuous deployment. DevOps. What is all this stuff and what does it mean for you as the tester? In this keynote, Rex Black will explain these concepts and their test implications. He’ll then describe the emerging role of the SDET (Software Development Engineering in Test, also called SET) and what SDETs do. Yes, being an SDET is about test automation, but it’s about a lot more than that, and Rex will give you some examples of things you can expect to do as an SDET in a shift left world over the coming decade. Don’t worry. Life as a tester in the SDET reality is gonna be fun and exciting, and Rex will give you some ideas how.
TMMi has become the leading model for test process improvement, but how are organizations adopting TMMi and what issues are they addressing? Join us as we welcome guest presenter, Martin Adcock, Managing Director of Experimentus who have been helping organizations to deliver TMMi based solutions for over 14 years, as he explores how organizations have adopted TMMi and are using it to improve their test process and give them a competitive edge.
Join Rex Black and Rob Sabourin for a lively back-and-forth on the topic followed by a Q&A opportunity. Rob observes that, today, many software testers are challenged to quickly identify product quality concerns amidst turbulent project contexts. Business, technology, and organizational factors change frequently. Testers are forced to continuously adapt, to think on their feet, and to provide stakeholders, team members and even system users with meaningful feedback about quality concerns, and operational readiness.There are many different test automation technologies which can facilitate the control and observation of software. Rob notes that, among his customers, test automation technologies are mainly limited to implementing automated verification checks, as part of regression suites, in continuous integration and deployment processes.This webinar will address the problem of how test automation tools, methods, and techniques can be effectively used to facilitate, and improve the efficiency of, exploratory testing.Robert Sabourin has more than thirty-eight years of management experience, leading teams of software development professionals. A well-respected member of the software engineering community, Robert has managed, trained, mentored, and coached thousands of top professionals in the field. He frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization. The author of I am a Bug! the popular software testing children’s book, Robert is an adjunct professor of Software Engineering at McGill University. Robert is the principal consultant (&president/janitor) of AmiBug.Com, Inc.
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.
You may have heard the saying “The only constant on any project is change.” Yet the prospect of change is rarely welcomed—either personally or professionally. How is it that we still believe that these changes apply to others but not to us? Julie Gardiner says that now is the time to re-evaluate and transform how we test in order to deliver more value to organizations—from a people, processes, and tools perspective. She examines, how we’ve gotten to this stage in terms of our role and what skills are vital for us to be prepared for the next stage.
You know that testing and quality is important, right? Okay, prove it. Exactly how much money do you think testing saves? Yes, that’s right saves. Testing is often thought of as a regrettable cost center, something that must be funded to avoid some dimly-understood “bad stuff that could happen.” In fact, software testing and other quality assurance activities save money. Typically, every dollar spent on testing saves eight dollars in the long run. In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate the use of cost of quality, a technique known for over 50 years, using a real world case study and a spreadsheet you can download and use that same day. Testers, know your value!
In this month’s webinar, we are happy to welcome guest speaker, Adam Leon Smith. Adam is CTO of Dragonfly and is focused on testing, quality and AI. With two decades experience in environments, development, testing, quality and project delivery in addition to commercial experience, he is the chair of the British Computer Society's Special Interest Group in software testing, and works with international standardization committees developing AI and quality-related standards.
AI is a complex topic and is the biggest technical renaissance to impact testing for at least two decades. Adam will talk about intrinsic quality issues with AI, challenges in testing AI-based systems, and new techniques and methods. In addition, he will cover emerging AI-enhanced testing tools that are yet to get much coverage.
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!
Automobiles can have millions of lines of code in them, and some of that code can have safety-critical implications. Various standards apply to safety-critical automotive code, dictating the level of code coverage required: statement, decision (or branch), or modified condition/decision coverage. To celebrate the launch of our new Automotive Software Testing course, we’re offering this free webinar. If you build or test automotive software, attend to get a taste of what you could learn in this course.
In this free RBCS webinar, join Rex Black, President of RBCS, as he describes in detail what each of these levels of coverage means, how you can achieve it, and how to understand what code coverage tools are telling you.
In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex is happy to welcome José Mata. José Mata has worked over 20 years as a Software Quality Assurance consultant and manager, working in Austin, San Francisco, New York, and Paris. As a member of the American Software Testing Qualification Board (ASTQB) Technical Advisory Group, José wrote questions for the Foundation Level qualification exams. He is currently a Senior Software Test Engineer with NarrativeDx, an Internet startup in Austin Texas, providing AI-driven analyses of healthcare data.
In this session, José and Rex will discuss moving Selenium automated testing from concept to implementation and overcoming basic “gotchas” in bootstrapping Selenium testing.
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.
Join Rex and Gary for a joint presentation on how TMMi can improve your testing and accelerate your business performance since testing is a key contributor to higher profits, customer satisfaction, personnel motivation and a bigger market share.
Inclusion vs Exclusion – The Key to Building Stronger IT Departments In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex is happy to welcome Yalonda Haywood. Yalonda Haywood is a person of intention. As a professional speaker, trainer, and rebound coach, Yalonda helps companies and individuals recover in value, amount, and strength after any decrease or decline. The passion to see other’s reach their next level has been the driving force behind Yalonda’s career. Over the past 20 years, her journey has and continues to include speaking, training, coaching, people leadership and building high performing teams in the quality assurance space within information technology. In this session, Yalonda and Rex will discuss the key to building stronger IT departments including possible tension between quality assurance and development and operations teams, keys to creating a different culture that is not dependent on industry, practical steps organizations can take to make the culture shift and more.
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!
Is software testing a waste of time and money? Many people outside of the testing profession seem to think so, and, based on the relative paucity of money devoted to testing compared to other activities in the lifecycle, it’s certainly not a high priority for many organizations. Is that smart? Why do we test software? What benefits, goals, and objectives does testing serve? Attend this presentation to learn solid, hard-headed, convincing reasons why testing is one of the smartest investments you can make, and why organizations that invest in testing receive long-lasting benefits from doing so. Rex will lay out the case for software testing and answer your questions
Just like creating code for user stories, creating and maintaining automated tests for user stories have characteristic velocities. Are you measuring them? Do you know what good looks like for these metrics, and can you recognize the warning signs of a serious test automation death spiral when it emerges? In this One Key Idea webinar, Rex will explain how to use two simple, easy-to-gather metrics to calculate automated test creation velocity and automated test maintenance velocity.
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.
Performance testing is easy, right? Grab a tool, record a transaction with the server, ramp up a thousand virtual users... What do you often get? A hot mess! Performance testing is likely the kind of testing most likely to be done poorly. It does not have to be that way. Join us to learn what performance testing is not: not easy, not guaranteed, but not impossible to do well. Much of a good performance testing program is not about using the tool at all; instead it includes all of the ISTQB buzzwords: static testing, early testing, planning and preparation. Learn the basics of successful performance testing and improve your performance test project.
Is your organization looking for growth opportunities? Do feel the status quo within your firm or your industry is ripe for disruption? Are you concerned your company will be swamped by the backwash of some else’s innovation? Your organization needs to innovate. Innovation requires a way of thinking, a reliable process and a toolset to identify the problem or challenge that you are best equipped to solve while solving it in a manner stakeholders will value. Innovation is risky, so is not adequately anticipating ever persistent change. This course discusses several approaches and tools developed to enable teams to apply designerly ways that center design on your users, and enables your users to help you help them. To learn design thinking well is to apply it. This Design Thinking course puts the evolution of a product design in your hands in collaboration with a participant design team. Join us to learn about the Design Thinking approach to solving problems, which will serve you well as an individual contributor, manager or leader.
Defects and errors prevent applications and systems from delivering the value their designers and customers intended. Moreover, defects and errors present opportunities for malicious actors to undermine the integrity, availability and confidentiality of essential business data and computational assets. Many large cyber incidents (ex. Target, Yahoo! and Equifax) have reduced the tolerance of regulators, shareholders, customers and the public for poor cyber security practices. The greatest threat is directed towards the greatest value, albeit the path of attack may be roundabout. Security testing is an essential phase in the application and systems development and operations lifecycle. Join us to learn about this valuable professional development step that will bolster your career, and assist your employer’s efforts to take substantive steps to ensure their business goals are reached and risks managed.
Archimedes once wrote, “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” In Agile, the place to stand is testing, and the lever is test automation. Are you using all the leverage that lever gives you? Most organizations are missing some tricks, and not getting the full value of test automation. In this webinar, Rex will survey all the different ways you can—and should—take advantage of test automation as an Agile tester. The best news: Many of these forms of automation involve tools that won’t cost you a dime! Spend some time learning about some high-ROI, proven best practices to reduce failure costs and increase quality.
Shifting defect discovery to earlier activities (Shift Left) reduces rework and improves quality deliveries to customers. A lot of attention is paid to this part of “Shift Left and Down”, but how do we do the Shift Down? Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is the answer. A variety of techniques can be used with varying formalities, cost, and results; ranging from informal, 5-why, Ishikawa/fishbone to Cause-Effect. Which technique is the right one to use, and when should it be applied? Is your organization ready for RCA? What do you do with the results? These questions and others will be discussed by Ed Weller, who will draw on 20 years of experience using RCA and onsite training across a wide range of businesses.
Give a listen to Rex's talk with Mark Tomlinson on STP Radio. They cover the history of RBCS, the future of software testing and how AI/ML figures into it, and how to stay relevant and up-to-date as a consultant. (Hint: It's not by leaving the field for eight years.)
A typical objective of testing is finding defects, but how effectively do you achieve that objective? Fortunately, there’s a way to measure that, using a metric called defect detection effectiveness. In this One Key Idea webinar, Rex will explain how to use two simple, easy-to-gather metrics to calculate defect detection effectiveness, and also share some insights into how to use that metric to set a baseline for future improvements and to benchmark yourself against other companies.
Two Points of View at Two: Short High-impact Talks about Testing, with Michael Mah
In this session, Rex is happy to welcome Michael Mah. As managing partner of QSM Associates for over 20 years, Michael and his colleagues have assembled one of the largest worldwide databases containing software quality and productivity trends from over 10,000 completed projects. Michael and Rex will discuss defects, or bugs - and how in today’s competitive market, they can either make or break your company. We’ll discuss real world case studies and key findings from real world benchmarking and diagnostic engagements on what separates the leaders from has-beens. Michael and Rex have over 60 years of collective experience dealing with defects and their consequences, so they will discuss these important topics, and take your questions.
Selenium has become a very important test automation tool. Now, the Alliance for Quality (A4Q) has brought out a highly practical, extensively hands-on training and certification, the Selenium Tester Foundation. In this One Key Idea session, Rex Black, Project Manager for the A4Q Selenium Tester Foundation development project, is here to help you understand this certification and how it can launch you—or boost you along the way—on your career path to becoming a Selenium test automation expert. In twenty minutes or less, you’ll understand how the A4Q Selenium Test Foundation training and certification can help you progress towards your professional test automation goals.
If you are testing a simple mobile app, you may find it relatively easy to find representative test data. However, what if you are testing enterprise scale applications? In the enterprise data center, one hundred or more applications of various sizes, complexity, and criticality co-exist, operating on various data repositories, in some cases shared data repositories. In some cases, disparate data repositories hold related data, and the ability to test integration across applications that access these data sets is critical. In this webinar, Rex Black will talk about the challenges facing his clients as they deal with these testing problems. You’ll go away with a better understanding of the nature of the challenges, as well as ideas on how to handle them, grounded in lessons Rex has learned in over 30 years of software engineering and testing.
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.
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.
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.
In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex is happy to welcome Nivia S. Henry. Nivia fundamentally believes that happy people, working in a healthy environment, will do great things. This philosophy has driven her to build a 15+ year career creating and supporting high-performing teams. Her career path has included agile coaching, enterprise agile transformations, product management, and people leadership. Today, Nivia applies her hard-earned experience as an Quality and Web Engineering Manager at Spotify. In this session, she'll discuss Spotify's perspective on Quality and focus on how the organization has organically grown its test automation practice.
As a bonus to our June complimentary webinar, this month we will share with you Rex's presentation about the newly released ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level 2018 Syllabus. Listen to the session and you will learn why the changes were made, what was the process for making the changes and, finally, what are the changes!
The Agile Testing Pyramid is a great metaphor, and it can be very useful when applied properly. However, it can also lead to some serious dysfunctions in organizations that misunderstand, misapply, or misinterpret it. Are you using the Agile Testing Pyramid properly? Rex will help you answer that question, and help you resolve problems if they exist. In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn the rights and wrongs of the Agile Testing Pyramid.
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.
Many smart, otherwise-capable testers sabotage their own careers by committing one or more of the seven deadly sins of testing. Are you your own worst enemy? Come join us to discuss these seven deadly sins with Rex. You might recognize your own behaviors, or behaviors of others on your test team. In this webinar presentation, Rex gives examples of these behaviors through case studies, and tells you how to stop the behaviors and solve the problems those behaviors have created. For sinners and non-sinners alike, Rex offers ideas on how to become a testing saint.
Technical debt is bad. It’s smart to carefully manage technical debt. Defects are a form of technical debt. Do you know how to measure how well you are managing defect-related technical debt? In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate two simple defect metrics, easily extractable from any defect management tool, which can give you useful insights into what’s happening with defect-related technical debt. In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn what these metrics can tell you and how you can use them to manage your technical debt better.
In just a few years, mobile devices and the applications on them have upended the way people use computers. People spend more time than ever on their PCs, but people spend even more time on their mobile devices. Obviously, mobile devices and apps have important differences from their PC counterparts. It’s not just a smaller screen! However, does that mean that all proven best practices for testing and quality go out the window when dealing with mobile apps? In this webinar, Rex will explain what changes, and what doesn’t change, when you move into the mobile world.
Agile methods have become widespread over the last 20 years, but it’s taken a while for testing to catch up. However, Agile testing best practices have emerged, and the ISTQB Agile Working Group has taken on the task of capturing those for you. In this brief webinar, Rex Black, Chair of the ISTQB Agile Working Group, will explain where the program has been, where it is now, and how it is evolving to support Agile testers in their careers. In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn how the ISTQB Agile syllabi can help you advance your career as an Agile tester.
You know that testing and quality is important, right? Okay, prove it. Exactly how much money do you think testing saves? Yes, that’s right saves. Testing is often thought of as a regrettable cost center, something that must be funded to avoid some dimly-understood “bad stuff that could happen. In fact, software testing and other quality assurance activities save money. Typically, every dollar spent on testing saves eight dollars in the long run. In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate the use of cost of quality, a technique known for over 50 years, using a real world case study and a spreadsheet you can download and use that same day. Testers, know your value!
If you have been in software engineering for a while—or in fact just in the working world in general for a while—you’ve probably seen someone do something stupid with metrics. Such mistakes raise a whole bunch of interesting questions. What are the most common metrics mistakes? Why are they mistakes? Why do people make these mistakes? Are you making these mistakes? Why use metrics at all, when there are so many mistakes? In this talk, Rex will give real-world examples of these mistakes, explain the management and economic theories behind metrics, and help you find ways to implement metrics that aren’t stupid.
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.
Mark Twain once wrote, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. In logic, that thing you know that just ain’t so is called a fallacy. Fallacies abound in software testing, and risk-based testing especially suffers from a number of misconceptions. Are you laboring under such delusions? If so, what damage is that doing to your ability to implement the most effective and efficient way to manage the risk to the quality of your software and systems? In this free webinar, Rex will identify and dispel these fallacies, and take your questions about risk-based testing fallacies that are affecting you.
Test automation is all the rage. Spinning away in Agile lifecycles or playing key roles in DevOps pipelines, automation is supposed to be everywhere, right? However, such widespread automation is a big investment. If you want to obtain management approval for the kind of automation investments all the webinar and conference talking heads are saying you simply must do right now, you better be able to talk automation ROI. In this One Key Idea session, Rex will explain the measurable business benefits of test automation and how to calculate automation ROI. In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn how to bridge the gap between automation techno-speak and the managerial bottom-line focus.
Shift left. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Continuous deployment. DevOps. What is all this stuff and what does it mean for you as the tester? In this keynote, Rex Black will explain these concepts and their test implications. He’ll then describe the emerging role of the SDET (Software Development Engineering in Test, also called SET) and what SDETs do. Yes, being an SDET is about test automation, but it’s about a lot more than that, and Rex will give you some examples of things you can expect to do as an SDET in a shift left world over the coming decade. Don’t worry. Life as a tester in the SDET reality is gonna be fun and exciting, and Rex will give you some ideas how.
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.
If you are testing a simple mobile app, you may find it relatively easy to find representative test data. However, what if you are testing enterprise scale applications? In the enterprise data center, one hundred or more applications of various sizes, complexity, and criticality co-exist, operating on various data repositories, in some cases shared data repositories. In some cases, disparate data repositories hold related data, and the ability to test integration across applications that access these data sets is critical. In this webinar, Rex Black will talk about the challenges facing his clients as they deal with these testing problems. You’ll go away with a better understanding of the nature of the challenges, as well as ideas on how to handle them, grounded in lessons Rex has learned in over 30 years of software engineering and testing.
One important way to test software is based on the way it’s supposed to work, verifying conformance to specified behavior from user stories and requirements, and validating that the software solves the users’ and customers’ problems. This is often called black-box testing. However, another way to test software is based on the way it’s built, which is the complementary concept of white-box testing. We measure completeness of black-box testing through coverage of requirements, user stories, risks, personas, and more, and we measure completeness of white-box through code coverage. In this One Key Idea session, Rex will explain the meat-and-potatoes of code coverage, statement coverage and branch coverage, and demonstrate these concepts with a free tool, gcov. Technical and non-technical testers alike will walk away with a clearer understanding of this critical concept.
Archimedes once wrote, “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world. In Agile, the place to stand is testing, and the lever is test automation. Are you using all the leverage that lever gives you? Most organizations are missing some tricks, and not getting the full value of test automation. In this webinar, Rex will survey all the different ways you can—and should—take advantage of test automation as an Agile tester. The best news: Many of these forms of automation involve tools that won’t cost you a dime! Spend some time learning about some high-ROI, proven best practices to reduce failure costs and increase quality.
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.
While much of testing and test management involves rational decision-making, measuring quality and providing testing services to the team, there are realms of the test manager’s job where psychology meets politics to form psychopolitics. In this webinar, drawn from three decades of industry experience and materials in his best-selling book Managing the Testing Process, 3rd edition, Rex will discuss how psychology and politics can collide to make the test manager’s job…interesting. Join in the discussion after the initial presentation with your own questions and stories about testing psychology, testing politics, and plain ol’ psycho-politics!
A majority of software development organizations have adopted Agile methods, but testing in Agile projects remains a major challenge. However, some of these organizations have found practical ways to integrate testing into Agile lifecycles. In this webinar, Rex will address challenges and opportunities associated with Agile, different ways of adapting Agile lifecycles and the testing within those lifecycles, and how Agile differs from traditional lifecycles. We’ll examine tools and metrics for Agile projects. We’ll address whether Agile can be used for outsourced projects. We’ll look at different options for organizing test teams on Agile projects, and why only some of these options can work. Rex will offer his thoughts on Agile and quality, and what skills and personalities work best in Agile projects. In this updated free webinar, Rex will discuss these points and more, giving you a better shot at Agile testing success.
At first, mobile phones were limited, clunky, dumb luxuries. Now, almost half of the world’s population carries in their pockets or purses more computing power than was involved in the Apollo program that landed men on the moon—and safely brought every one of them home. But a smart phone is not just a computer. What are the implications of always carrying a computer that is also a two-way radio and a GPS location device? Does it make you safer, or put you at risk? How is the ubiquity of mobile technologies changing the world? What are the intersections between mobile technologies, crime, fraud, privacy, security, and encryption? What are the testing and quality implications of this modern, mobile world? Join Rex for some thoughts, case studies, and suggestions about the exciting and sometimes scary world mobile technologies are bringing to us.
When we do assessments, we always try to look at process metrics. In most cases, we can find millions of dollars in process improvement opportunities. In this webinar, Rex will show you how two very simple bug metrics, calculated using only two simple facts for each bug report using simple, free spreadsheets you can get from our website, can reveal millions and millions of dollars in potential process improvements. All the more reason to track those bugs! To paraphrase Timothy Leary: Tune in, download, and drop software costs.
Some people use the terms “verification and “validation interchangeably, but there are significant differences between them. Some people disparage verification, or deny that it’s even involved in testing. However, you can’t adequately build confidence and reduce risk in the software you test without using the proper mix of both. In this webinar, Rex will clarify the meaning of these two terms, give examples, and explain why both are essential to proper software testing.
Many smart, otherwise-capable testers sabotage their own careers by committing one or more of the seven deadly sins of testing. Are you your own worst enemy? Come join us to discuss these seven deadly sins with Rex. You might recognize your own behaviors, or behaviors of others on your test team. In this updated webinar presentation, Rex gives examples of these behaviors through case studies, and tells you how to stop the behaviors and solve the problems those behaviors have created. For sinners and non-sinners alike, Rex offers ideas on how to become a testing saint.
Mobile apps have more users than PC apps, and people spend more timeon mobile apps than on PC apps. Mobile apps have been around since the1990s, but the real explosion in mobile apps has occurred in the last tenyears. And, while time-wasters and entertainment apps abound, missioncriticaland safety-critical apps exist, and so quality matters. What do weneed to know about testing mobile apps? It’s more than just a smallerscreen, right? In this webinar, Rex will describe the ten key things thatmobile application testers must know. Join us for a quick introduction to theart and science of mobile app testing.
Let’s suppose you bought a car. Six days later, someone from the dealership let himself into your garage, removed the tires on the car, installed some “updated tires that actually had holes in them, and then left. In the morning, your car was there in the garage, all sad and undriveable on its flat, flabby tires. That’s clearly unacceptable, in fact even criminal, but we allow the same thing to happen all the time with software. Why? In this webinar, Rex will catalog infamous automated software updates, released without sufficient testing to wreak havoc, or at least inconvenience. He’ll then give a detailed roadmap for reducing your chances of being part of the problem.
Software quality, for the most part, sucks. It still sucks, seventy-five yearssince the advent of the programmable computer. Software bugs are aconstant fact of life, thanks to the ubiquity of software and the ubiquity ofsoftware bugs. Sometimes the bugs cost millions of dollars or kill people.Why is the reaction so muted? Rather than just accept software bugs asunavoidable, let’s ask the obvious question: Given that manufacturing isable to achieve six sigma levels of quality—i.e., only three defective itemsper million manufactured—why does software quality still suck? In thiswebinar, Rex will address some of the real barriers to achieving six sigmaquality in software, while at the same time holding software engineering asa profession accountable for not doing nearly as much as we can.
In software engineering, there have been many controversies, fads, andtechniques recently. One that has created a lot of noise—but perhaps a lotless signal—has been test-driven development. Does this mean that thetesters tell the developers what to do? Hardly. Is it even testing? Kind of,sort of, but it’s not testing as we know it, Jim. Who does TDD? Isn’t it thesame as ATDD? Does it have a place outside of Agile development? In thiswebinar, Rex will expose what every tester needs to know about test-drivendevelopment, including giving a small, simple example of how it’s done.Come confused; leave enlightened.
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.
Testing is an interesting part of the software engineering process, in that we are engaged in a voyage into the unknown. After all, if we could predict the results of our tests in advance, we wouldn’t need to run them. However, if testing delivers only an incoherent, confusing, and possibly even contradictory mass of raw findings in the form of the status of hundreds or even thousands of test cases and bug reports, then what value has testing created? In order to deliver value, testing must deliver insight and confidence to the other project participants and stakeholders. In this presentation, Rex will talk about the problems with most approaches to test results reporting and how to transcend those problems, so that everyone understands the test results and can make good decisions based on them.
How long will testing take? Estimating testing effort and duration is a common challenge on projects small, medium, and large. In this session, Rex will cover techniques that work in both traditional and agile lifecycles. How many testers do we need? How many test cases do we need? How many bugs will testing find? How long will testing take? Those are good questions, but those questions are often hard to answer. In this keynote, drawn from three decades of industry experience and materials in his best-selling book Managing the Testing Process, 3rd edition, Rex will discuss fundamental techniques for test estimation.
With the prevalence of continuous integration, many people are now incorporating code coverage tools to measure how thoroughly they’ve tested the code. However, few people really understand what these tools do, how they work, and what exactly all the metrics mean. In this webinar, Rex will discuss the use of sophisticated code coverage techniques. By the end of this hour-long session, you’ll be ready to work with your developer colleagues on enhancing your tests via better white-box coverage. Join this webinar, illustrated with examples throughout, to learn these useful techniques—and why not bring a developer with you.
Our industry is focused on developing software, and, for the last 20 years or so, we’ve been obsessed by the process by which software is developed. However, since software is still built mostly by hand, are we talking too much about how we develop software and not enough about how we develop the teams that develop the software? Here at RBCS, we think there’s been entirely too much religious warfare about SDLCs, and not enough healthy discussion of how to develop, build, and nurture our people. So, in this webinar, Rex will describe a solid, proven process for determining the skills your team needs, assessing which of those skills your team already has, and putting in place a plan to grow the skills that are lacking. Through this process, you can develop a test team that has the skills and experience needed to succeed—regardless of the chosen lifecycle.
Why do you test? Have you asked yourself that question before? Try it. Then take the next step: Identify two or three colleagues with different roles and ask them why they think you test. Typically, the lists won’t match up very well, and many times the lists include completely unrealistic objectives like, “Make sure the software works right before we put it into production, or, “Find all the bugs before we ship. Instead, in this webinar, Rex will explain a process that will allow you to create a set of clearly defined, achievable, measurable set of objectives. This process will also build consensus on those objectives within your team and across teams. Tune in to this free webinar to step out of the confusion and into clarity on this important topic.
Free tools are great, because they are always in budget, right? Well, not always, because your time is valuable. You can waste a lot of time if you misuse free tools. However, with commercial tool vendors pounding down your doors, trying to convince you to buy their gee-whiz test tool (often with a gee-whiz price tag to match), you might forget to look at the open-source test tool options available to you. In this talk, drawn from three decades of industry experience including recent consulting work with many clients, Rex will provide some case studies—and the lessons we can learn from them—in successful use of free tools. He’ll also give some cautionary tales of free tool usage gone astray.
How long will testing take? Estimating testing effort and duration is a common challenge on projects small, medium, and large. In this session, Rex will cover techniques that work in both traditional and agile lifecycles. How many testers do we need? How many test cases do we need? How many bugs will testing find? How long will testing take? Those are good questions, but those questions are often hard to answer. In this keynote, drawn from three decades of industry experience and materials in his best-selling book Managing the Testing Process, 3rd edition, Rex will discuss fundamental techniques for test estimation.
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.
Are there really four different “schools of testing? Do you have to belong to one? Or are there just different testing strategies, to be selected and blended as appropriate? Has the concept of “schools of testing promoted clearer thinking about testing, or has this concept actually created a useless schism, sowing conflict and slowing growth of the profession? In this debate, Rex Black will argue the negative side of the case, being one of the leading critics of the concept of “schools of testing. One the other side, you’ll hear one of the originators of the concept, Cem Kaner, argue for its benefits. Love it or hate it, you can hear both sides and make up your own mind.