White papers

6 Tips to Get Started with Automated Testing

Automated testing will shorten your development cycles, avoid cumbersome repetitive tasks and help improve software quality but how do you get started? These best practices a successful foundation to start improving your software quality.

Driving Development with Tests: ATDD and TDD

Despite its name, TDD is a programming practice, not a testing technique. It happens to result in a fully automated suite of unit tests, but those unit tests are a side effect, not the ultimate goal. Practicing Test Driven Development is much more about setting concrete, detailed expectations in advance, and allowing those expectations of [...]

Exploratory Testing in an Agile Context

“Exploratory Testing” is a style of testing in which we learn about the behavior of a system by designing a small test, executing it immediately, using the information gleaned from the last test to inform the next. We continue that rapid cycle of design a test, execute it, observe until we’ve characterized the capabilities and [...]

What do you do when a ShowStopper escapes into production?

You are the QA manager of a company developing an enterprise application. Last week, your team released a product version, including features requested by new customers. But, it included a showstopper that already has affected about a third of customer installations. What would you and your team do in this situation? All of a sudden [...]

Test Automation: An Architected Approach

In the world of automated testing, everyone throws around buzzwords like “data-driven,” “data flows” and “error handling,” but what does it take to produce automation that is efficient, maintainable and usable? Successful automated testing requires a considerable financial investment. Simply installing an automated testing tool and recording scripts may jumpstart the initial automated testing effort, [...]

Web Performance Testing Test objectives and Real Life Monitoring

Web Performance Testing is executed to provide accurate information on the readiness of an application through testing the web site and monitoring the server side application. This is done by simulating load as close as possible to the real conditions in order to evaluate if the application will support the expected load. That allows you [...]

Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors

The Top 25 list is a tool for education and awareness to help programmers to prevent the kinds of vulnerabilities that plague the software industry, by identifying and avoiding all-too-common mistakes that occur before software is even shipped. Software customers can use the same list to help them to ask for more secure software. Researchers [...]

Choosing a Test Automation Framework

Basing an automated testing effort on using only a capture tool such as IBM Rational® Robot to record and play back test cases has its drawbacks. Running complex and powerful tests is time consuming and expensive when using only a capture tool. Because these tests are created ad hoc, their functionality can be difficult to [...]

The Reality of Software Testing in an Agile Environment

The definition of agile testing can be described as follows: “Testing practice for projects using agile technologies, treating development as the customer of testing and emphasizing a ‘test-first’ design philosophy. In agile development, testing is integrated throughout the lifecycle, testing the software throughout its development.” * This white paper addresses the following myths about Agile [...]

Qualities of a Good Software Tester

In the past, companies would recruit anyone in the company with some extra time on their hands to help with the testing process. This unstructured approach backfired and management has come to the realization that software testing should be done by qualified testers. This has resulted in management acknowledging the need for structured software testing [...]

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