White papers

Practices for Maximizing Value from Software Testing

It wasn’t too long ago that quality assurance (QA) teams played the leading (if not the only) role when it came to software testing. These days, however, developers are making an enormous contribution to software quality early in the development process, using automated as well as manual techniques. Throughout the development cycle, there are several [...]

Improving the Maintainability of Automated Test Suites

Article by Cem Kaner What’s the Problem? There are many pitfalls in automated regression testing. I list a few here. James Bach (one of the LAWST participants) lists plenty of others, in his paper “Test Automation Snake Oil.” [3] Problems with the basic paradigm: Here is the basic paradigm for GUI-based automated regression testing: [4] [...]

Software Test Automation Myths and Facts

Today software test automation is becoming more and more popular in both C/S and web environment. As the requirements keep changing (mostly new requirements are getting introduced on daily basis) constantly and the testing window is getting smaller and smaller everyday, the managers are realizing a greater need for test automation. This is good news [...]

Applying Models in your Testing Process

Model-based testing allows large numbers of test cases to be generated from a description of the behavior of the system under test. Given the same description and test runner, many types of scenarios can be exercised and large areas of the application under test can be covered, thus leading to a more effective and more [...]

Practices for Maximizing Value from Software Testing

All-pairs testing technique

If you’re a software tester who’s been in the field for a few years, you may have found yourself in one of the following situations: You’re working as hard as you can to find bugs in a huge system and you can’t get to everything within the deadline. You’ve already stumbled across some good bugs, [...]

Defect Detection Efficiency: Test Case Based vs. Exploratory Testing

This paper presents a controlled experiment comparing the defect detection efficiency of exploratory testing (ET) and test case based testing (TCT). While traditional testing literature emphasizes test cases, ET stresses the individual tester’s skills during test execution and does not rely upon predesigned test cases. In the experiment, 79 advanced software engineering students performed manual [...]

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