Archive for the ‘Agile Testing’ Category

Software Testing Resolutions for 2012

It’s alwys amazing how every year the month of January sparks the desire in many people to reflect on past promises, challenges and successes. Once the moment has gone, a sense of clarity and a surge of determination takes root, and a new list of promises kick-starts a change and a passion to do well for the new year ahead.

Although this helps set about many good changes, trying to stick to these promises can sometimes prove quite a challenge!  How many of you can relate to the the goal of, “I shall join the gym and get fit and healthy”? Unfortunately for some, by February this ambitious goal is broken and by March the very idea of keeping it is mere wishful thinking!

Although harmless if broken, what would happen if the promises you made effect your business? What if your company was sold promises such as:

• Provide a code-free testing tool for QA.
• Offer good customer support.
• Ease the burden of application testing.

Now imagine what would happen if these promises were broken! The impact to your business would be quite damaging.

As a software vendor in the Application Quality Management space, we prefer to keep the promises we make to our customers. So on that note, Original Software would like to lay down a few promises this year that the testing community should also consider following.

2012 New Year’s Resolutions

1. I will focus on testing rather than scripting – why should a tester require programming skills. We believe that empowering your subject matter experts to define and execute sophisticated tests without the need to use any kind of code is the kind of promise that is worth keeping. So we promise to continue innovating our code-free solution in order to remove the burden of code-based script maintenance.
2. I will stop being the drag on Agile development teams – traditional test tools struggle to work in an Agile environment. This is mainly due to the fact that they were designed to work in a ‘test last’ environment whereas the agile model is more a ‘test first, test continuously’ model. Our promise is to support the Agile community with a solution that will provide a dynamic and efficient testing solution for your Agile projects.
3. I will not forget about the test data – regulatory compliance and data protection laws continue to have an ever greater impact upon the ways that companies do business. We want to make testing on live data a thing of the past and help you create subsets of data that retain their referential integrity, and provide a perfect miniature copy of your live environment.
4. I will stop insisting that BAs and end users should test manually – the UAT phase of your application delivery requires business process expertise in order to check that the application meets business expectations. This means relying on business users to test the new or upgraded system. We promise to supply a solution that is able to capture the business process knowledge from the lines of business.
5. I will stop pretending I can run a professional quality organisation on spread sheets and scraps of paper – it’s amazing how many companies still reply on spreadsheets and paper to manage the QA process. We promise to show you a way that enables you to unite all aspects of your quality lifecycle, across all stakeholders, from one central point.

If you have any Software Testing Resolutions for 2012 that you would like to share, we would love to hear them! Please feel free to comment back or tweet your resolution to @Origsoft.

Agile is Difficult and for Life, Not Just for Christmas!

Agile testing can be a challenging process for anyone who is either new or experienced with agile methodologies. Our research shows that some companies are true Agile (with a big ‘A’) and some have chosen to adopt a hybrid approach of agile and waterfall. There are even some that have given up on agile all together due to the challenges faced. We say: “Don’t give up on agile!”

Join Original Software for a quick webinar, just before the holiday season begins in earnest, where you will learn how to get the most from your software testing in an agile environment. George Wilson will give pragmatic advice to ensure that application quality isn’t compromised in agile. He will also offer ways to make sure that your manual agile testing is effective and actually assists in your ultimate move to agile test automation utopia!

Register today to secure your place. Even if you can’t make it, it is still worth registering so you can view the webinar recording at your leisure.

Podcast: Innovations in Software Testing

Our very own Colin Armitage, CEO at Original Software, took to the stage along with HP, IBM and Microsoft to discuss the latest trends and innovations in the world of software testing. Topics under discussion included manual testing, agile testing and how test automation can be improved. Listen to the podcast here.

Manual Testing - The Smarter Approach

There appears to be a lot of hype in the market place right now about HP Sprinter revolutionising manual testing. A revolution? Really? At Original Software, we’re flattered that HP is attempting to play catch up to our existing manual testing solution.

TestDrive-Assist has been helping manual testers across the globe maximise their manual testing efforts and is particularly useful for agile testing. It dramatically reduces the time needed to perform manual software tests and increases their accuracy and effectiveness. If you’re thinking about HP Sprinter, we suggest you take a look at TestDrive-Assist instead.

We’ve set the standard for dynamic manual testing and we invite you to learn more by registering for our webinar: Manual Testing is Here To Stay.

Will you join us at TMF next week?

Gerrard Consulting have been hard at it again as they get ready for their main Software Testing two day event. Workshops will be running on Tuesday, whilst the Summit will be on Wednesday and we hope to see you there!

If you are looking to step out of the office and have a little refresher, discovering what is new in the software testing world, how your peers are coping or even how your competitors are getting on, this event is the perfect opportunity, and the best part of all is that there are still places left!

Join us at the Test Management Summit in London, Wednesday 26th January and listen to George Wilson’s presentation, “Successful Agile Testing – How did you make this work?”.

There will be lots of topics to engage in, such as:

– Test Team and People Management
– Project/Programme Test Management
– Agile Test Management
– Test Strategy and Communicating It
– Performance and Non-Functional Testing

Remember, the event is coming soon. Don’t hesitate, register your attendance now by clicking through to the TMF website from: http://www.origsoft.com/about/events/

We hope you can make it!

The Dark Side of Application Quality Management at the TMF

Jonathan Pearson, Original Software, did a fantastic presentation at the Test Management Forum in London, on Wednesday called: “The Dark Side of Application Quality Management: Ten Black Holes to Avoid For Successful Application Delivery”.

The session was lively and Johnny impressed the crowd with his Obi Wan Kenobi Jedi Knight costume complete with light sabre for pointing at the projector screen and Star Wars sound effects. Johnny had no idea that his impressive presentation would leave its mark and he is now known by friends and colleagues as Johnny Wan Kenobi!

The force was certainly with young Jedi Johnny that day as he pulled in a crowd of 45 people, sharing his wisdom on application quality management, collaboration and avoiding a QA silo. The topic was widely applauded and many were intrigued, (or at least laughing out loud), when he introduced a new hybrid methodology between Vmodel and Agile, called Vagile! One tester present has already blogged about it: http://pedantictester.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/uk-test-managers-forum-28-july-2010/

You can also read more about the events of the day and see a few photos on The Social Tester Blog, by Rob Lambert. http://thesocialtester.posterous.com/july-uktmf

If you missed this event and would like to attend the next one, the TMF are meeting up on 27th October 2010. For more information visit: http://uktmf.com/index.php?q=node/11

Johnny Wan Kenobi

Drilling deeper into the World Quality Report

Some good headlines about emerging industry trends came out of the recent World Quality Report produced by HP, Sogeti and Capgemini, but as I read deeper, some things started niggling at me, so much so that I decided they were worthy of a blog post.

For instance:

‘Only 4% of IT professionals agree that their ALM investments are fully paying off, and only slightly more than a third said that half or more of their solutions have been fully implemented and are helping to improve application quality.’ (Pg.8)

HP and Sogeti state that ‘QA organizations need to focus on increasing the adoption rates of their purchased technologies’. This is of course great advice, but both companies have a vested interest in these users throwing more and more money at consultancy, training, and in HP’s case, overpriced and difficult to implement products, (that consequently need a lot of ‘services’ cash thrown at them).

In my opinion it would be more prudent to look in more detail at why these companies are not getting a return on their investments or managing to fully implement their products.

The answers seem to fall into three categories. Company issues, Resource issues and Technology issues, with technology resoundingly winning the prize for biggest stumbling block.

20% failed due to lack of an internal process or support from management. The question does beg to be asked – how on earth did they ever manage to purchase their ALM technologies without some form of internal support? To make ALM successful, it must touch more than just the QA team: support needs to be gained, processes mapped out and business goals and requirements defined way before you make decisions about what technology to buy. It’s really not surprising that these projects failed.

26% stated that not enough resources were invested into the adoption of the technologies. Now I could have classed this under company issues, but I think you really need to look deeper than just writing this off as a staffing issue. It could equally be a technology issue. Was it that not enough staff were trained? Was the project badly planned? Was the technology too complicated for users outside the dev/test team to adopt?

In terms of technology, a whopping 41% struggled because their ALM investment was the wrong choice of technology; it failed to integrate with other technologies or was too complicated and required specialist skills that were thin on the ground. I’ve lost count of the amount of times we hear stories like that when meeting companies across the globe. To truly embed a solution in your company, you need to empower all stakeholders. Unless everyone involved in the delivery of IT projects can collaborate using the solution, it’s just not going to work. When choosing a solution, you need to think about how easily management, business analysts, business users, developers, project managers and testers are able to get what they need out of the solution.

‘Companies prefer testers who have both strong technical skills and relevant domain and business knowledge’ (Pg.11)

Well the stats don’t really allude to that. The question that was asked was – When hiring testers which of the following skills are most important to you? Well obviously QA skills came out tops at 31%. Having a good grounding and understanding of the principles of Quality Assurance is key for testers, I’m actually more surprised that this figure wasn’t higher, but interestingly, the second largest desired skill is business knowledge (22%). This is something we come across time and time again with companies we talk to; so many of them utilise business users for the testing phase. Take SAP testing for example, business process is key. You really need to leverage the knowledge that the business users have about how the system is supposed to perform and exactly how they all use it. So many of the accounts we’ve been into have been literally banging their heads up against a brick wall trying to work out how to capture this knowledge or utilise these testers, knowing that it is impossible with their current toolset – HP is just too cumbersome to get non technical business users to adopt. Development skills 9% and scripting skills 10% are actually rated incredibly low when you consider that the market dominating tools actually force these prerequisites upon QA and make these skills imperative at sites where these traditional tools are embedded.

‘Nearly three quarters of respondents say that they do not follow [common test management methodologies]. Instead, their organisations develop and document their own best practices that are followed in the majority of development and testing projects. (Pg.10)

Different groups in the organisation may adopt their own ‘versions’ of the standard practices, and as a result, the company as a whole is not fully realizing the benefits of standardization, economies of scale, common metrics, unified reporting and asset reusability’

Not all companies are equal and each has different ways of doing business. One size DOES NOT fit all, so surely it is good for the industry that companies develop their own best practices? These companies are just using their brains and working out what best suits their own unique needs and circumstances.

Software vendors should be supporting this very obvious progression of development maturity. Why shouldn’t they be able to all work slightly differently, yet still enjoy the benefits of unified reporting, asset reusability, common metrics etc.? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that HP hasn’t built its software to be this flexible? Maybe it’s time for the dominant market player in test automation and management to listen to what businesses need rather than telling them how they should be working!

This particular bone of contention was revealed earlier this year with a survey of Application Development Managers back in April 2010. The industry is really crying out for flexibility in the way that tools allow them to work, which is one of the reasons that Original Software developed Qualify, a process and methodology agnostic Application Quality Management solution. Qualify allows businesses to map their own processes, use standard methodology templates, tweak them to suit their own needs and even run multiple methodologies across different teams and projects, with – wait for it, all the added benefits of unified reporting, metrics, re-usability and economies of scale.

Go and check Qualify out.

Blasting away market frustrations

Today we are officially launching Qualify to the world. Our brand new Quality Management solution aids business agility and unifies the software delivery process.

A recent independent report highlighted a huge amount of discontent in the market, with 84% of those surveyed stating that current products did not meet their functional requirements. Built with the purpose of directly answering these needs, Qualify unites all aspects of the software development lifecycle from requirements through to release. It is also fully integrated with Original Software’s manual and automated test execution solutions for the user interface and database layers.

Qualify encompasses requirements, planning, scheduling, resource management, test execution, defect management and reporting in one platform, ensuring collaboration and communication throughout. The methodology agnostic, entirely code free Quality Management solution, even comes complete with a smart phone interface, allowing instant access to cross-project information from just about anywhere.

Businesses now have a much better option than Quality Center from HP. One that really answers today’s business needs. Colin our CEO had this to say about the launch  -  “With more complexity in IT projects and a need to respond faster to changing markets, development teams have had to adapt the way they work, requiring processes and technology to support the dynamic nature of their businesses. The absence of a holistic solution for ensuring quality when managing the Software Development Life Cycle has been a bone of contention with the customers we speak with.”

We really think it’s quite brilliant and hope you do to. Check out our brand new Qualify page http://www.origsoft.com/qualify, where you will find links to some great resources including datasheets, a comparison document, analyst reports on Qualify and a new whitepaper with a great Star Wars theme entitled ‘What Yoda can teach us about Quality Management’

Agile Test Automation, Can It Be Done?

Join us on our next upcomming webinar, “Agile Test Automation, Can It Be Done?”
http://www.origsoft.com/webinars

George Wilson, Original Software, will be hosting the webinar this Wednesday, May 12th 2010, discussing the reality of test automation in an Agile environment.

Agile is a methodology that requires a change in the way QA and development work together. The use of technology and automation are much more difficult and finding a practical approach to testing is critical for successful Agile projects. This webinar will explore how testing in Agile is different and George will give pragmatic advice to ensure application quality.

Listen in and learn how:

*    To overcome the barriers to Agile automation.
*    You can progress into automation gradually and easily even in an Agile environment.
*    Your application quality can be managed with complete visibility.

If you haven’t already registered, make sure you register today at: http://www.origsoft.com/webinars

Disposable test controversy

Search Software Quality has published an article this week by our very own George Wilson.

In his article he talks about the need for more disposable test assets. “In the last decade the rate of business change has risen beyond anything we could have expected. With increasing software development complexity and more and more IT departments taking on an agile approach, traditional test automation has become too cumbersome for most to sustain.”

He argues that “Test automation has failed to date simply because we could not afford to throw it away. Creating any form of automation takes effort and time, when the application under test changes and the automation ceases to work you are faced with a stark choice – either maintain it at additional effort and time or abandon it. If you abandon it you are also writing off the effort and time you invested in creating it, thus bringing the whole concept into question.” (you can read the whole article here)

It’s an interesting angle and certainly a problem that the technology we build at Original Software has been at pains to rectify, however it seems George has touched on a controversial topic. Discussions about the article have sprung up all over the internet and one commenter on a Linked In Group even went as far as saying “There is absolutely no need for ‘throwaway test automation’. Where on EARTH would he get that diagnosis or term?? The whole point of automation is that it doesn’t need to be throwaway.”

We think that the whole point of automation is that it should be flexible enough to adapt so that all your efforts don’t go to waste when applications change, but what about you? Which camp are you in? We’d love to hear your views….