Report - Security Technical Meeting, At Sogeti, Netherlands

At the Security Technical Meeting of Sogeti in the Netherlands, I presented a topic: "The Main Challenges of Testing Today", and discussed 6 main challenges that needs to be addressed:

Technical Perspective:

1) Adding Value to the Business - we need to measure the right things, and aim with those measurements to fit business and management needs. We need also to speak the language of risk for the risk-takers to understand us, and to get clients and business involved with the testing group earlier in the life cycle.

2) Test Automation Huge systems and systems of systems pose a situation where we cannot cover a lot in our manual testing anymore. Will test automation need a boost? I believe so. What shall be the future of TA - will Model Based Testing catch up? Is TA going to be only a design issue?- Those questions were discussed.

3) Requirements Oriented Testing The testing world of today is moving into being more 'engineering' like profession. In order to do that, we shall be forced into becoming more proficient in requirements creating and analysis. How would that change our: skills? Tools? Estimation and budget? ROI? Systems quality? and maybe... lifestyle?

Profession Perspective:

1) Lack of unity and standard We should be more professional, reading more literature, learning more techniques and methods, adopting methods that have worked well in the field. We should certify and educate out test engineers, and invest in their knowledge.

2) Testing: is it a Profession Yet?We do not agree yet on the testing career path, or on the testing promotion levels both as a manager and as a professional. We should promote the TBOK, We should develop ourselves in: application domain, technical aspects, testing skills, and communication skills. Plus, as multidisciplinary test engineer is the tester of tomorrow, we must learn more domains in the engineering life cycle like: project management, product management, system architecture, etc'.

3) People as the Dominant factor of successful testing projects People have always been the dominant factor for our projects success. Since tomorrow's testers are going to be with much higher skills and knowledge (that is the demand of the market/business/clients), we should invest more in people: moral, education, certification, management - all these have to change in order to keep the knowledge (people...) in our companies. Outsourcing will also have a big weight and a factor in this investment.

Alon Linetzki
Best-Testing

Testing Experience Magazine

I would like to draw your attention to a new magazine for testers.It will be issued 4 per year (for free). Attached you will find a short introduction by José M. Díaz Delgado, Editor of the magazine "testing experience":

Dear ladies and gentlemen,We have for a long time hatched the idea of a magazine covering the daily experiences of testers and providing a platform for test professionals on the topics and trends around their fields of interest have. “testing experience” is intended to be both: a magazine and a platform for discussion.“testing experience” is the challenge of producing a high-quality magazine for professional testers made by and issued for people involved in testing.

In the first edition, we rely on a lot of experienced and well-known authors with attention-grabbing articles like Tom Glib, Patricia McQuaid, Erik van Veenendaal, Mike Smith, Alon Linetzki, Rex Black, Derk-Jan de Grood, Satoshi Masuda etc.

We hope to get the support of the global testing community by asking them to subscribe to the magazine and to make the magazine’s link known to their contacts.Please find the first issue on the link: www.testingexperience.com/testingexperience01_08.pdf If you’d like to get the “testing experience” as printed edition please subscribe on http://www.testingexperience.com/subscribe.php.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us, if you have any recommendation, article to send or just to unsubscribe! "

The first issue of the magazine had more than 13,000 downloads, and I congratulate Jose for his efforts, vision and motivation for creating this magazine. Good luck in the future!

Alon Linetzki
Best-Testing

Challenges of testing Down-scaling of systems

I once came across an unexplainable phenomena. We where in the middle of a POC, very tight schedule, and it was evening Thuresday. We decided to leave the server 'on', and not inject any transactions or events, and come back Saturday evening to continue working on it. When, after only a few hours later (11 or 12 I believe), we found out that the system carshed!

That was the fist time I saw a big system fall so hard, when not dealing with anything, just in idle state. regardless to say, that we have included from that day forward an 'Idle state test' in the regression of every release.

It brings us to the point of asking do we know to test downscaling systems? We always ask how to test up scaling ones, but the downscaling is a big issue as well. Systems are 'used' to high communication and high volume of events, and are exercising daemons, loggers, and other means to make sure everything is 'alive and kicking', but seldom do we see big systems testing trying to simulate small scale traffic.

What other issues are to take into consideration in downscaling testing?
- traffic
- buffers
- log mechanism
- memory
- synchronous things that should happen vs. asynchronous ones
- shooting 'by requests' processes and or quesries and or reports after long time

Add your own commenting this.

Alon Linetzki
Best-Testing