Monthly Archives: November 2011

The State of Application Lifecycle Management

With more pressure than ever on the application development process, IT organizations are re-examining their application lifecycle management processes.

Nothing makes that clearer than a report from Capgemini and Hewlett-Packard that finds that only a small percentage of the 30,000 IT professionals surveyed said they are getting the expected return on investment in ALM.

A big part of that problem, says Charles Li, head of testing services for Capgemini in North America, is the fact that the application development process is changing so rapidly within the enterprise. While the concept of iterative application development methodologies has been around for a while, it’s only recently that enterprise IT organizations have begun to embrace this approach to application development.

But while the developers themselves have embraced these new approaches to application development, the process for managing the development of applications is struggling to catch up. As a result, Li says most IT organizations are looking at re-engineering their ALM processes in the months to come.

Source: http://www.ctoedge.com/content/state-application-lifecycle-management

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Top six trends to drive market for software testing in 2012

Companies around the world invest more than $50 billion per year on applications testing and quality assurance, according to Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC).

Research firms such as IDC and Forrester report a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.4 percent with spending reaching nearly $19.3 billion by 2015 on testing services alone.

The following 6 trends are in the software testing industry tower:

1) Mobility Application Testing

2) Testing-as-a-Service

3) Cross cloud testing

4) Business Intelligence Testing

5) Crowd sourced Testing

6) Testing catalyzed through test data generation and management

Source: http://www.techjournalsouth.com/2011/11/top-six-trends-to-drive-market-for-software-testing-in-2012/

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Software quality: When defect tracking is not necessary

“I don’t care about your bug reports. Only the software matters,” said author and Google’s engineering director James Whittaker at the controversial STARWEST keynote. Whittaker’s presentation challenged a number of beliefs that we’ve held strongly to in traditional software testing, including the idea that users won’t accept poor quality. “Users know software sucks. They don’t care about quality. They don’t want perfect software. They want us to fix the bugs,” said Whittaker, claiming that users are better than testers at testing. This point of view is completely contrary to what Caper Jones and Olivier Bonsignour, say in their book, The Economics of Software Quality. In Quality metrics: Defect tracking throughout the software lifecycle, we looked at why some experts feel that tracking defects is mandatory for high-quality code, and in turn, customer satisfaction. In this follow-up piece, we will look at the other side of the story, the argument against tracking defects.

1. Only the software matters

2. Many defects never get fixed

3. Defect tracking is a poor way to communicate

4. Defect metrics can be misleading

Source: http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/tip/Software-quality-When-defect-tracking-is-not-necessary

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The Trials of Application Testing

未命名 Nobody likes to test applications, but we all know that if it’s not done properly some testing-related issue is eventually going to come back to haunt not just the developer, but the entire business.

Most organizations are still discovering application defects pretty late in the application development lifecycle, according to a new survey of 140 development professionals working in companies will 1,000 employees or more that had 50 or more developers on staff that was conducted by Osterman Research on behalf of Electric Cloud, a provider of software production management tools. Worse yet, many organizations are encountering the same bugs over and over again, which means application development costs are being driven up unnecessarily.

Despite these issues, most development organizations take an inconsistent approach to application testing. Some testing activities are automated, while others are done by hand. And surprisingly, many development organizations report they have trouble convincing senior managers about the value of automated testing tools.

As much as anyone values their job, nobody enjoys tediously looking for the same bugs over and over again when there is a tool that can do the same thing in a matter of minutes. That doesn’t mean that manually testing applications is going to go away any time soon. But it does mean that IT organizations as a whole could be a lot more efficient about application testing.

Source:http://www.ctoedge.com/content/trials-application-testing

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Testing Your Test Code

In the world of software testing and quality assurance, we all know the value test automation brings by improving test coverage, overall product quality and the tester’s productivity. But all of this value flows in and the return on investment occurs only when the automation code is robust and reliable enough to produce consistent results to catch product bugs. The term “product bugs” is very important here. If the automation code does not catch bugs (if this is truly because the product has reached a steady state and is largely bug free, then it is acceptable) or shows more false negatives (due to test code issues rather than product issues), there will be a lot of wasted effort including:

Test Automation Effort – code design, implementation and maintenance resulting in wasted time, cost and human resources

Triage time – involving the product team to look into the invalid bugs reported resulting in expended time, cost and human resources and more importantly the reputation of the test team

Resource Usage – machine, other infrastructure and software usage for automation execution

Source: http://www.ctoedge.com/content/testing-your-test-code

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Write sample bug testing report

Below sample bug/defect report will give you exact idea of how to report a bug in bug tracking tool.

Here is the example scenario that caused a bug:

Lets assume in your application under test you want to create a new user with user information, for that you need to logon into the application and navigate to USERS menu > New User, then enter all the details in the ‘User form’ like, First Name, Last Name, Age, Address, Phone etc. Once you enter all these information, you need to click on ‘SAVE’ button in order to save the user. Now you can see a success message saying, “New User has been created successfully”.

Here is the sample bug report for above mentioned example:
(Note that some ‘bug report’ fields might differ depending on your bug tracking system)

SAMPLE BUG REPORT:

Bug Name: Application crash on clicking the SAVE button while creating a new user.
Bug ID: (It will be automatically created by the BUG Tracking tool once you save this bug)
Area Path: USERS menu > New Users
Build Number: Version Number 5.0.1
Severity: HIGH (High/Medium/Low) or 1
Priority: HIGH (High/Medium/Low) or 1
Assigned to: Developer-X
Reported By: Your Name
Reported On: Date
Reason: Defect
Status: New/Open/Active (Depends on the Tool you are using)
Environment: Windows 2003/SQL Server 2005

Source: http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/sample-bug-report/

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Testing to get your all bugs resolved without any ‘Invalid bug’ label

The main reason for bug being marked as invalid is “Insufficient troubleshooting” by tester before reporting the bug. In this post I will focus only on troubleshooting to find main cause of the bug. Troubleshooting will help you to decide whether the ambiguity you found in your application under test is really a bug or any test setup mistake.

Yes, 50% bugs get marked as “Invalid bugs” only due to testers incomplete testing setup. Let’s say you found an ambiguity in application under test. You are now preparing the steps to report this ambiguity as a bug. But wait! Have you done enough troubleshooting before reporting this bug? Or have you confirmed if it is really a bug?

Before reporting any bug, make sure it isn’t your mistake while testing, you have missed any important flag to set or you might have not configured your test setup properly.

Troubleshoot the reasons for the failure in application. On proper troubleshooting report the bug. I have complied a troubleshooting list. Check it out – what can be different reasons for failure.

Source: http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/how-to-get-your-all-bugs-resolved/

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DOD Looks To Make A Game Of Software Testing

The Department of Defense wants to create computer games that will crowdsource the complex process of verifying software for weapons systems.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DOD’s research arm, through a project called Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV), aims to provide a "fun" way for the public to take part in software verification, a software engineering process to ensure an application satisfies its requirements, according to an agency announcement posted on FedBizOpps.gov.

"Currently, formal program verification is not widely practiced due to high costs and the fact that fundamental program verification problems resist automation," according to DARPA. "This is particularly an issue for the Department of Defense because formal verification, while a proven method for reducing defects in software, currently requires highly specialized talent and cannot be scaled to the size of software found in modern weapon systems."

The games will generate solutions that will populate a database and be mapped back into annotations that can help a formal verification tool verify a software property, according to DARPA.

The federal government increasingly is turning to crowdsourcing as a way to save money and widen the expert pool to solve complex technology problems rather than paying experts to do so.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/enterprise-apps/232200117

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Axing Google’s Gears may spark security concerns

Search giant Google has confirmed that some out-of-season spring cleaning is resulting in it killing off a number of developmental projects, including one that was supposed to convince IT chiefs to embrace its cloud-based services.

In a blog post, Urs Hölzle, senior vice president, operations at Google confirmed that it was mothballing seven of its products which hadn’t quite lived up to expectations.

These included Wikipedia ‘rival’ Knol, its baffling communications platform Wave, and Google Gears – a tool for accessing Google’s hosted email, calendar and documents offline.

The decision to can these projects would allow Google to focus its efforts elsewhere, said Hölzle. “Our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience,” he wrote.

The demise of Gears comes as little surprise. In March, Google pulled its Gears browser extension for creating offline web applications and stopped supporting new browsers.

From 1 December, Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers. “This is part of our effort to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5,” said Hölzle.

Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2127300/axing-googles-gears-spark-security-concerns?WT.rss_f=&WT.rss_a=Axing+Google%27s+Gears+may+spark+security+concerns

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Samsung skewers Apple fanatics in new ad

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Samsung attempts to undermine Apple’s mystique and its hold on consumers with a Galaxy S II ad that presents hard core Apple fans as lemmings who are so blinded by marketing that they can’t acknowledge a superior phone.

It isn’t the first time Samsung has taken a shot at Apple. The company ambushed the launch of the iPhone 4S in Australia by offering $2 smartphones in a temporary shop just metres away from the official Sydney Apple store.

The ad, which was set to premiere on Facebook Tuesday evening and then hit TV on Thanksgiving in the US, doesn’t mention Apple or the iPhone 4S by name, however. Instead, fans are shown lining up outside an Apple Store-like location nine hours before it opens. “Someone just left,” says one woman. “Why would they be leaving when we’re only nine hours away?” asks her male companion. “Uh oh,” says another guy in line, reading off his phone. “The blogs are saying the battery looks sketchy.”

Just then, a cool group of young men and women come into the line’s view sporting a Samsung Galaxy S II. The crowd is drawn to the phone, although one guy haughtily dismisses it. “I could never get a Samsung,” he says. “I’m creative.” “Dude, you’re a barista,” his friend replies. The ad also makes much of the S II’s 4G compatibility available on US versions of the phone (iPhones are still on 3G), which leads to the kicker: “The next big thing is already here.”

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/samsung-skewers-apple-fanatics-in-new-ad-20111124-1nvmv.html

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