Program Contents

09:15 Key Note: Can we justify the choice "open source tools versus commercial tools"? - Mieke Gevers, Belgium

During recent times,analysts are predicting a economic downturn which will have an impact on many industries and companies. Quality Assurance will not be immune from these effects. It is more important than ever to make sure that our testing is as effective and efficient as possible in real life.

In testing, we are constantly challenged to increase coverage and quality in our products & testing efforts, adding more automation, managing our professionals more efficient and this in a time where resources are being reduced. Sourceforce.net and http://www.opensourcetesting.org/ do provide a world of choice in which individuals and organizations can pursue their goals based on what uniquely drives them. Whether you are a developer or a tester who wants to learn new skills, connect with the community, help to build a business-application, dealing with complex interoperability or you want to setup a quality management platform including proprietary and new open source testing tools, a lot of decisions need to be made. Needless to say that decisions should be based on data and much of the data we collect today in testing finds itself on the table of business analysts and upper management, tasked with making decisions. 

Can enterprises take advantage of open source software? Is it an option for organisations to make the transition towards open source software? Which choices need to be made and why? These are just a few questions which Mieke, based on her experience with testing tools will try to answer during her talk.

Mieke Gevers, AQIS, Belgium

Has been in the IT industry for 20 years and since 2006, founder and managing director at AQIS (Agile Quality in Information Systems).

She has a Bachelors of Computer Science and started her career as a software developer, later moving on to various positions as an analyst, project manager and, ultimately, QA Manager for several different companies in the Benelux region and Germany. Until November, 2006 she has been with Segue Software, Borland for more than eight years rising from Technical Sales Engineer, Technical Manager, EMEA/APAC, Alliance Architect EMEA/APAC to Solution Architect, EMEE at Borland.

Having developed special interest in the techniques and processes relating to test environment management and the impact of environmental factors on automated testing, she is a regular speaker throughout Europe, the United States, Asia and Australia. She is also EuroSTAR’s country coordinator for Belgium and a member of the Eurostar 2007 & 2009 Program Committee. In 2006, she co-founded “the Belgian Testers Organisation and recently became a board member of KVIV and BNTQB.

She also has been working with different automatic testing tools, specialising on Performance testing and monitoring.

10:15 Taxonomy of Testing Tools according to ISTQB - Hans Schaefer, Norway

Testing Tools: What is out there. The taxonomy according to ISTQB.

Types of Tools and what they can do for you

1. Tools for test management and control
2. Tools for test specification
3. Tools for static testing
4. Tools for Test Execution and Logging
5. Tools for performance and monitoring (non-functional testing)
6. Tools for special application areas
7. Other tools

Where to go and get more information

• Tools catalogues
• Software testing journals and magazines

10:15 Open Source Test Infrastructure - Gaurav Oberoi, Rajesh Bharathan, Prathamesh Satpute - India

Test Management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources in achieving specific project goals and objectives. Efficient test management is the key to the success of any software development activity and would facilitate speed to market and quality product. To ensure that the testing activity achieves the desired objectives and to ensure the success of the overall project, a test management infrastructure should be laid down. Test management tools, which can help laying down a test management framework, can be a boon for effectively managing the Software Test Life Cycle.

Open source has emerged as the latest trend in the software-testing arena. The applicability of open source tools has grown significantly in scope, as has its usage, over a relatively short span of time. The most important benefit provided by open source tools is cost saving, as organizations need to spend nil or very less on licensing cost of the tools as compared to the commercially available tools.

Objective of this paper is to discuss an Open source Test Infrastructure, which can be laid down by various Business and Services Organizations to leverage upon the benefits provided by the Open Source community.

Rajesh Bharathan is a seasoned professional with over 12 years in IT with exposure to mainframe based systems, Data warehousing environments, Distributed applications. He has extensive experience across the entire software development lifecycle. Data warehousing and QA are pretty close to him and his current role involves heading the Testing practice, Insurance at L&T Infotech. As part of his activity he gets involved in all aspects of people, process and technology areas of QA. He directly manages teams that work extensively in Open source tools and has developed a good knowledge and understanding of testing in the Open Source area.

Gaurav Oberoi is working as a Project Leader with L&T Infotech. He has more than 5 years of experience in Software Testing. He has authored a number of white papers; those have been presented at organization level and in various external conferences. Gaurav has worked extensively on manual as well as automation testing projects. He has also worked on developing key word driven frameworks, which are automation tool independent. Gaurav has thorough knowledge of Test Automation frameworks developed by L & T Infotech and he has implemented the test automation framework for functional testing in a number of projects.

Prathamesh Satpute is

working as a Software Engineer with L&T Infotech. He has more than 3 years of experience in the IT Industry. He has more than 2 years of experience in Open Source Testing framework development. Prathamesh has extensively worked on development of enterprise level applications for Finance, Insurance, Automobile and Project management

11:30 Exploring no man's land with keyword driven testing - Martin Gijsen, The Netherlands

Testers are good at analysis and at creating tests. But few are both willing and able to create a maintainable automated test solution. Many developers would be able, but few are interested. This leaves automated testing as a kind of no man's land in between. Keyword driven testing helps because it enables us to separate the WHAT and the HOW of an automated test. Well defined keywords allow testers to read, write and maintain automated tests with ease and significantly reduce the maintenance sensitivity of tests. The testers can then focus on WHAT to test. Someone with software engineering skills can implement the keywords and focus on executing the automated test, the HOW part. You will learn:

• When record & playback works and when it does not
• What keyword driven testing is and why it works,
• How product development and test automation can proceed in parallel,
• How to define keywords so they will work for you, and
• The remaining issue of where the programmer should come from.

11:30 Automated Testing of Non-functional Requirements - Frank Wathne, Norway

We have created a toolkit for continuous testing of information web sites - ie sites that are driven by content management systems. In contrast to most applications, information web sites have a large set of non-functional requirements and few - if any - functional requirements. By non-functional, we here mean - as examples: Performance, scalability, CSS and HTML validity/compliance (WAI, Section 508), design/layout verification, content integrity and cache efficiency. The content itself has a big impact on the appearance of the web site. While the framework and rendering templates may be correct, errors in one particular article or picture might break one or more non-functional requirements. This should be detected automatically. However, tools available today is not very well suited for this kind of testing. We have therefore integrated common open-source libraries and built a simple system that automatically tests an application and provides developers and project managers with quality reports. The system can be used during development (to detect regression errors, for example) or on a production system to ensure that a given quality level is maintained.

Frank Wathne is a Senior Consultant in Bekk Consulting. He has broad experience from Java development projects and content management projects the latest 6 years. Frank is a firm believer in agile methodologies and various flavours of test-driven development.

13:30 Introduction to automated testing: pragmatic approaches and tools - Vidar Kongsli, Norway

There are numerous approaches and tools available for automated testing and finding the best fit for your project can be difficult.

Among types of automated testing are unit testing, integration testing, web testing, and various forms of functional testing. Furthermore, we have a large number of tools like JUnit, Selenium, Watir, Fit/Fitnesse, RSpec, CubicTest, Cucumber, and WatiN. I will give an overview of these based on our experiences of using such tools in web application development and implementation projects.

The presentation will contain:

• Introduction: what is automated testing?
• What types of automated testing are there?
• Test ownership
• Relevant tools for the different test types
• Summary

13:30 Hudson: Introduction and experiences - Jørgen Austvik, Norway

Jørgen Austvik works in Sun Microsystems' Database Group (DBG), where he is quality lead for MySQL Server 6.X. Earlier he has had similar positions for Sun's PostgreSQL in Solaris work and for High Availability DataBase (HADB). In his copious free time, Jørgen codes on OpenGrok - and pesters the other committers with tests and quality concerns.

14:30 Performance tests with JMeter - Jan Sabak, Poland

During my presentation I would like to show how to develop simple Web tests with JMeter. The basic agenda of my presentation is as follows:

1. types and goals of different performance tests
2. performance test process
3. JMeter in general
4. basic components of JMeter
5. case study

• recording a script
• script parameterization
• test data generation
• test data analysis

I would like to begin with some theory of performance tests, stressing importance of performance requirements. Then I would like to describe performance test process. Five steps one must make to do testing right; from test planning to test data analysis. I would like to describe basic components of JMeter and then show how to use it with a simple case study. During case study I will concentrate on script parameterization and test data generation. I would like to prove that JMeter is simple and nice tool, yet very powerful.

14:30 Automating non-GUI components of an application built on Microsoft technologies using Windows PowerShell - Nikhil Bhandari, India

16:00 Key Note: Test Automation Objectives - Dorothy Graham, UK

Test automation efforts often fail because of unrealistic expectations, often as a result of poor objectives for automation. In this presentation, Dorothy Graham explains the pitfalls of a number of commonly-held objectives for automation and describes characteristics of good automation objectives. The following objectives seem sensible at first and are common in organizations:

• find more bugs
• run regression tests overnight and weekends
• reduce testing staff
• reduce elapsed time for testing
• automation x% of the testing

Finding more bugs is a good objective for testing, but not for automation, especially automation of regression tests. Running tests out of hours is only worth doing if the tests are worth running. Reducing testing staff is a management issue, not an automation objective – in the majority of cases, more staff are needed, not less! Reducing elapsed time for testing is unfair as automation does not address all of the contributing activities. Manual and automated tests should not be the same; some manual test are not worth automating. Automation objectives should be measurable, realistic and achievable, be both short and long term, and be regularly re-visited and revised. Test automation should support testing activities. Examples are given of better automation objectives.

Dorothy Graham has been in testing for over 30 years, and is co-author of 3 books (Software Inspection, Software Test Automation and Foundations of Software Testing). Dot was the program chair for the EuroSTAR Conference in 1993 and 2009. She has been on the boards of conferences and publications in software testing. She was a founder member of the ISEB Software Testing Board and was a member of the working party that developed the ISTQB Foundation Syllabus. She is a popular and entertaining speaker at conferences and seminars world-wide and holds the European Excellence Award in Software Testing.

Performance and Load in Action - 2 days workshop with Mieke Gevers, Belgium

Performance and Load Testing in Action Response time issues, application slowdowns, bottlenecks, sever non-availability - whatever you call them, are among the most challenging issues for IT organizations to detect, monitor, resolve and prevent from happening again.

A Performance Test is one of the instruments that can be used to identify these issues, helping to avoid the catastrophic effects of application performance failures.

Needless to say that creating and conducting a “good-enough” load test is a challenge on its own and several conditions need to be met. During the years of field work, a methodology has been developed to address this challenge.

This 2-day workshop Performance and Load Testing in Action will give you an overview of the performance testing types, addressing the most crucial challenges you might encounter, providing you with a Performance Testing methodology and guidelines on how it can contribute to a successful performance test, including “Hands-on” – putting theory into practice! Or in other words answers to: “Where do you begin!”, “What are the pitfalls?”, “Which Resources & when?”…

Probable timeschedule for both days:

• 9:00 am - 11:00 am Tutorial-Session I
• 11:00 am - 11:15 am Tea Break
• 11:15 am - 1:00 pm Tutorial-Session II
• 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Lunch Break
• 2:00 pm - 3:45 pm Tutorial-Session III
• 3:45 pm - 4:00 pm Tea Break
• 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Tutorial-Session IV