Consolidated List of Testing Conferences

http://nikhil-bhandari.blogspot.in/

Work hard/Smart it is up to you, But sleep well… Ranjan Das, CEO and MD of SAP Indian subcontinent died after a massive cardiac arrest in Mumbai . One of the youngest CEOs, he was just 42 year old What killed Ranjan Das and Lessons for Corporate India A few months ago, many of us heard about the sad demise of Ranjan Das from Bandra, Mumbai. He was very active in sports, was a fitness freak and a marathon runner. It was common to see him run on Bandra's Carter Road . Just after Diwali, on 21st Oct, he returned home from his gym after a workout, collapse! d with a massive heart attack and died. It was certainly a wake-up call for corporate India . However, it was even more disastrous for runners amongst us. Since Ranjan was an avid marathoner ( in Feb 09, he ran Chennai Marathon at the same time some of us were running Pondicherry Marathon 180 km away ), the question came as to why an exceptionally active, athletic person succumb to heart attack at 42 years of age. Was it the stress? While Ranjan had mentioned that he faced a lot of stress, that is a common element in most of our lives. We used to think that by being fit, one can conquer the bad effects of stress. The Real Reason However, everyone missed out a small line in the reports that Ranjan used to make do with 4-5 hours of sleep. This is an earlier interview of Ranjan on NDTV in the program. Well-known cardiologist on the subject of 'Heart Disease caused by Lack of Sleep' have distilled the key points below in the hope it will save some of our lives. Some Excerpts: 1. Short sleep duration ( <5 or 5-6 hours ) increased risk for high BP by 350% to 500% compared to those who slept longer than 6 hours per night. 2. Young people ( 25-49 years of age ) are twice as likely to get high BP if they sleep less. 3 Individuals who slept less than 5 hours a night had a 3-fold increased risk of heart attacks. 4 Complete and partial lack of sleep increased the blood concentrations of High sensitivity C-Reactive Protein (hs-cRP), the strongest predictor of heart attacks. Even after getting adequate sleep later, the levels stayed high!! 5. Just one night of sleep loss increases very toxic substances in body such as Interleukin-6 (IL! -6), Tumour Necrosis Factor-Alpha (TNF-alpha) and C-reactive protein (cRP). They increase risks of many medical conditions, including cancer, arthritis and heart disease. 6. Sleeping for <=5 hours per night leads to 39% increase in heart disease. Sleeping for <=6 hours per night leads to 18% increase in heart disease. Ideal Sleep In brief, sleep is composed of two stages: REM ( Rapid Eye Movement ) and non-REM. The former helps in mental consolidation while the latter helps in physical repair and rebuilding. During the night, you alternate between REM and non-REM stages 4-5 times. The earlier part of sleep is mostly non-REM. During that period, your pituitary gland releases growth hormones that repair your body. The latter part of sleep is more and more REM type. For us to be mentally alert during the day, the latter part of sleep is more important. No wonder when you wake up with an alarm clock after 5-6 hours of sleep, you are mentally irritable throughout the day (lack of REM sleep). And if you have slept for less than 5 hours, your body is in a complete physical mess ( lack of non-REM sleep ), you are tired throughout the day, moving like a zombie and your immunity is way down. Finally, as long-distance runners, you need an hour of extra sleep to repair the running related damage. In conclusion: Barring stress control, Ranjan Das did everything right: eating proper food, exercising ( marathoning! ), maintaining proper weight. But he missed getting proper and adequate sleep, minimum 7 hours. In our opinion, that killed him. If you are not getting enough sleep ( 7 hours ), you are playing with fire, even if you have low stress. Unfortunately, Ranjan Das is not alone when it comes to missing sleep. Many of us are doing exactly the same, perhaps out of ignorance. Please forward this mail to your colleagues/friends as possible, especially those who might be short-changing their sleep. If we can save even one young life because of this email, we would be the happiest person on earth. So sleep Well 

Testing Blogs

Software Testing Resources
• www.agilistas.org (Agile Testing Wiki - associated w/the Yahoo group)
• Association for Software Testing (New group derived out of FIT affiliations)
• FIT Testing Education (Florida Institute of Technology - Education site)
o http://www.testingeducation.org/BBST/index.html
o http://www.testingeducation.org/BBST/BBSTCombinationTesting.html
• www.methodsandtools.com
o http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=23 (TDD article by Lisa Crispin)
• www.missiontesting.com
• www.opensourcetesting.org (Open Source Tools)
• Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference - Proceedings
• Perl performance test tool - Perl::PDQ and general Perl test tools - http://qa.perl.org/
• QA Forums
o www.qaforums.com Calendar
o www.qatraining.net
o www.qajobs.net
o www.qalinks.com
o www.qadownloads.com
o www.qabooks.com
• Web Testing Tools
o Ruby - http://wtr.rubyforge.org Watir
o Selenium
• "Schools" of testing -
o http://www.jrothman.com/weblog/archive/2003_12_01_mpdarchive.html
o http://www.testingeducation.org/conference/wtst_pettichord_FSofST2.pdf
• Software Testing Institute
• The Software Quality Page
• Software Quality Institute
• StickyMinds
• www.stpmag.com (Software Test & Performance Magazine)
• www.sqatester.com
• http://www.testing.com/agile/ http://www.testing.com/test-patterns/index.html Brian Marick's - Testing.com
• Testing FAQs
o www.testingfaqs.org/t-design.html (Test Design Tools - All Pairs tools!)
• TETworks (Open source test environment toolkit)
• What is Testing
• Yahoo group for Context / Exploratory testing http://groups.yahoo.com/group/software-testing/
• Yahoo group for Agile testing http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agile-testing/
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Test Management Links
• American Society for Quality (ASQ)
o Software Division- www.asq-software.org
o RTP Chapter - http://www.rtpnet.org/~asq/
• Performance Tester and WOPR - Workshop on Performance & Reliability
• Bernie Berger - www.testassured.com (Financial Testing & STiFS Workshop)
• International Institute for Software Testing
o www.testinginstitute.com
o www.softdim.com
• Quality Assurance Institute (QAI)
o www.qaiusa.com or www.qaiworldwide.com
o www.qaiindia.com
o Charlotte Chapter - www.citqaa.org
o RTP Chapter - www.tisqa.org
• Software Quality Engineering (SQE)
o www.sqe.com
o www.stickynotes.com
o www.stqemagazine.com
• Testing FAQs - www.testingfaqs.org
• Testing a stapler, example of test case "thinking" - http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/928
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Ruby & Web Based Resources
Ruby is gaining wider acceptance as one of the leading OO, general purpose scripting languages. Check out more information -
• www.ruby-lang.com
• http://rubyinstaller.sourceforge.net
• www.rubygarden.org
• http://www.agilistas.org/agile/TestDataFromExcelToRubyHash
• http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ScriptingExcel
• http://atomicobject.com/systir.page (System Testing in Ruby)
• Web Testing Tools
o Ruby - http://wtr.rubyforge.org Watir
o Selenium
• http://rubyinstaller.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl
• http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
• http://www.rubycentral.com/
• http://www.rubyonrails.org/
• http://www.ruby-doc.org/
• http://www.projectforum.com/pf/wiki.html (free wiki software)
• http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8217
• http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/4.1.html
• http://www.mysqlfront.de/
• http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/
• http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby
• http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000199.html
• http://www.caliban.org/ruby/ruby-google.shtml
• http://www.caliban.org/ruby/
• Firefox interactions capture tool -
o http://developer.spikesource.com/wiki/index.php/Projects:TestGen4Web
Python / Jython Automation Tools
• PyCon
o Python Org - www.python.org
o Conference - www.python.org/pycon/
o Grig Gheorghiu talk on testing frameworks - http://www.python.org/pycon/2005/papers/10/
• STAF/STAX from IBM for test distribution, execution and reporting -- uses Jython - http://staf.sourceforge.net/index.php
• Marathon from ThoughtWorks for Java GUI testing (I know, agile and GUI testing don't jive, but this tool is supposed to help write acceptance tests in an agile environment) -- uses Jython - http://marathonman.sourceforge.net
o See paper submitted to XP2003:
http://marathonman.sourceforge.net/docs/Successful%20Automation%20of%20GUI%20Driven%20Acceptance%20Testing.pdf
• TestMaker from Frank Cohen's PushToTest.com -- uses Jython agents to check Web applications and Web Services for scalability, performance and functionality - http://pushtotest.com/Downloads/downloadtmdoc.html
• pyGUIUnit -- unit test framework for apps written in Python using QT (I know this is a very specific subset of apps, but the ideas in there could be generalized hopefully to other GUI apps) - http://pyguiunit.sourceforge.net/
• PyFIT, the Python port of FIT that can also be used with FitNesse. I know of no other scripting language that can do
this. FitNesse supports Java and .NET out of the box, but the PyFIT integration is pretty easy to achieve - http://www.xprogramming.com/software.htm
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All Pairs Testing - A Few References
• www.pairwise.org
• James Bach at Satisfice has written a small perl script that implements allpairs. Best part - it's free and available from his website. www.satisfice.com and http://www.satisfice.com/tools/pairs.zip. You even get source.
• www.opensourcetesting.org contains quite a few links to open source tools. It has a link to "jenny" which is another free allpairs implementation that is a bit better than James'
• The Air Academy, Six Sigma version is at - www.sigmazone.com/protest.htm
• www.smartwaretechnologies.com
• The general testing FAQ site has quite a few links as well. The site can be referenced by http://www.testingfaqs.org/ and the design tools area by http://testingfaqs.org/t-design.html. There are a few similar tools on that page.
• There is also a testing technique called Category-Partition method that focuses on high degrees of coverage. Some of these tools will not only reduce to an efficient / minimal set of test cases, but also generate test cases (templates) for you. Tcases from www.startingblocktech.com is one of these tools.
• See http://www.developsense.com/testing/PairwiseTesting.html for a description of pairwise testing.
Context Driven Testing School - Wiki
• http://www.context-driven-testing.com/wiki/scribble.cgi?read=ProceduralTestCases
• http://www.context-driven-testing.com/wiki/scribble.cgi?read=BionicTesting
• http://www.context-driven-testing.com/wiki/scribble.cgi?read=ContextDriven
• http://www.context-driven-testing.com/wiki/scribble.cgi?read=NoBestPractices
• http://www.context-driven-testing.com/wiki/scribble.cgi?read=AlternatePrinciples

• Exploratory testing - http://www.satisfice.com/articles/what_is_et.htm
• Session Based Management - http://www.satisfice.com/sbtm/index.shtml
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World Quality Report by Capgemini

How well is your organization driving software quality and testing compared to other companies today?
-Which areas in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) pose the greatest challenge to an organization’s success?
-How well do companies follow best practice standards?
-How quickly are companies adopting Agile methods?
-How are virtualized environments changing the way companies test?
-What skills do testers need in increasingly distributed teams?

The 2010-2011 World Quality Report provides insights into these questions and more. This report is based on survey findings from hundreds of testers, business analysts and developers and reveals emerging trends in quality and a forecast of how these trends will shape ALM and associated software in the future.

http://www.capgemini.com/insights-and-resources/by-publication/2010-11-world-quality-report/

Size of multi-billion dollar testing market

Welcome to multi-billion dollar testing market
Software Testing is one of the emerging areas in IT industry which is rapidly growing. Increased competition and customer demand has made software testing a key operation which demands nowadays top talents and pay packets.

The Global software Testing market is estimated to be $17 billion dollars. The market opportunity for the Indian offshore testing companies is currently $10 billion, estimated to rise to $15 billion in 2012. The software-testing arena would require 25,000-30,000 professional in the next one year as per the IDC report.





Software is integrated into every area of our lives, it's critical to the way we live.

In industry - we no longer have to justify why we need Software testers. Companies are already convinced.

Testing is attracting higher standards of talent.

Decade ago, testing was not recognized at the same level as development. Today, both billing rates and salary levels of testing professionals are comparable, and at cases better than programming professional.

Customers are more exposed to technology and will not accept anything less than perfect software.

Next generation users are more technically advanced. There is low tolerance for poor usability and poor performance.

Higher Business ROI through Cloud Based Testing Environments

Higher Business ROI through Cloud Based Testing Environments

With proliferation of multiple development environments, operating systems, browsers, distributed user base world, testing of an application is becoming increasingly complex. N-Dimensional just seems inadequate when quantifying the testing space formed by new development environments. In the past, we thought we could put our arms around the testing space. We felt like we could understand all the possible states and the resulting effect on our code path traversals. We would use our known black box testing methodologies (like boundary value analysis, equivalence class partitioning etc.) and could load test well beaten paths with our known testing tools. This is true no more. To test with all the possible permutations and combinations, need for the size of test labs are increasing on exponential basis. It is not an unusual thing to hear that various releases of an application have been pushed off as the test lab was not available for the testing teams. Cloud computing environment can surely give a helping hand by providing economy of scale for wide variety of test environments. This paper is making an attempt to explore that how cloud computing can help to bridge this gap in test infrastructures and which all market players are trying to fill this gap.

• What is Cloud?
• Why Cloud?
• Advantages of Cloud
• Typical Cloud Deployments – Examples
• Vendors providing Cloud Services
• Challenges in Cloud Deployments
• Testing using Cloud Based Environments – Benefits and Limitations

Challenges in Testing of mobile applications

Challenges in Testing of mobile applications

http://www.ciol.com/Developer/Testing/Feature/Challenges-in-Testing-of-mobile-applications/142143/0/

According to Gartner, the worldwide mobile applications market is currently estimated to be around $6.2 billion. In 2013, this market is expected to be around $21.6 billion. It is nobody’s guess that this market has huge untapped potential. For the companies that are involved in creating and testing mobile-based applications, this is the tipping point.