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Volume 15, Issue 2 MARCH/APRIL 2013
20
C O N TENTS
features
12
COVER STORY
PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT (AND WHY YOU SHOULD LEAVE IT TO MAGICIANS)
To build and sustain credibility, good project managers focus on managing expectations and leave perception management to magicians. Explore the difference and find out why. by Payson Hall
16
TAKING THE RISK: EXPLORATION OVER DOCUMENTATION

The loudest voice in the room might push for a stable, predictable, repeatable test process that defines itself up front, but each build is different. An adaptive, flexible approach could provide better testing in less time with less cost, more coverage, and less waste. by Matthew Heusser
12
20
GAIN GREATER TESTING PRECISION THROUGH ADAPTIVE TEST METHODS

Learn how adaptive testing provides nimble test solutions that bend and shift with the changing needs of the market and the environment. by Brooke Bowie
24
24
GREEN IT: A SUSTAINABILITY PERSPECTIVE FOR PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION

As organizations grow and diversify, they end up with a large number of IT systems. However, by quantifying sustainability metrics, they can optimize their IT infrastructures and introduce a greener side of IT. by Sunita Purushottam and Vaibhav Bhatia
in every issue
Mark Your Calendar Editor's Note Contributors From One Expert to Another
4 5 6
9 Techwell Spotlight 10
Product Announcements 28 FAQ 31 Ad Index 33
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7 TECHNICALLY SPEAKING
IT'S ALL A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE by Johanna Rothman Everyone has a unique perspective on problems at work. Help your problems make it to the top of the queue by expressing them in terms of business value.
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32
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
A MAJOR AWARD by Lisa Crispin You may remember the major award from the film A Christmas Story as that gaudy leg lamp. But, for Ralphie's Old Man, its indescribably beautiful. Sometimes, the meaning of an award is more important than the award itself.
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Editors Note
A Kind
of
Magic
Its called the art of persuasion, not the blunt instrument of persuasion. However, if youve ever watched kids TV programming after a school day or on a typical Saturday morning, you know that commercials geared toward kids can be noisy, flashy, and seemingly the furthest thing from art. You need a bowl full of totally awesome Sugar Flakes right now! But, beneath the veneer, even the most ostentatious commercials are working a certain kind of subtle magic. For instance, food artists are in charge of making sure that their products look perfect on camera. They manage viewers perceptions through trickery, such as using white school glue in place of milk in a cereal bowl, because the glue keeps the cereal from getting soggy on set during filming and, in the end, the television audience cant tell the difference. Of course, if youve ever eaten a bowl of soggy cereal, you know that perception management only lasts so long. In this issues cover story, Payson Hall addresses the difference between managing perception and managing expectations. Keeping expectations in line is a valuable workplace skill. Pulling the wool over peoples eyes can be useful in the workplace, too, but only if you work as a professional magician. Otherwise, if youre trying to manage the perceptions of your employees, your colleagues, or even your own managers, youd better start honing your magic tricks in your spare time, because you likely wont be working as a manager for very long. In their articles, Matthew Heusser and Brooke Bowie discuss the importance of adaptation in testing, with Matthew focusing on exploration and Brooke on precision. Sunita Purushottam and Vaibhav Bhatia look to the future of green IT in their article on using metrics to show that sustainability is more than just a nice ideaits also a quantifiable asset for your company. Plus, Johanna Rothman teaches us about working our way through problems by keeping an open mind and looking to others perspectives, while Lisa Crispin relates her personal experience of winning a major award that appears to be just a big rock from someones garden but ultimately turns out to be much more. We hope youll enjoy this issues articles, look beneath the surface, and maybe even take away a new perspective or two. Keep your eyes peeled for ways in which people might try to manage your perceptionsespecially if theyre not magicians by trade. Yours abracadabrally,
Joey McAllister jmcallister@sqe.com
Contributors
Vaibhav Bhatia is a certified data center associate and green IT professional with nine years of industry experience, most of it in the data center space. He has managed operations of a data center in Bangalore and large-scale data center projects and has worked on several data-center-optimizing and green IT initiatives. Vaibhav has published and presented several papers at various forums. He is currently a senior consultant with the sustainability practice at Infosys Limited.
Brooke Bowie has more than eighteen years of quality assurance and testing experience across various industries. She specializes in transforming and creating testing organizations that fit the unspoken needs of the company culture by creating powerhouse teams that have customized testing and quality toolkits. Brooke is available for corporate coaching and training and independent consulting services. You can contact her at Brooke@testimprovements.com or testimprovements.com.
Lisa Crispin is the coauthor (with Janet Gregory) of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, coauthor (with Tip House) of Extreme Testing, and a contributor to Beautiful Testing. She has worked as a tester on agile teams for the past ten years and enjoys sharing her experiences via writing, presenting, teaching, and participating in agile testing communities around the world. Lisa was named one of the 13 Women of Influence in testing by Software Test & Performance magazine. For more about Lisas work, visit lisacrispin.com. Janet Gregory, coauthor (with Lisa Crispin) of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, specializes in helping teams build quality systems. As tester or coach, she has helped introduce agile development practices into companies and has successfully transitioned several traditional test teams into the agile world. Janet is a frequent speaker at agile and testing software conferences in North America, including the STAR conferences.
Payson Hall is a consulting project manager for Catalysis Group Inc. in Sacramento, Californiaand a magician. Payson consults on project management issues and teaches project management. Email Payson at payson@catalysisgroup.com, and follow him on Twitter at @paysonhall.
Matthew Heusser is a consulting software tester and software process naturalist, who has spent his entire adult life developing, testing, and managing software projects. Matthew blogs at Creative Chaos, is a contributing editor to Software Test & Quality Assurance magazine, and is on the board of directors of the Association for Software Testing. Matthew recently served as lead editor for How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing. Follow Matthew on Twitter at @mheusser or email him at matt@xndev.com.
Sunita Purushottam is a principal consultant in the sustainability unit at Infosys. She has more than fourteen years of experience as an environmental and sustainability consultant specializing in carbon, sustainability, and supply chain strategies and e-waste management. Sunita is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society (UK) with keen understanding of climate change. She has a post graduate degree in physics (with specialization in electronics) and a PhD in meteorology and air pollution models and impacts on humans.
Johanna Rothman helps organizational leaders see problems and risks in their product development, recognize potential gotchas, seize opportunities, and remove impediments. She is the technical editor for Agile Connection and the author of many books, including Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management and Hiring Geeks That Fit. Johanna is working on a book about agile program management. She writes columns for Stickyminds.com and Gantthead.com and blogs at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com. Ed Weller, the principal at Integrated Productivity Solutions, is an SEI-Certified SCAMPI high-maturity appraiser for CMMI appraisals with nearly forty years of experience in hardware and software engineering. This extensive practical background in development has resulted in a no-nonsense, practical approach to process improvement. Integrated Productivity Solutions is a consulting firm that focuses on providing solutions to companies seeking to improve their development productivity. You can reach Ed at efweller@aol.com.
6
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Technically Speaking
Its All a Matter of Perspective

Employeesdespite their many different viewpointswant what's best for the organization.
by Johanna Rothman | jr@jrothman.com
Im in Colorado on vacation this week. My family skis, even have data, then you have a way to approach the business value though I dont. By any skiing standard, theres not much snow of the defect. here. But to a person from the equator, this would be a ton of Its the same problem with technical debt. Maybe you have snow. Its all about your perspective. an entire group of people helping you with build automation. We need to keep our perspectives when we think about our Your business case would be: These people are developers projects, too. When I go to conferences, I often meet testers in their own right. We could use them on the product instead who say, No one at my company cares about quality. What of on the build. That would give us another six people every they mean is, No one at my company cares about the defects I week on product development instead of managing our intecare about. That might even be true. gration debt, and we would be able to build ourselves. Theres When I meet developers, they a lot more to this argument, but you say, No one at my company cares could start there. about technical debt. What they When I hear people discussing If you want people to care mean is, No one at my company architecture, I have to admit, the cares about the technical debt I enabout the problems you see at last thing I want to do is to stop evcounter every day that makes my life erything and re-architect a system. miserable. Im happy to incremenyour organization, change your However, When I meet architects, they tally re-architect. So, if an architect say, No one at my company cares came to me and said, I have this perspective. about the architecture. What they idea to increase the business value mean is, No one at my company of our architecture by iterating this cares about the architecture I see way and that way, and heres the every day that makes everyones life miserable. value, and heres how I would prove it every week or two, I I could go on with managers and business analysts, but I would listen. suspect you have the general idea. Everyone wants whats best Notice the short timeboxes, my architect colleagues. I refor the organization. How do we help the organization get alize that some frameworks take a long time to prove. I am whats best, even though each of us has her own perspective? challenging you here and now to shorten that time. Yes, I am a I like to ask this question: Whats the business value of the pain-in-the-tush project manager. problem I see? How do we mesh your architect perspective of needing a Once you ask this question, its not a matter of a tester fair amount of time to develop a framework and test it, and talking about defects or a developer talking about technical my project management perspective of wanting to manage debt or an architect talking about architecture. No, its a risk? You use patterns and evolutionary architecture. You start person on a project talking about a business problem. That proving architecture with features. And once you prove some elevates the problem up, optimizing the problem to somekind of business value (there we go again with business value), thing that managementwhether you are agile or more tradiIm happy with the risk management. It really is a matter of tionalcan understand. perspective. Now, if you want to talk about defects, you can say someIf you want people to care about the problems you see at thing like this: This defect might look like nothing, but when your organization, change your perspective. I like starting with our customers encounter it, they roll their eyes and make nasty business value. Maybe you have another alternative. Let me comments on Twitter. We spend time defending ourselves on know. Twitter. I counted forty-five tweets last week alone. If you Now, Im going outside to play in the snow. {end}
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From One Expert to Another
Matt Barcomb
Years in Industry: 14 Email: mgbarcomb@gmail.com
Patterns are things to be applied, not implemented.

Interviewed by: Janet Gregory Email: janet@agiletester.ca
Applying patterns allows us to take actions from principles, instead of mechanically implementing some checklist.
At a high level, when I think of whole-team quality, I think of a When a group of individuals shares the same knowledge of certain patterns, it provides a common language for understanding and working together in some domain. Teams can visualize all sorts of things, like workflow, The team should understand that quality has various aspects and applications depending on context and that quality is more than just testing the software. team norms, product goals, quality initiatives, etc. I find that visualization helps teams come to a shared understanding or build consensus more quickly. cross-functional development team where all members feel responsible for quality and continuously work to understand and improve it.
Team members should work to understand how their particular specialties can improve quality efforts, especially when collaborating with other team members' specialties.
For the full interview, visit
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TechWell Spotlight
Featuring fresh news and insightful stories about topics that are important to you, TechWell.com is the place to go for what is happening in the software industry today. TechWells passionate industry professionals curate new stories every week day to keep you up to date on the latest in development, testing, business analysis, project management, agile, DevOps, and more. The following is a sample of some of the great content youll find. Visit TechWell.com for the full stories and more!
Hollywood Hackers vs. Real-Life Hackers
by Jonathan Vanian Hollywood seems to enjoy portraying hackers as stereotypes akin to troubled geniuses or bands of attractive rogues subverting some sort of powerful corporate or political (bonus points if its a hybrid) dictatorship that gets a kick out of limiting the personal freedoms of beautiful people and the peons (Hollywood extras and commercial actors) that cheer for them. With this in mind, its fascinating when prominent hackers adopt a larger-than-life personality that seems the stuff of action movies. In this case, Im thinking of the infamous Julian Assange, although maybe a naturally captivating character like him is always destined to play this role. Continue reading at well.tc/152-TW-Hackers.
How to Overcome the Impostor Syndrome and Excessive Self-Doubt

by Naomi Karten A lot more people experience the impostor syndrome than admit to experiencing it. Thats because the impostor syndrome concerns feelings of inadequacy. Its a set of self-sabotaging feelings that leads people to discount their skills and competencies. People with this syndrome believe theyre frauds and fear that others will discover their inadequacies. These people might have a nagging fear that everyone knows more than they do; theyre all phonies and sooner or later, theyll be found out. These feelings persist even in face of information that proves the opposite is true. Has this ever happened to you? Continue reading at well.tc/152-TW-Impostor.
In Search of the Perfect Mobile App

by Noel Wurst If you search on the Internet for what makes a mobile app successful, youll find page after page of supposed experts telling you the three or five or seven absolute musts that your app must have to truly become successful. Most of these experts agree on a core list of needs for any app to be successful, so it would seem that simply following this advice would give your app worldwide popularity. So, why is building the perfect app so difficult? Two reasons stand out: people are fickle, and technology changes just as often as the needs (often really wants) of mobile device owners. Continue reading at well.tc/152-TW-Mobile.
Anti-Patterns: Watch Out for Common Development Mistakes

by Brendan Quinn As this video from The Candlestick shows, it is just as valuable to learn from mistakes as it is to just focus on best practices. Worst practices are common thought approaches to problem solving that appear again and again and get implemented by a programmer or even groups of programmers across continents and organizations. Ever heard of groupthink? The clich is that you learn from your mistakes, but this is a costly approach to learning. From a financial and timesaving point of view, learning from the mistakes of others makes much more sense. As a developer, it is your job to not repeat common coding misdemeanors. As a tester, it is your job to watch out for those common errors. Continue reading at well.tc/152-TW-Antipatterns.
How Does Testing Fit in a Patent Lifecycle?

by Rajini Bharath A patent is a universal phenomenon; you can file one regardless of who you are or the position you hold in an organization. Some studies show patents are typically filed by men, specifically those from design and research and development backgrounds; in reality, there is nothing stopping anyone from filing for a patent. Patents typically fall into a patent lifecycle and are successful when mapped to a commercialization plan. Patents can be filed by a commercial organization or by an individual. In both cases, the importance of testing in obtaining patent approval and commercialization cannot be underestimated. If a patent is in the software testing discipline, it obviously calls for a lot of in-depth testing. Continue reading at well.tc/152-TW-Patent.
Why Is Scrum So Popular?

by Joe Townsend I have wondered why Scrum is mentioned more often by developers than any other form of agile development methodology. You might occasionally hear of extreme programming (XP), feature-driven development (FDD), and a host of others, but none more than Scrum. I wanted to find out why; whats so special about Scrum that makes it the peoples obvious choice? To find out why, I first typed the following into Google: Why did Scrum methodology win? The first article answers that question, explaining that Scrum wins due to simplicity. Another reason the article mentions is certification, and one has to agree Scrum has a variety of different certifications
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TechWell Spotlight
certified ScrumMaster, certified product owners, certified developers, etc. Continue reading at well.tc/152-TW-Scrum.
Take the High Road When Creating Product Roadmaps

by Scott Sehlhorst The biggest mistake you can make when crafting a product roadmap is not talking to customers and prospects about what to put in the roadmap. The second biggest mistake you can make is building a roadmap that schedules all the features and functions you plan to build. Thats taking the low (level) road. You want your plan, your roadmap, and your conversations to be focused on the problems people solve with your productnot the gee-wiz features of your product. Continue reading at well.tc/152-TW-Roadmaps.
about a revolution in the office environment. Businesses are being forced to implement policies (e.g., usability standards and bring your own device) that enhance the employee experience. Yet, usability is only in its infancy in terms of the importance it will play in future software systems. As the world around us becomes more complex, our ability to solve problems without software assistance becomes more limited. While an explosion of specializations in various fields might provide us with answers, this tactic can only take us so far. Continue reading at well.tc/152-TW-Usability.
FCC Launches Security Checker Tool for Smartphones

by Pamela Rentz Worried that consumers arent doing enough to ward against possible security threats on their smartphones, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the US Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Cyber Security Alliance, and others in the private sector are trying to get consumers to take steps. The FCC launched the Smartphone Security Checker, a new online tool that creates a ten-step action plan for consumers, including tips on setting passwords, backing up data, and how to report stolen phones. Continue reading at well.tc/152-TW-FCC.
So,You Want to be a TechWell Curator?

What Is a TechWell Curator?
TechWell curators are software professionals who are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and engaged in the latest industry trends, tools, and technology. Using content sourced from around the Internet, our curators compose short stories that are interesting, entertaining, sometimes thought provoking, and occasionally opinionated.
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Each curator is responsible for submitting a minimum of five to ten stories a month. Stories should run 300-500 words, with 400 words being ideal. Stories are built around and should link to articles, videos, blog posts, or other online contentboth from our TechWell Community sites and anywhere in the Internetthat the curator considers interesting and applicable to our audience. You should expect to spend one to two hours developing and writing a story. Because audience engagement is key to the success of a curated site, we ask curators to respond to reader comments and questions.
The Perl Programming Language Turns Twenty-Five

by Rick Scott The Perl programming language turned twenty-five years old this past December. Version 1.0 was publicly released on December 18, 1987, by its creator, Larry Wall. The Perl Foundation's twenty-fifth anniversary post takes a detailed look at the major elements of the Perl ecosystem and the milestones the language has passed along the way. Perl is arguably the first general purpose scripting language and certainly the one that popularized the concept as we know it today. Its choice of constructs that are useful to and make sense to human programmersas opposed to ones that map neatly to underlying machine instructionsis characteristic of the scripting languages. Continue reading at well.tc/152-TW-Perl.
Whats in It for Me?
Stories you write will feature your byline with a link to a profile page containing your photo, bio, and links to your blog , Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Readers will come to know you, your stories, and your personality. Thought leaders are born this way. TechWell curators receive $100 per story published, up to a total of ten stories ($1,000) per month. In addition, active TechWell curators receive free Wednesday-Thursday conference passes to any SQE conference and half price on pre- and post-conference event sessions (tutorials + summit). Curators submit stories to the TechWell editors, who check them for grammar, style, and punctuation, and then publish them to the siteusually within two business days.
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Why the Demand for Usability Will Continue to Grow

by Jacob Orshalick Usability is an important aspect of any software system. The superior usability of employees' personal devices has brought
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recently met with a project manager as part of a project review. I think the PM has a clue, but I left feeling uneasy. (For those unfamiliar with external reviewers coming in and conducting what is essentially a real-time project audit, having a lead reviewer feel uneasy is a bad thing.) As I reflected on why, I thought it might serve as a cautionary tale for others, so Im sharing. The heart of the issue is the difference between managing expectations and managing perceptions.
Expectations
Expectations are what people believe they will get out of a project. How much do they believe it will cost? How long do they imagine it will take? What do they think they will get for their investment when the project is complete? A key part of a project managers job is managing the expectations of project sponsors and stakeholders. Before the project begins, when it is merely a gleam in the sponsors eye, everything is possible. This is called the honeymoon phase. Everyone is happy and in love, giving no thought to the hard work ahead. No one knows how much the project will cost, but everyone assumes the cost will be reasonable. No one knows how long it will take, but theyre sure it wont take too long. People usually dont know exactly what they will get for their investment, but they believe that their business problem will be (mostly painlessly) solved by the project. This is the bliss of early project love. The gritty realities that emerge during planning and execution about costs, risks, limitations, competing priorities, resource requirements, and tradeoffs often prove more daunting than originally imagined. One of the principle roles of the project manager is working to assure that these emerging realities do not surprise sponsors and stakeholders. Managing expectations about such things as the uncertainty of new technologies; the variability of early estimates of cost and schedule; and necessary tradeoffs among cost, schedule, functionality, and quality as additional information becomes available is a tough part of the project managers job. This involves keeping people grounded during the honeymoon so the emerging realities arent such a shock. It also involves keeping an open channel for good news, bad news, and changes in the risk profile as the project evolves. Show me a competent project manager who does a good job of managing expectations, and I will show you a good project manager. On the other hand, if you dont manage expectations well, the rest of your performance is often irrelevant. Unpleasantly surprised people are not happy people. Managing expectations honestly, openly, and fairly is an essential skill.
Read those two conclusions carefully. They represent two very different meanings that can be derived from the same data. There is a particular element of perception management that is reasonable, necessary, and helpful: assuring that people understand the context of the data they are receiving. For example, imagine that integration testing in the month of December identifies 2,000 faults with the system being developed. This might sound bad. Helping to manage perceptions in this case might involve saying something like this: 2,000 reported faults in one month sounds like a lot, but I need to remind you that we are talking about a system that has several million lines of code and processes about one hundred unique kinds of transactions with a variety of interface partners. With integration testing just starting in December, we discovered that one of our interface partners had made a slight change to an interface that behaved differently than it had during earlier testing and was not consistent with our agreed-upon specification. That accounted for about 900 of the faults automatically reported by our testing tool. We are working to analyze and categorize the other faults and will have additional information for you next month, but we believe that the initial December numbers were reasonable for a project of this size and complexity and, factoring out the one interface, were actually pretty good. I look forward to providing you with more detailed information about the number, sources, and severity of faults, as well as trends, next month. Perception management of this kind can be valuable and improves communication. However, managing perceptions can be taken beyond simply providing context. When this happens, it can damage credibility.
Dubious Perception Management

One of the essential skills of a magician, con man, or unethical marketer is masterful perception management. The magician does it to mislead you in the service of entertaining you. (News flash: Magicians arent really doing magic. They conspire with a willing audience to put on a show that gives the perception that magic is happening.) The rest of those professional perception managers are trying to mislead you for their own benefit, often at your expense. What does it sound like when people are trying to manage your perceptions and possibly mislead you? It often involves avoiding answering questions or answering questions that werent asked.
Perceptions
Perceptions are the meaning we make of the data we observe. Perceptions can be tricky things. An executive overhears one person in the lunchroom saying, The Alpha Project is having trouble, and the meaning the executive might take from that could be one of the following: A) One person in the cafeteria says there is some kind of trouble. B) There is trouble.
Failure to Answer Your Questions

Q: What are the consequences of the resources arriving late? A: The team is working very hard to keep the project on track.
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Sometimes, when a magician appears to give you a choice, it isn't really a choice at all. If it generally appears to be a choice, that is often sufficient.
You might imply from this answer that the project remains on track, but that isnt really what was said, was it? The question about resource issues has not been addressed. Q: Can we please review the risk log and the budget reports this afternoon? A: Great. You may only have time to review one, though. Where would you like to start? Q: Can we start with the risk log? A: Im afraid the risk database is down today. Perhaps we should start with the budget, and we can schedule the risk log for your next visit. Notice that there was about a 50 percent chance that the fact that the risk log wasnt available would not come up. Heres a suggestion: Dont try this. When it works, it works well. When it fails, it often wont go undetected and will be taken for outright dishonesty.
Deflecting or Redirecting Your Attention

Q: Have you been tracking the frequency and severity of the quality problems reported with the requirements document? A: Although there were early issues with the document, we have instituted changes to our review process that we believe will streamline review going forward. I would like to get your ideas about how others do this kind of review. My guess is that the answer is No, we havent been tracking. However, it could be more troubling. The answer might be Yes, and it was initially so terrible that we are avoiding discussing it and are doing what we can to resolve the issue before the information becomes public. Notice how both of these possible answers provide more information than the answer received. Notice the subtle change in subject.
Summary
I think the project manager Im working with is well intentioned but a little green. I intend to work with him to get past what I take as clumsy attempts to manage my perceptions, which I currently attribute to defensiveness rather than malice. Im aware that when Im participating in project reviews, people are sometimes anxious about what I will find and how I will characterize it. What is challenging for me to communicate is that reviewers like me dont expect perfection. Complex projects always have issues. Reviewers look for the project manager to have a handle on where the issues are and a plan to address them. When I feel like someone is trying to manage my perceptions, it is a red flag that drives down credibilityprobably the opposite reaction of what was intended. If you are interested in more information about the perception management methods of con men and magicians, you might find the book The Right Way to Do Wrong by Harry Houdini (yes, that Harry Houdini) to be a fast and amusing read. {end}
The Were Doing It by the Book (Whats Your Problem?) Non-Answer

Q: Im concerned that your monthly status reporting to the executive team seems to exclude important quality and risk information. Are there other mechanisms you are using to keep senior management in the loop about these issues? A: Our status reporting is consistent with organizational standards, and the executives havent expressed any concerns with the content or format. Notice how the response doesnt really address the question and implies a challenge to the validity of the inquiry? Anyone who was ever a teenager recognizes this type of evasion and obfuscation in the more blatant forms. Most savvy parents learn to recognize these shenanigans. As a magician, I can tell you that there are more subtle ways of manipulating peoples perceptions that require more practice to detect.
payson@catalysisgroup.com
The Magicians Choice

Sometimes, when a magician appears to give you a choice, it isnt really a choice at all. If it generally appears to be a choice, that is often sufficient.
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"I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I dont know anything like enough yet. That I havent understood enough. That I cant know enough. That I am always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldnt have it any other way. Christopher Hitchens [1] Inspired by Hitchens, Id like to contrast two ways of looking at software testing. The first is straightforward, predictable, and repeatable, while the second is wild, dangerous, and perhaps a little bit scary. After explaining both, Ill provide some tips and guidelines to help steer testing in an environment that is constantly changing and chaotic.
Example 1: ProcessCorp
ProcessCorp, a large enterprise operating in twenty states, was in the middle of a transition from a waterfall approach to Scrum. For ProcessCorp, the test process was straightforward. Any given story had acceptance criteria. Testers took the acceptance criteria and turned it sideways, creating test cases that operated at the click-type-click-expect level of detail. When the build was ready, the tester would create a test run to record results. In the world of ProcessCorp, bugs came from one place: Test runs did not comply with expected results and could be traced to acceptance criteria. Test automation and training on the application were easy, because anyone could automate the cases and, likewise, anyone could run the tests to get up to speed on the software.
that it is not a real company or that I am making a straw man argument. This is the way a real client recently explained testing to me and, while we may be tempted to mock it, ProcessCorp offers real answers to the questions What is a bug? and Where does a bug come from? AdaptiveCorp does not; it requires us to develop a method that may change over time. Now, Ive painted these as two polar opposites because they represent two different ways of thinking, but the way people actually act is usually not black and white. At ProcessCorp, testers often perform exploratory testing to get results to the programmers fast. They may find half the defects through an exploratory process. Likewise, they are quick to admit that the documentation often fails to cover all combinations of the user interface and that something is happening to help people figure out whether an undocumented behavior is actually a bug or an unplanned, logical consequence.
Where Do Bugs Come From?

When I view software in a different browser and it overlaps so that I cant read the page, its obviously a bug. No requirements document told me that. It just seems sort of obvious. So, how do I know it is a bug? Where did that come from, and how do we know? I have a very simple suggestion: Bugs come from an inconsistency between the software and some expectation. In other words, the software is somehow different from what we expect. As critical thinkers, we seek out those differences and then attempt to figure out if they matter. One term for this is a consistency heuristica heuristic being an imperfect method to solve a problem, or a rule of thumb. Here are a few of the more obvious ones we use every day but rarely think about: Inconsistency with requirements: The obvious one. We have examples or definitions of what the software should do, and it does not do it. Inconsistency with past experience: The last time I used the product, it did not do this. The requirements for the feature have not changed, and now it does something different. Inconsistency with language rules: I know how cancel should be spelled, and this aint it. If I look hard enough, I could find the right way to spell it in a dictionary or the Holt Handbook for grammar. Inconsistency with user-interface standards: Open, Save, and Save As ... should go below File, which should be at the top left. I just know this. Again, if I tried hard enough, I could find a reference for you, but I dont need one. Inconsistency with comparable products: When we were making an online spreadsheet at Socialtext, one of our simpler tests was to see if a formula gave us the same answer in Microsoft Excel and in our product. Beyond simple feature-forfeature comparison, many products have metaphors you can borrow from, such as how resizing should behave. Inconsistency with claims: When companies talk about a product, they often refer to promises about uptime, crashes, and reliability. Any time we find that the software is inconsistent with those claims, we may have a problem. If the company hasnt made any claims, getting them down is just a matter of
Example 2: AdaptiveCorp
Another company, roughly the size of ProcessCorp, with something like a half dozen development teams spread over six cities and two continents, AdaptiveCorp was also starting with something like Scrum and adapting it. Instead of viewing specifications as the source of truth, the staff at AdaptiveCorp viewed them as a source of truthas if, at some point, they decided to stop investing time in arguing about what they were building, wrote down the information as best they knew it, and started working. In this model, defects are very different. Instead of coming from the requirements, a bug is, as Michael Bolton has said, anything that bugs someone that matters. [2]
Differences and Similarities

At ProcessCorp, bugs are easy. If the requirements say that the button should be Cancle and the developer wrote Cancel, well, file the bug and fail the test run. Sure, it looks like a typo, but the requirements are the source of truth, and the bug will at least force the conversation among the decision makers. At AdaptiveCorp, everyone is a decision maker. The company takes the risk that the whole team can use their judgment and skill to figure out the right thing to do in the moment, in trade for the reward that decisions and fixes are much faster. Now please dont laugh about ProcessCorp and tell me
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having a conversation with a decision maker about what the customer experience should be like. Often, the claims are implied. We may derive customers should never crash the web browser from a vague claim that quality is job number one and may internalize our job as testers as making sure that a web browser crash never happens. For a great deal more on where bugs come from during improvisation, I recommend James Bachs Heuristic Test Strategy Model. [3] Parimala Hariprasads blog post The Power of Mnemonics [4] also outlines many popular collections of these heuristics.
a script that must be completed to call a phase done. Instead, they find value in helping to get a product to market. Without specific direction, they need to find the best way to do that. The bet that AdaptiveCorp makes is that those people, in the moment, know better how to invest their time than someone else who weeks or months ago wrote a script. The bet is that by documenting what to test rather than how, the team will create documentation that is cheaper, less brittle, and possibly more valuable. It is also a bet I would make any day of the week. In a very real way, I have staked my career on it.
But, What Do the Testers at AdaptiveCorp Actually Do?

What the testers at AdaptiveCorp actually do is improvisation. For any piece of work, they meet with the customers and developers to agree on some minimal examples of passing tests. The company calls them acceptance tests but they are more like rejection teststhings that have to pass in order for it to be worth having a human exploratory tester take a look at things. Then, the testers have a piece of work called test the software. To accomplish this, they pull out a whole list of test ideas from a bag and actually use the software, looking for inconsistencies. Once they find an inconsistency, they take steps to resolve it, which may mean a conversation with a developer, the product owner, other members of the team, or a customer proxy. At some point in these conversations, the tester decides whether this is a bug and signals to have it fixed (or not). On the surface, this looks like a messy, unrepeatable way to develop software. The heuristics above are fallible. The testers need to work closely with the customers and business owners to figure out whether an inconsistency matters. Actually succeeding with an exploratory approach requires a great deal of discipline and skill. After all, it relies on real, thinking humans to figure out what to test each time. It requires not only that regression testing be more than mere script following, but also that the team to comes up with different approaches for each build based on different risks. If some part of regression checking is automated, then the automator will need to actually understand the software instead of following a pre-determined script. It requires that all testers actually understand the software and are trained. It is different, and change can be scary. Also, it works. Teams that follow an adaptive approach shift what testers spend time on, from creating documentation to actually testing the software. This change allows the team to move faster. By altering what is tested with each build, adaptive teams increase the overall test coverage of the application. (Spending a greater amount of time actually testing helps, too.) Encouraging improvisation allows the testers to see the whole boardi.e., to consider risks outside the scope of a specifically crafted requirements document. It also forces conversations that can uncover risks and consequences that testers could never find working off a script. Testers at AdaptiveCorp dont find their value in following
Moving Toward Adaptive

If your company thinks more like ProcessCorp, then I suggest you try an experiment. First, to the bottom of your test cases, add an exploratory section that contains general advice on what to attack. Over time, compare the type of bugs that fall out of the test cases versus the exploratory testing and determine whether the exploratory section would have found the bugs that the scripting tests found. Second, propose not doing test cases at all in favor of charters, which describe what to test instead of how. If you work more like AdaptiveCorp, look for opportunities to experiment with the how much of exploration. When I was at Socialtext, we would occasionally tweak our regression test process to focus on the issues of the daya new browser release, a critical new feature, or a major refactor. This allowed us to change the coverage to address the risk profile. You may find that some types of stories (e.g., create, read, update, delete) can do with less how documentation, while others (e.g., pasting of bullets and indents from Microsoft Word) could use more. Dont look for a sweet spot of how much. Constantly experiment. As I wrote earlier, my inspiration comes from Christopher Hitchens, who wanted to live his life as if he did not know enoughas if there were something new to discover about the world and about the way he did his work. Thats kind of how I feel about software testing. I may use scripts to save time, but I want my work to heavily include exploration, adaptation, and discovery. I wouldn't have it any other way. What about you?
{end}
matt@xndev.com
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References
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have always been fascinated with creating methods for efficient delivery, particularly during testing. In the 1990s, I was stretching my theories to the brink and loving the ride. The adoption of evolutionary methods brought about many solutions for better efficiency, including the idea to test smaller, more frequently, and earlier. In todays age of automation and complex integrated infrastructures, we often encounter the unresolved issue of how to get high-value testing within the condensed time-to-market window. Automated frameworks and modularized scripts provide a partial solution, but they are not independently intelligent enough to provide consistently high value or highly efficient testing. To solve this, we need to select tests that require us to examine what is needed to test within each unique increment,
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cycle, or iteration. Every change, whether done for improvement or remediation, presents an opportunity for the software ecosystem (applications, browsers, web services, and vendor software) to fail. This results in a much greater need on our part to perform high-value testing. High-value testing does not mean that you need to perform all end-to-end testing or run the full suite of tests. This can potentially create a bottleneck and dampen the velocity. To properly perform high-value testing requires a precise and often unique test response for each new change, which entails a medley of testing types, each working in concert to ensure the quality goals. This is a modern-day necessity to fully ensure the end-user experience, the ecosystem stability, and product health.
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The goal is for you to create an intelligent testing trove (security tests, functional tests, data accuracy tests, performance tests, usability tests, interoperability tests, etc.) that can be succinctly arranged and rearranged across varying sets of browsers, platforms, and hardware. This variety of intelligent tests is scalable to varying business goals and marries the quality categories to the unique business requirements to create test goals. The adapting tests are always targeted at the most relevant business and quality goals, which yield the most important results for the team to use for decision making.
Experience 1: Quality Goals

One of my recent challenges involved a two-week sprint with thirty-eight backlog items (including requested system
changes), of which most were small, front-end UI changes to multiple web applications. In this case, the test team executed all the tests and performed regression, and the sprint was given the green light. This was followed by an uneventful implementation. To our chagrin, on the day after implementation we received a call from an executive informing us that one of the two user profiles was redirecting to a broken page after login, and the other had severe performance issues, taking over three minutes to authenticate the user. This particular login page and process had not been changed by the recent implementation, and our previous regression testing had only targeted the login process of one user profile using test data. We did not test the less-common user profile (which resulted in the broken page).
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When constructing the initial user stories and tests, we knew that the login process was a critical path and should be included in regression. But, we had designed stories for general login with test data since it seemed stable in the test environment. As we learned, however, 70 percent of the generated revenue was connected to this line of business, and the production environment was conclusively different, which could render some of our test results useless. In the retrospective meeting, it was clear to me that a few key areas were being underserved, resulting in a growing problem. For one thing, the testing value was beneath the quality need, meaning that the best test results did not accurately predict the system behavior or confidently indicate that the business goals would be met in production. After I digested this premise, the exact root cause of the issues was less relevant, because we didnt have a process that would allow us to detect errors left or right of the established regression. The established regression comprised previously created user stories and tests. The regression suite was enormously inefficient and took two to three days to execute. The thought of having such an ineffective, time-expensive process boggled my mind. The production problem was revealed to be a service breakdown between the content management system (production instance only) and the middleware, which would have never been caught due to the established coverage gap and lack of testing in the production environment. From this, I concluded that there was a potential of ongoing defect migrations into production as well as unknown issues residing in the production environment that were both just waiting to be encountered by a customer. We could have used adaptive testing during production, as this method would have created a focus on quality goalsin this case, critical process flows, usability, and content.
This would have resulted in higher test efficiency and better test precision based on the goals of data accuracy, security, usability, and content consistency. Both of these experiences resulted from misplaced testing rigor, or the lack of intelligent test design because of low business domain knowledge. Adaptive testing would have allowed the teams to focus on the greater goal of the changes and to creatively fashion test solutions by combining and rearranging tests, types of tests, browser and OS combinations, or hardware configurations, according to the need in different environments. For example, high-value tests for production may encompass 40 percent usability (of both functions and content), 30 percent interoperability (of critical user flows), 20 percent security (user authentication and data flows), and 10 percent performance. It all depends on what the quality goals are for that particular test run and environment. The testing value shifts with different changes and potentially with each unique need of the code promotion.
Incorporating Adaptive Testing Methods

Here are a few ways that I have found to be successful in incorporating adaptive testing methods to gain precision:
1. Become self-adapting.
Break out of the pre-defined test scope by creating versatility and flexibility in your testing suite. You can do this by engineering a flexible framework that allows unique combinations of small, executable tests and grouping test assets based on quality goals. This will provide the ability to re-integrate parts of stories (or test cases) into new, high-value runs. You can define the new executions by precise needs and execute them in combination or independently. The core principle here is the flexibility of test assets, which presents endless options for creative execution.
Experience 2: Unique Project Needs

Using adaptive testing also would have been beneficial in another case of mine, when a financial client added a new online product to its services and rebranded old content in an effort to create a better customer experience. During this project, two decisions were made: We wanted to use a limited set of test data that represented only a fraction of users and functions, and we wanted to eliminate security testing from the scope of work. The testing efforts were from local (decentralized) teams that executed system, integration, performance, and user acceptance tests on their allotted work stream. The end of the project revealed a scattering of moderate to minor defects, which were sanctioned as acceptable in production. Upon release into production, major processing errors occurred that displayed the wrong users account information to users. This allowed an account holder to view and change another account holders information. The decision to remove security testing and usage of small-scale data limited the testing and was solely based on controlling exorbitant testing costs. If this team had employed adaptive testing, the use of smaller, more precise tests could have been shared across teams, allowing them to arrange tests per their unique project needs.
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2. Define the test goals.

Most testing, whether agile or not, requires pre-planned executions, which are largely categorized into either new change or regression testing of existing functionality. This traditional separation of test effort hinders the creative blending of testing types and methods. With adaptive methods, you can drive the testing based on the goals, regardless of whether it is new change or existing change. By combining meaningful tests together into a logical flow of quality-based goals, you can accomplish testing of the new delta along with additional regression coverage under the theme of the test goal. Commonly used goals include usability, integration and interoperability, user and data security, data accuracy, and brand testing.
3. Adapt data-driven testing.

You should support your test selections with data and analytics of past-run metrics, user analytics, and test-failure analysis. This will allow the team to clearly see testing needs and define test goals. For example, user analytics might reveal that 60 percent of your customers used a tablet device to access
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your site, and 40 percent of the existing customers use mobile devices to post product opinions on social media. This data tells you that the tablet presentation (usability and branding) will be important to test, and the ease of launching to social media from a mobile phone (interoperability and performance) should also be precisely targeted by combining tests that focus on these areas.
tion. What were once called regression, performance, and security tests are now combined needs that can be incorporated into a standard testing process. This method serves best when done in a lightweight and self-adapting way. Adaptive testing provides nimble test solutions that bend and shift with the changing needs of the market or the environment. {end}
4. Perform evergreen maintenance.

Continuous integration of the testing baseline is best for adaptive testing, because you can rely on your test execution selections to be relevant and up to date. You dont want several generations of automation or old test cases hanging around that can be inadvertently selected or rendered inefficient by not being execution ready. Ongoing fluid development, testing, and test-baseline integration (of retrospective feedback, production fixes, planned change, etc.) will decrease the need for large maintenance windows and provide a foundation for continuous testing.
brooke@testimprovements.com
This article first appeared on AgileConnection.com.
5. Extend testing to production and beyond.

Testing based on adaptive goals is valuable across the entire lifecycle and lifespan; however, the greatest benefit can be seen during production. The results of early cycle, preproduction testing can lead to a high-performing live product. The product owners will thank you because you are assisting them with customer retention. Technology staff will thank you for providing aid in an accelerated discovery, fix, and deploy cycle.
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6. Monitor and measure.

You should measure test velocity and precision by capturing test execution metrics and comparing them to the test goals and the defect types. Production monitoring and issue resolution should be fed into the test baseline and utilized as a production quality metric. This can be used to identify potential areas of risk and aid with test selection. Common metrics that indicate quality and health include the number and criticality of defect hotspots, the time between defect identification and recovery time, and the time between test execution and test goal comparisons.
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refers to environmentally sustainable computing and the optimal use of information and communication technology (ICT) to manage the environmental sustainability of enterprise operations, supply chain, products, services, and resources throughout their lifecycle. [1] Organizations often fail to quantify the green benefits of portfolio optimization and thus miss a significant opportunity to articulate its sustainable value. The Carbon Disclosure Project has developed guidelines to calculate the carbon footprint of ICT-sector companies [2], and the International Telecommunication Union [3] is developing guidelines to help the ICT sector embrace sustainability in all aspects of its operations. These developments should nudge more organizations to look into the greening of their IT operations. As seen in figure 1, most IT projects can be classified into the following broad areas: application, operating system, hardware, network, data center (power, cooling, and facility), monitoring, security, costs, and processes and management. The elements in the border encompass all the individual layers as monitoring can be for the physical data center, network, or application. Similarly cost optimization can be a project for just one of the layers or for overall IT cost. A data center consolidation project may be undertaken to reduce cost and overhead and to provide reliable services to employees and customers. While these are valid reasons for this project, the green benefits are equally important. A project of this scale usually involves rationalizing several applications, discarding hardware, and trimming resources. If no environmental baseline is taken at the beginning of the project, then the sustainability benefits cannot be measured or reported at the end, and an additional benefit will be lost.
In addition, employees generally feel good about contributing to a greener environment through their daily work. Green initiatives can be leveraged for the companys participation in voluntary disclosure frameworks like the Carbon Disclosure Project to improve brand reputation. There is also motivation to achieve a little more while executing projects due to the added measurements and metrics that must be reported, and the process makes a stronger business case for streamlined IT operations. Lastly, organizations will find themselves in a better position to be compliant with upcoming regulations, such as those enforced by market regulators in certain locations that require organizations to publish sustainability reports or carbon taxation norms.
Case Study
A telecommunication service provider wanted to cut costs, increase capacity, and reduce the carbon footprint of its IT infrastructure. The provider understood that the data center and its server, storage, and network assets supported applications. The organizations IT infrastructure and operations group took a unique approach. They focused on rationalizing the portfolio first and then focused on consolidating, optimizing, and virtualizing the remaining infrastructure. The benefits were significant. From January to December, the organization retired 127 applications, decommissioned or redeployed more than 2,239 servers, and freed up 291,042 GB of storage. This translated into $28 million of re-deployable assets, a $20 million reduction in operating costs, and a reduction of data center-related carbon emissions by 10,450 metric tons. [4]
Aspects of an Application Portfolio

An application portfolio consists of the infrastructure (IT and facility), the IT service management (ITSM) process, and the IT back office. The infrastructure hosts the IT applications. This comprises the data center, network, servers, and storage for environments like test, development, production, and disaster recovery. The ITSM process defines methods, policies, and SLAs and impacts sustainability at several levels, including resources, people, and infrastructure. The IT back office has various teams supporting the application, from development and test teams to the service desk and the governance team for the process and applications. (See figure 2.) It is very difficult to isolate the energy use of applications from that of the IT and facilities infrastructure, as they are closely entwined. Some steps that can be taken toward portfolio optimization include: Identifying the application carbon footprint and energy cost Transforming offices to reduce energy and paper use Re-engineering ITSM processes to reduce environmental impact Conducting portfolio rationalization Optimizing IT infrastructure and data center facilities to reduce energy use
Figure 1: Broad areas of IT projects (Source: Infosys Research)
Benefits of Incorporating Sustainability Metrics

Incorporating sustainability into IT portfolio optimization offers many benefits, such as metrics that provide visibility into the impact of IT on the environment and a comprehensive sustainability data repository with respect to an organizations IT assets and application portfolio. Sustainability data related to green IT initiatives becomes streamlined as a result of the incorporation of these sustainability metrics.
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Figure 2: The various aspects of an application portfolio that need to be taken into account for the purpose of carbon footprinting (Source: Infosys Research)
Portfolio optimization presents the right opportunity to embrace a greener business application portfolio by introducing responsible e-waste disposal, reduced paper use, and efficient application usage. It also can result in a more efficient data center, data de-duplication, disposal of old assets, faster and more efficient applications, the elimination of underutilized applications, a reduced carbon footprint, and fewer required resources for support and maintenance.
A Sustainability Framework for Portfolio Optimization

Figure 3 shows a framework for realizing the sustainability benefits of IT projects in the course of portfolio optimization. This framework will become extremely relevant with the uptake in industry reporting guidelines such as the Global Reporting Initiative and Integrated Reporting, as well as increasing dependence on IT. The framework breaks down IT projects into twelve types: application, operating system, hardware, network, cooling,
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power, facilities, security, monitoring, costs, processes, and others that are beyond the data center. The sustainability impacts of projects in each layer of the data center (see figure 1) are felt by all layers below. Therefore, the higher a project is in the data center layers, the greater the impact and the more measurements will be required. Based on this layered structure, the framework helps to identify which areas are potentially high and low impact. And, because IT projects usually impact one or several of the areas indicated in figure 1, the framework indicates metrics that should be identified and defined across all areas. The framework further describes a process to realize the benefits. Creating a baseline will help the company understand the current IT assets, resources, application landscape, energy use, and carbon footprint of the portfolio. Reviewing the metrics is an integral part of the framework so that all key stakeholders from different parts of the organizationlike IT, sustainability, and businesssign off on the metrics and baseline to avoid later disagreements. Also, each
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Figure 3: The sustainability framework for portfolio optimization (Source: Infosys Research)
department will review the metrics and baseline from a different perspective. An effective way of monitoring and tracking the key identified metrics is to create a dashboard, which also helps to create transparency at multiple levels of the organization. Measuring at project milestones is important so that the metrics are regularly updated. An added benefit is that if a particular metric is missed, it can be identified at the checkpoints and added to the dashboard. Reporting toward the end helps in articulating the cost, energy, and resource savings delivered as a result of portfolio optimization. In addition, the sustainability team can use this information to promote brand value and industry recognition. Table 1 depicts sample scenarios in which accurate baselines of the parameters should be created and measured at regular intervals. If the answer to any of the guidelines is affirmative, then there can be an associated sustainability benefit.
Conclusion
A comprehensive IT portfolio optimization initiative can help organizations create a responsive, agile, flexible, and cost-effective IT function with a strong alignment to business and environmental strategy. Embarking on business portfolio optimization provides the right platform to initiate sustainability efforts within the organization and, in turn, provides an added advantage to embarking on the optimization journey. Sustainability disclosures are gaining strength. Stringent upcoming carbon and energy regulations, such as the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme in the UK and the Australian carbon tax, will indirectly drive organizations to adopt green IT practices by focusing on energy efficiency and efficient operations. The disclosures and metrics described in the framework in this article are likely to become prevalent in many IT projects. Increasing public and industry awareness about sustainability makes it imperative that we talk about sustainability and IT portfolio optimization together. {end}
Table 1
sunita_purushottam@infosys.com vaibhav_bhatia@infosys.com
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Kovair Software, Inc. announced release 7.0 of its enterpriseclass Development and IT Tools products generally offered as the ALM Studio, ITSM Studio, and Omnibus Integration Platform. The major focus area for this release is to provide Kovairs current and future users with a Web 2.0 user interface experience that is consistent with the social media UI that users are looking for in all the applications that they use currently. This new release resembles social networking websites and has been designed like that in order to enrich user experience and allow future releases of Kovair 7.0 to run on mobile devices.
kovair.com/landing-page/kovair70.html Black Duck Software Releases Black Duck Suite 6.2

Black Duck Software announced the release of Black Duck Suite 6.2, adding new capabilities that help development and legal teams work more effectively together to expedite the adoption of open source software. Suite 6.2 adds new license obligation management capabilities, new development tool integration support through software development kit (SDK) enhancements, and updated support for SPDX 1.1, allowing organizations to more effectively implement open source governance and compliance throughout the software development lifecycle. The release also includes expanded SDK support, enabling integration and customization into existing ALM environments and adding transparency to the open source governance process. Similarly, Black Duck customers can use the SDK to build additional integrations and ensure compliance in their own SDLC as needed.
urbancode.com/html/products/release Micro Focus Releases Enterprise Developer Personal Edition

Micro Focus, an enterprise application modernization, testing, and management solutions company, announced the general availability of its free-of-charge Enterprise Developer Personal Edition product. An integrated development environment (IDE) for IBM mainframe applications, Enterprise Developer Personal Edition is the entry-level version of the full Micro Focus Enterprise Developer product for IT development professionals and students. It offers a choice of Eclipse or Visual Studio IDE to develop enterprise-class mainframe and distributed applications. The product comes with smart COBOL editing, syntax checking, and compilation to create a way to modernize, develop, and maintain mainframe applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Developer Personal Edition is the entry-level development platform of the Micro Focus Mainframe Solution, a comprehensive product suite to help organizations deliver mainframe workload. It includes Enterprise Analyzer, Enterprise Developer, Enterprise Test Server, and Enterprise Server.
blackducksoftware.com/black-duck-suite Splunk, Inc. Rolls Out New Software Development Kits for Java and Python
Splunk, Inc., a software platform for real-time operational intelligence, announced the general availability of new software development kits (SDKs) for Java and Python. SDKs make it easier for developers to customize and extend the power of Splunk Enterprise, enabling real-time, big-data insights across the organization. Splunk previously released the general availability version of the Splunk SDK for JavaScript for Splunk Enterprise 5. The Splunk SDK for PHP is in public preview. The Splunk SDKs for Java, Javascript, PHP, and Python are built on a fully documented and supported REST API and include documentation, code samples, resources, and tools to help developers build on the Splunk platform.
online.microfocus.com/Enterprise-Developer-PE License Dashboard Releases License Manager 5.7

License Dashboard, a developer of advanced software license management solutions, released License Manager 5.7, its flagship software asset management (SAM) tool. Available immediately, License Manager 5.7 is the first SAM solution to offer in-product management of software licenses in virtual server environments, including modeling the effect of Dynamic Resource Allocation. Other enhancements include a new intelligent import function for simplifying the import of software install and hardware configuration information from a range of different inventory solutions, further improvements to the recently launched License Dashboard Cloud Console, and additional reporting functionality.
splunk.com/view/splunk/SP-CAAAG57 Atlassian Announces New Release of Stash

Atlassian, a provider of enterprise collaboration software for product teams, announced its newest release of Stash, the on-site Git repository management system used by enterprises to take
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advantage of the flexibility of Git while maintaining control of code quality and development. With improved performance and scale for large, distributed teams, Stash 2.0 rounds out Atlassians integrated enterprise offerings that include JIRA for issues management and Confluence for content collaboration. Stashs new enterprise functionality includes branch permissions that allow development teams to specify and manage an individual or teams access control to code. All code developed separately on a branch can be properly tested and reviewed before being merged into source. The new team collaboration features include @mentions and Markdown support, instantly bringing any team member into a code discussion and providing greater context for richer discussions and faster communications. tween Appcelerator Titanium 3.0 and SOASTAs TouchTest mobile test automation solution and a distribution agreement between the two companies. This integration allows mobile developers at Appcelerators 1,400 enterprise customers to access TouchTest for continuous automated testing as part of the mobile application development lifecycle. TouchTest is the first enterprise test automation solution to support Appcelerators Titanium 3.0. The integrated solution provides a cost-effective, rapid, and continuous product development lifecycle for mobile developers. The new distribution agreement between Appcelerator and SOASTA enables Appcelerator customers to easily add TouchTest to their mobile development environment. As enterprises and developers build mobile applications for a variety of devices and operating systems, they can now rely on TouchTest to simplify the testing process, utilizing SOASTAs patented visual test environment, precision capture, and replay technology. Apps are now continuously testable, thoroughly validated, and fully supported through the development lifecycle by leveraging TouchTests embedded Jenkins plugin for 100 percent hands-free mobile test automation.
atlassian.com/software/stash/download Apache Software Foundation Releases Apache Cassandra v1.2

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 open source projects and initiatives, announced Apache Cassandra v1.2, the latest version of the big data, distributed database. Successfully handling thousands of requests per second, Apache Cassandra powers massive data sets quickly and reliably without compromising performance, whether running in the cloud or partially on premises in a hybrid data store. Highlights for the second-generation NoSQL database include clustering across virtual nodes, inter-node communication, atomic batches, and request tracing. In addition, Cassandra v1.2 marks the release of CQL3 (version three of the Cassandra Query Language) to simplify application modeling, allow for more powerful mapping, and alleviate design limitations through more natural representation.
appcelerator.com Free Mobile Testing in the Cloud from Keynote

Keynote announced DeviceAnywhere Free, a smartphone testing tool allowing web developers, web application and site owners, and software testing professionals to interactively test and spot check the functionality and content rendering of mobile websites on real smartphones over the Internet. Current research shows that in North America more than 20 percent of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices. This rapid adoption in the market underscores the critical importance of ensuring much higher levels of quality in mobile web development, testing, and quality assurance. DeviceAnywhere Free gives users a real view of their mobile websites on select smartphones in real time via a simple web interface. Users can access all the functions of the smartphones, including the ability to press and swipe touchscreens, push buttons, view the screen in different orientations, and power cycle the device. Users are able to access any number of devices, for ten minutes per device, to spot check mobile websites and capture screenshots for archiving and reporting. After ten minutes on one device, users may select a new device and run the same checks to ensure cross-device and cross-browser functionality. Advanced queuing allows users to save their place in line for devices that are currently in use. DeviceAnywhere Free features the most popular smartphones and is continually updated to stay current with the mobile device market. All devices are connected via Wi-Fi to enable testing of live mobile web content. When testing needs grow to require sessions longer than ten minutes per device, a carrier connection, the need to download or upload applications, or the need to conduct device-to-device testing, users can advance their mobile testing to the next level by getting started
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cassandra.apache.org iCIMS Launches Connect

iCIMS, a provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) talent-acquisition software solutions for businesses, announced the release of the companys newest product, Connect. Added to the iCIMS Talent Platforms suite of talent-acquisition tools, Connect allows customers to engage passive candidates and build a sourcing pipeline for future hiring needs. Connect joins Recruit and Onboard as one of the talent-acquisition solutions comprising iCIMS Talent Platform. Connects features afford clients the opportunity to appeal to candidates who may not be ready to apply for an employers open positions but are interested in the companys employment brand and want to keep in touch with the organization. Connect can be purchased as a standalone recruitment CRM product that can feed into an organizations existing applicant-tracking system (ATS) or alongside iCIMS other products.
icims.com Appcelerator and SOASTA Partner to Bring TouchTest to Mobile Enterprise Developers
Appcelerator and SOASTA announced a new integration be-
with a free trial of Keynote DeviceAnywhere Test Center Developer. documenting every step they take during the testing process. A subscription-based service, Defect Scribe is installed on the users desktop and records every user action and application screen to improve test session efficiency and create better bug reports. Available for web, Windows, or Java applications, Defect Scribe records activity during manual and exploratory testing. Defect Scribe builds a detailed history of the test session, including descriptions of the user interface controls used and a screen shot of every step with the relevant graphical user interface element automatically highlighted. If a defect is found, the tester can submit a complete and accurate bug reportincluding the recording, associated screenshots, testing notes, and detailed steps to reproducein just one click to a defect tracking tool or via email. This saves significant time with manual data collection, allowing testers to focus on breaking software and enabling developers to quickly reproduce and fix bugs.
keynotedeviceanywhere.com/da-free-register.html Defect Scribe Simplifies Manual Testing

QA Wizard, a business unit of Seapine Software Inc., launched Defect Scribe, a tool that helps quality assurance and software development teams improve their manual testing efficiency and create better bug reports. Defect Scribe allows software testers to focus more on testing an application or website and less on
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qawizard.com/ds TestPlant Launches eggOn for Full-Control Mobile App Testing

TestPlant has announced the forthcoming release of eggOn, a new development in mobile app testing technology. EggOn can be installed on any Android or iOS phone, including iOS 6, and provides full control of the device from eggPlant without jailbreaking. With eggOn, developers no longer need to install third-party software or deploy complicated software development kits to allow full testing on real devices. EggPlant for Mobile is an automated solution for mobile application testing across all operating systems and end-user devices (including BlackBerry and Windows devices), allowing full control of real devices to run tests that other tools cannot. Requiring no special hardware, eggPlant for Mobile is the only automated mobile app testing solution that uses image recognition technology to allow it to see and interact with any device display, whether testing native or web-based mobile applications. With eggOn, this approach does not require the app to be modified for testing. EggOn will be released in April.
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[1]
Capers Jones, A Short History Of The Cost Per Defect Metric, Randall Rice, The Value of ISTQB Certication
30
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What Questions Should Software Tester Certification Students Be Able to Answer?

In this installment of FAQ, Id like to turn the tables and share some of the questions I frequently ask students in the Software Tester CertificationFoundation Level class to encourage discussion around key points of the syllabus. You might ask yourself these questions and think about the impact of the answers on your organization. What is your background and current job function? I want to know how many developers or unit, integration, system, or acceptance testers are in the class. Each will have a different perspective and need. Typically, there are no unit testers in the class. Rarely are there developers in the class. This is not good. Unit testing by developers or dedicated testers in the development team has proven over and over to be one of the two least expensive ways to identify and remove defects. (See question 3 for the second method.) In the early 1990s, my company ran a series of test classes, including a test management class. Following advice from Bill Hetzel and Dave Gelperin, the first class was the test management class. Their requirement was that every software manager, top to bottom, attend the class. This acrossthe-organization understanding of software testing eventually improved our unit test effectiveness from 20 percent to 80 percent (stated differently, defects into system test were one-fourth the previous level), and system test cycles were cut in half. Do you measure the cost of rework? This question assumes you have a definition of rework. I have found that companies that do not know their cost of rework spend more than half their development resources on rework in test and post-ship maintenance. Why is this important? Any attempt by the test organization to improve how work is done will run into the question How much will it cost and what will we get in return? If you cant answer this question, your chances of changing things will be less. Do you use reviews? Static testing is not a new idea; the formal inspection process was developed in 1972 and published by Michael Fagan in the IBM Systems Journal in 1976. The latest variant of reviews is paired programming. It is surprising how many class attendees say there is no review process of any kind. If pairing is used, few know how effective it is (back to question 2). Why are you here? Hopefully, to learn, pass the certification exam, and become a better tester. This requires effort on the part of the students, which means advance preparation and study in the evenings. When I hear people saying What will we do this evening? regarding entertainment, I usually find they score low on the test and fail to pass the certification exam. Active participation in the class (asking questions, doing the exercises, talking to other attendees at breaks and lunch) will help you be a better tester, as this links the course material to real-world application of the principles covered in the class.
by Ed Weller
efweller@aol.com
31
Career Development
A Major Award
The physical award might not always be pretty, but the meaning shines through.
by Lisa Crispin | lisa@lisacrispin.com
North American readers may be familiar with the 1983 movie A Christmas Story (now also a Broadway musical), about a boy named Ralphie growing up in Indiana in the early 1940s. Ralphie longs for a BB gun for Christmas and has visions of protecting his family from marauding cowboy villains with it, but all the adults warn him, Youll shoot your eye out! The father in the movie (brilliantly played by Darren McGavin) constantly enters crossword puzzle contests. In one of my favorite scenes, he finally wins a major award, which is delivered to their house in a huge packing crate. The award turns out to be an incredibly tacky lamp made in the erotic shape of a womans leg, with a fishnet stocking and high-heeled shoe. His wife is horrified, but to the dad, this award is indescribably beautiful. It is the affirmation that hes a great solver of crossword puzzles and should enter even more contests. Back in 1998, I had my first major award experience. At the height of the Internet boom, I took the leap from traditional software development to a startup company producing a web travel site (Trip.com, now CheapTickets.com). Id never tested web software, and my new team had never done any testing at all. We found our courage, experimented, and, though we may not have delivered the best software around, we helped our company succeed. After Id been there a few months, the company founders decided to institute a quarterly award to the employee who rocked the mostthat is, someone who was a solid foundation for team success. Naturally, they called it the Rock Award. I was quite amazed to be named as the first recipient. The award itself was a wooden base with a small brass plaque, and sitting on it was a rock that our COO had picked up from the side of his driveway that morning. Its not quite as tacky as the leg-shaped lamp, though its just about as ugly. But for me, it was affirmation that my efforts to learn how to test web applications had paid off, that I could really add value to my team, and that my team appreciated my collaboration. And, yes, I thought it was indescribably beautiful. The Rock Award gave me the confidence to keep taking chances in my professional career and to share my experiences with a wider community. I wanted to attend testing conferences, so I started submitting papers. With the help of our teams technical writer, I finally got one accepted and my conference-presenting career was launched. In 2000, several of my teammates joined another startup and gave me Kent Becks Extreme Programming Explained to read. I was so excited about XPs focus on quality that I begged them to hire me as their tester and I never looked back. Ive had a series of mostly wonderful jobs on terrific teams since then. Today, Im enjoying a dream job, along with many opportunities to write, participate in conferences, and be part of a wonderful worldwide software community. I credit Trip.coms cofoundersand their initiative to encourage employees with that crazy Rock Awardwith boosting my confidence. Ive continued to develop my professional abilities and skills that helped my team, and Ive worked to exchange skills and experiences with others. Its always a good time to think about your learning and career goals. Im not sure that we all need to win an award, but think of ways that you can encourage your own colleagues to grow professionally. Recognize their contributions to the teams achievements. You dont have to be a manager to nurture a learning culture and help your business stakeholders understand that software teams need time to learn and experiment. Freedom to continually improve not only makes us more productive, it also
32
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Career Development
Trying to Connect to the Agile Community?

Brought to you by TechWell and Software Quality Engineering (SQE), AgileConnection.com brings together the latest agile ideas and practices from experienced software professionals and thought leaders. As a member of AgileConnection.com, you've got access to: Expert resources: Articles, interviews, and more from today's agile leaders Community interaction: Quickly build your profile, comment on articles, save resources to your briefcase, participate in Q&A. AgileConnection to Go: Your weekly update from the community with summaries of new content and ongoing conversations Full access to Q&A Boards: Post a question and get an answeror share your expertise with your peers. Free subscription to Better Software magazine digital edition: Delivering practical information and ideas covering all aspects of software development and deployment Better Software magazine archive: Hundreds of exclusive articles from experts and peers, focusing on the practical side of getting your job done Plus, stay tuned for more great community features coming soon, like online agile meetups, agile Twitter chats, and more!
It's always a good time to think about your learning and career goals.
helps each of us enjoy getting up in the morning and going to work. Sharing our experiences in the larger software community helps us all. What would you and your team like to achieve this year? How can the global community help you? How can you help and encourage others? In A Christmas Story, Santa brings Ralphie his Red Ryder BB gun, and it indeed proves to be a bit dangerous. But in the end, the family has a wonderful Christmas, and the boy feels more confident and happy. Lets all take some risks and find more joy in developing software.
{end}
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How to Overcome the Impostor Syndrome and Excessive Self-Doubt

In Search of the Perfect Mobile App

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