Tejas Software Consulting Newsletter

June/July 2004, vol. 4, #3

If you click Help->Manual within QMTest, a small explosion occurs. -Scott Lowrey
I like to teach testers how important it is to write an attention-getting headline for a bug report. This one, recently sent to the mailing list for the QMTest tool, really caught my attention. It turns out the author was only reporting a "page not found" error, but he did say the explosion was small, after all.

Thanks for reading my newsletter. If you've read this far, I have hope you'll keep going. With apologies to Aunt Fern, I chose a feature topic this time that will appeal most to professional testers who want to attend conferences to learn more about their craft.

Not a subscriber yet? To find the super-simple subscription form or to blow the dust off the back issues, head on over to http://tejasconsulting.com/newsletter/.  You have my permission to forward this newsletter to anyone else you think could benefit from it, as long as you keep it all intact.

-Danny R. Faught, Software Alchemist
faught@tejasconsulting.com -- http://tejasconsulting.com/ -- +1-817-294-3998

Contents

Tejas Newswire

I've just met a goal - I finally have my first client in my home county, only a local phone call away. It's giving me the opportunity to work in an FDA-regulated environment, which is an interesting change.

I will be speaking at three conferences this Fall, all on the west coast -
My latest StickyMinds column, "A Testing Career in 3-D," was featured the week of May 25.

Since writing about LinkedIn.com in the last issue, its popularity has continued to grow rapidly. My contact there says they stand at about 700,000 members now. My list of connections has grown from 65 to 135 people, and my reachable network has grown from 165,200 to 275,200 people. Watch in the coming weeks for my next StickyMinds column, which will cover more on what I've learned about professional networking.

The latest feature published for Open Testware Reviews subscribers is a review of the Mantis bug tracking tool. Also, new features opened to the public are the review of Holodeck Enterprise Edition (Trial Version), Test Design Tool Survey, and the JUnit review.

I facilitated a roundtable on homebrew test automation on StickyMinds. You can browse the archives to see how it went. I borrowed the "homebrew" term from Bret Pettichord, who is the most active champion of the do-it-yourself approach to test automation.

These continuing education courses at the University of Texas at Arlington are coming up soon: Career Insight: Software Testing - June 25, repeated on July 20, Your Name in Print: Getting Published in Periodicals - July 6 & 13 , and Composting Basics - July 31.

I've branched out with my freelance writing - I have an article in the June 2004 issue of Positive Parenting, a newspaper distributed in Fort Worth, Texas. The title is "Homeschool Lessons for Everyone." I'll send an electronic version of the article to anyone who's interested.

Feature Article
Alphabet Soup for Testers

I'm in the middle of a frenzy of preparing materials for conferences for the Fall, but occasionally I still find time to work on the conferences section of the resource guide I'm writing. I thought I'd share with you some of what I've learned about the state of the conference scene, for conferences that focus on software testing.

I'm going to PNSQC (the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference) in October. Going to this conference has been on my to-do list for many years, so I'm excited to finally be going. PNSQC was often compared to Quality Week in terms of having content for advanced testers but still not being too academic. Alas, Quality Week, which was the first conference I attended and later served several roles in, has been put on the shelf. Quality Week Europe is also no longer offered, and likewise, TCS (Testing Computer Software) disappeared from the calendar a few years ago.

Other notable conferences missing from the schedule this year are STAC (Software Test Automation Conference) and the joint SM/ASM conference (Software Management/Applications of Software Measurement), all produced by Software Quality Engineering. I never made it to SM/ASM, but I attended every STAC that was offered. All of these have been unofficially replaced by the new Better Software conference, which I'm speaking at in September. The Better Software conference adds programmers to the traditional target audience of testers and QA staff, which is an indicator of what I see as a trend in including programmers more in discussions about testing.

In November, I'm going to speak at one more SQE conference - STARWest. STARWest is the little brother of STAREast, and both are well-respected. They offer topics for both beginners and experts.

In January, you may recall that I attended AWTA (Austin Workshop on Test Automation), which is a different kind of event entirely. There isn't a good name for this style of workshop, except to say that there are several of them and they were all inspired by LAWST (Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing), which started in 1997.  These workshops focus on high-quality information-sharing. Most don't have a public web site, and they tend to be small and invitation-only. If your goals align closely with the goals of one of the workshops and you're able to do a bit of networking, there a good chance you can get invited. Examples of other workshops in this category that have been announced on public forums are STMR (Software Test Managers Roundtable), WOPR (Workshop On Performance and Reliability), and WTST (Workshop on the Teaching of Software Testing). Oddly enough, all of them seem to have whimsical pronunciations.

Some other testing and software quality conferences out there are ICSQ (International Conference on Software Quality), ISSTA (International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis), QAI's International IT Quality & Software Testing Conference and a smattering of other QAI USA testing conferences that I haven't sorted out yet, ISSRE (International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering), and PSTT (International Conference on Practical Software Testing Techniques).

Despite the "International" in the names, most of these conferences are are held in the U.S., perhaps with attendees coming in from other countries. I'm still trying to get a good handle on the worldwide testing conference scene, but here are some I've found: AsiaSTAR (Asia-Pacific Conference on Software Testing Analysis and Review) in Australia, EuroSTAR (Software Testing, Analysis, and Review Europe) which rotates around Europe, STANZ (Software Testing Australia/New Zealand) in both Australia and New Zealand, ICSTEST (International Conference on Software Testing) in Germany, QAI India's International Software Testing Conference in India, and Software Quality Assurance Days Europe, hosted by the QAI chapter in Russia and including a small amount of testing coverage.

Also worth mentioning are a few specialized testing conferences, including these two that focus on tool vendors: Mercury World and the Rational Software User Conference. Some other examples of specialized conferences are TestCom (International Conference on Testing Communicating Systems), and CSVHC (Conference on Software Validation for Health Care). Sometimes you'll find specialty conferences co-located with other more general conferences.

I thought it might be interesting to try to find the oldest software testing/quality conference out there that's still in operation. ISSRE, started in 1990, is well over a decade old, but it faces a good deal of competition for longevity. TestCom's predecessor started in 1989, but PNSQC jumps us way back to 1982. If the shaky evidence holds, though, the champion may be the QAI's International IT Quality & Software Testing Conference, known as the International Software Testing Conference as late as 2002, and apparently as the "National Conference on Software Testing" in the late 1980s. The 18th annual edition of this one was in 1998, which sends us perhaps back to 1980 for the first one, though I could only find tangible evidence of it as far back as 1987 (from Edward Miller's resume of all places; Edward was the director of the Quality Week conferences). Also worth mentioning are two in the resource guide that don't specifically focus on testing - SAFECOMP, started in 1979, and ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering) started in 1975.

If you broaden your scope to look at quality assurance, process improvement, or programming, there are dozens of other options to consider. But for now, I think we've seen enough alphabet soup. If you're looking to rub elbows with testers, there are plenty of opportunities.

Feedback

Prathibha Tammana commented on the April/May 2004 feature about LinkedIn and the interview with Vipul Kocher:

Good content! I liked the Feature Article and the Bonus Feature.

Jon Allen sent this comment and teases me with a promise for more:

Great newsletter.  Always informative and worthwhile.  Much to digest and comment upon here but that will have to wait.

Prathibha and Jon, I appreciate getting your feedback. Another reader sent similar remarks and even said he enjoyed the discussion on keyword-driven test automation in last issue's Feedback section.

Mike Durrigan asked me an interesting question that I'd like to address here -

I am wondering if anyone out there would agree with me that we are in a crisis in SQA test methodology? I'm basing this on what I am seeing in Silicon Valley. That is, SQA and its management is considered mostly a technical undertaking not a system for ongoing improvement.

Well, there's a bit of a crisis in terminology. Most people who say "SQA," which means "software quality assurance," actually mean "software testing." Most testing activities aren't really quality assurance at all, but rather, quality control of a product that has already been developed.  So I think a lot of what you're seeing is that teams with "SQA" in their title actually aren't chartered to do quality assurance and only intend to do quality control.

As to the broader question of whether more companies should be following a broad quality assurance program - you're right that many companies don't do this. There are so many that have such glaring issues that need to be addressed, they don't really need formal quality assurance to know that they have a lot of work to do in order to get better at software development.

Mike continued with this example -

Here is a question that came to me during a recent interview.  Without my having seen a requirements document, nor a use case, nor talking with a customer or user, never having seen or explored the system in question, and without knowing technical support staff etc., I was asked "How would you test our Reliability?"  He seemed irked that I requested additional info, like reliability of what? A component, the entire system, a single function? A GUI interface? What stats are we interested in - MTTF, MTBF, availability, failure rates?

When I realized he was serious and wanted an example of  "How I would test 'Our' reliability,"  I simply and honestly stated I wouldn't presume to try and outline a test for reliability without having read a requirement, finding out what am I testing against, played with the system, dealt with a user, or spoke with a QA or software development expert.

It looks like we have an example of a software culture clash. Mike said he probed further and found out that the organization's processes were immature. He hadn't worked in that kind of environment before, so he felt like he was in alien territory. I've seen people get hired into alien territory before, and it didn't turn out well. It can be very frustrating to move from a highly structured process to an organization that doesn't even let you say the word "process," just as someone working in an agile environment would feel terribly bogged down in bureaucracy when moving into an organization with a regimented process. It's possible to make the switch, though, if you keep an open mind and work diligently to learn about the many different ways that processes can be defined and followed. Right now I'm working on a project representing a low-process company that has contracted to produce a product within their customer's high-process world. It's an interesting challenge.

For more about life at the lower end of the maturity scale, see my "Testing, Zen, and Positive Forces" article. Also, I'd recommend that you learn more about Context-Driven Testing.

Copyright 2004 by Tejas Software Consulting
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