Words From a Purple Mind

The test plan is very important in any organization. The Test Plan defines the project’s objectives, scope, approach, and focus of its testing efforts. The process of preparing a Test Plan provides an effective way to think through the efforts needed to validate the acceptability of the application under test (AUT).

The testing methodology is very important in any organization. This document lays the foundation for the testing group. It’s main purpose is to set consistency and discipline to the testing process. It guides you through the process by defining why testing is being done, who is testing, what is produced during the various phases, and when it testing should be included in a project.

Performance testing is a general term used to describe testing activities where a simulated user load is directed at a system and measurements are gathered. It is designed to meet or exceed a set of system performance goals while maintaining a particular user load profile. It places variable load – from a minimum to a maximum – on the system. The variable load demonstrates what the system can sustain without running out of resource or having transactions perform in a less-than-optimal fashion.

I was cleaning out a folder on my machine when I stumbled on an oldie but goodie PDF called “Classic Testing Mistakes” by Brian Marick.

In the paper he states how he breaks the classic mistakes into 5 themes and how to resolve the mistakes:

Security testing is a process to determine that an IS (Information System) protects data and maintains functionality as intended.

The six concepts that need to be covered by security testing are: confidentiality, integrity, authentication, authorization, availability, and non-repudiation.

Test Management tools are very important to any test team. Test teams use these tools to help capture requirements, design test cases, map test cases to requirements, test execution reports and much more. Companies may use one to many tools for this, which range from very expensive to open source. My advice would be to pick a tool that can meet most of your current and near future needs.

It is very important to make sure that your application functions as expected. There may be times that you add one little piece of code and all of a sudden other parts of the application no longer works. You may not have time/capacity to manually go back and regression test all the pieces of your application to make sure they are up to par. Companies use a variety of different testing tools for regression testing. There are lots of tools out there from very expensive to open source.

I attended the Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) this week, which is hosted by the Association for Software Testers (AST). I was very impressed by not only the topics but also the great people. It was nice being able to sit down and discuss topics that we all face out in the field (lack of requirements, process, communication, etc). There were tutorials on different topics like metrics and agile development.

No matter how good you think your code is there is always going to be a bug/defect of some kind. Defect numbers may range from 1 to thousands so it’s important to have a very good tracking tool. There are commercial tools out there but I figured I’d focus on the open source tools.

It is very important to make sure that there are no broken links on your site. A link may be active when your first added it but as the days, months, years go by the link may end up being broken.

Below are some open source tools that can help you find those broken links.