Category Archives: Management

Business Applications: On the Tension between Efficient Testing and Compliance

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Smooth business processes need a stable IT landscape. Thus, IT departments spend time and money on testing their business applications. But what could be a reason for a tension between efficient testing and compliance needs? Sensitive data are the reason! Testing business applications requires adequate data in the databases of test systems. …

Read here the full article of my Keynote at the 37th meeting of the special interest group testing, analysis, and verification” of the German Informatics Society.

How Scrum Changes Test Centers

Do you like agility? Do you like being celebrated like a rock star? There was once such an opportunity. You and the authors of this paper missed it. Until recently, developers lusted after tales of agile and Scrum projects. This changed as agile became the new normal for development projects and talks about Scrum mainstream. In the testing community, in contrast, Scrum brought
uncertainty. Is agility the ultimate chance for developers to get rid of nasty testers? Or does agility only change job profiles? This article provides the answers.

Read the Konrad Schlude’s and my article how scrum changes test centers here…

This article appeared in the August 2013 issue of Agile Record.

Test Data Management in Practice

Do you have issues with your legal and compliance department because test environments contain sensitive data outsourcing partners must not see? Do your testers have idle time because test data are missing or test environments have inconsistent data? If any of these challenges applies to your situation, the concepts of this paper can help. The first concept is database-application-aware test cases. They enforce that test cases for business applications provide all information needed for repeatable execution. Second, a type
concept eases the test case maintenance and preparation of test data for a test start without delays. Third, a test data catalogue lists database objects for the various types. Finally, architectural patterns describe various ways to set up test environments with production and/or synthetic test data. This paper focuses on integrating these concepts into the daily test process. This includes the tool aspect, which we illustrate with our Swisscom Test Data Organizer. Read the complete article Test Data Management in Practice

This article appeared appeared in the conference journal of the Software Quality Days 2013, Vienna.

Three New Technologies That Will Disrupt Your Test Organization

New technologies such as Cloud, SOA, and multi-tenant systems boost ASP and BSP sourcing models. This fundamentally changes the task portfolio and staffing needs of test organizations. CIOs prevent quality and cost problems by initiating the change process early.

Read the complete article about future trends in testing here…

This article appeared at the 2012 Software Testing, Analysis, and Review West Conference (STARWEST 2012), September 30 – October 5th, 2012, Anaheim, CA

Know-How Transfer in Core-Banking System Implementation Projects: A Case Study

In the last years, many Swiss banks replaced their old core-banking systems with new ones. Implementing a core baking-system requires that the bank, the software vendor, and the implementation partner collaborate. Crucial for the collaboration and the project success is planned and unplanned know- how transfer. This case study examines the know-how transfer in a core- banking system implementation project for a retail bank with around 200 project members. We describe the sourcing network and different roles people have with respect to know-how transfer. We elaborate the methods used within the project for know-how transfer and present first results of a study looking on their effectiveness. Thus, this paper gives project managers a good insight into know-transfer within a project and points out how to stimulate them successfully.

Read the complete paper about know how Transfer in core-banking system implementation projects here…

This paper is joined work together with Marcel Heuberger and was presented at the Central and East European Conference on Software Engineering Techniques (CEE-SET 2009), Krakow, Poland, October 12-14, 2009