Category Archives: Testing

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.

What Developers and Testers need to know about the ISO 27001 Information Security Standard

Image courtesy ofrenjith krishnan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy ofrenjith krishnan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Late in 2013, the International Organization for Standardization released a new version of its ISO 27001 information security standard. The standard covers requirements applying to all organizations and ones relevant only for organizations with in-house software development and integration projects. They impact testers, developers, and release managers. This article summarizes the relevant facts and points out topics that testing and development teams have to work on.

Click here to read the article, which I published in the testing experience magazine…

Mobile Testing

(C) Samsung Mobile Press

(C) Samsung Mobile Press

Mobile apps are everywhere. Some apps entertain and others enable business transactions. Apps increasingly interact with complex IT landscapes. For example, a banking app on a mobile device acts as a front end that invokes services on a back-end server of the bank, which might contact even more servers. Mobile testing becomes crucial and challenging. This paper follows a user-centric testing approach. The app’s architecture matters for testing, as does its user base and usage context. Addressing these factors ensures that test cases cover all relevant areas. Most apps need test automation for two reasons: agility and compatibly. To the complete article about testing mobile apps …

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.

Testing & Quality Assurance in Data Migration Projects

New business models, constant technological progress, as well as ever-changing legal regulations require that companies replace their business applications from time to time. As a side effect, this demands for migrating the data from the existing source application to a target application. Since the success of the application replacement as a form of IT maintenance is contingent on the underlying data migration project, it is crucial to accomplish the migration in time and on budget. This however, calls for a stringent data migration process model combined with well-defined quality assurance measures. The paper presents, first, a field-tested process model for data migration projects. Secondly, it points out the typical risks we have frequently observed in the course of this type of project. Thirdly, the paper provides practice-based testing and quality assurance techniques to reduce or even eliminate these data migration risks.

Read more about how to ensure smooth data Migration Projects with testing and QA here…

This article is joined work together with Florian Matthes and Christopher Schulz and presented at the 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM’11), Williamsburg, VA, Sept. 25-30, 2011.