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How to overcome common challenges in Exploratory Testing

February 20, 2024 by Lauren Payne

Exploratory testing involves testing system behaviour under various scenarios, with a predefined goal but no predefined tests. This focus on discovering the unknown makes exploratory testing both powerful and challenging.

“Exploratory testing is a systematic approach for discovering risks using rigorous analysis techniques coupled with testing heuristics.”

-Elisabeth Hendrickson

Although exploratory testing (ET) is not a new concept, its significance has increased exponentially in the dynamic field of software development. With its simultaneous learning, test design, and execution processes, ET represents a shift from the traditional, script-based testing methodologies. This approach is particularly beneficial in handling the complexities and unpredictabilities of modern software projects. It prepares testers to actively engage with the software, uncovering potential issues that scripted tests might overlook.

In exploratory testing, catching bugs is an adventure – a journey through the unknown aspects of software, where each test can reveal new insights. In the Agile world with rapid development cycles, exploratory testing stands out as a dynamic and responsive testing strategy, essential for ensuring software quality in a fast-paced environment.

Despite its advantages, exploratory testing has challenges that can interfere with its effectiveness. Testers often encounter hurdles in planning and adapting to newly discovered information, managing frequent context switches, maintaining comprehensive documentation, and effectively measuring the success of their testing efforts. Addressing these challenges is crucial for harnessing the full potential of ET. This blog will explore these common challenges and discuss how the Xray Exploratory App provides innovative solutions, enhancing the exploratory testing process and enabling testers to deliver high-quality results efficiently.

How to overcome challenges with Xray Exploratory App

The Xray Exploratory App proves to be a vital resource for successfully navigating these challenges. The tool supports the unique factors of exploratory testing, empowering testers to optimize their testing strategies while maintaining the flexibility and adaptability that exploratory testing demands.

Planning and Learning

One of the primary challenges in exploratory testing is the balance between planning and learning. While ET is less structured than traditional testing, it still requires a level of planning to be effective. Xray Exploratory App facilitates one of the measures to counter this challenge and optimize your ET adoption – session-based test management (SBTM).

Testers must continuously learn from the software they are testing and adapt their approach accordingly. This requires understanding the project’s goals and the ability to quickly assimilate new information and apply it to testing strategies. One of the elements that helps with gaining the skills and experience is the structure of knowledge sharing. For example, if charters are handled as Jira stories, you get a centralized storage (a library of templates, of sorts) that has good examples which help educate any team member about the system and previous ET efforts.

Context Switching

Testers in an exploratory setting often deal with context switches. They must juggle different aspects of the software, switch between various tasks, and respond to new findings in real-time. Managing these switches efficiently is crucial to maintain focus and avoid overlooking critical issues. Beyond common techniques like Pomodoro, you can leverage two key features of Xray Exploratory App – saving sessions locally and editing the detailed Timeline with all your findings.

Proper Documentation

Unlike scripted testing, where documentation is predefined, exploratory testing requires testers to document their findings as they explore. This can be challenging as it requires a balance between detailed documentation and the fluid nature of exploratory testing. Testers need to capture enough information to provide context and enable replication of failure and future test repeatability without getting bogged down in excessive detail.

Xray Exploratory App addresses this challenge with the easily created chronological history of not just text notes but also screenshots, videos, and issues/defects created in Jira during the session (which accelerates the feedback loop).

Reporting and Measuring Success

Another significant challenge in exploratory testing is effectively reporting and measuring success. Traditional testing metrics often do not apply to ET, as its dynamic nature does not lend itself easily to quantitative measurement. Defining meaningful metrics to capture the essence of exploratory testing’s success is crucial for validating its effectiveness and value within the broader testing strategy. In many cases, such definitions would be very company-specific.

The good news – the seamless integration between Xray Exploratory App and Xray/Jira allows you to leverage centralized test management features, such as real-time reporting on several possible metrics (e.g. number of defects, elapsed time). That improves visibility and allows to clearly determine the status of not only exploratory testing, but all testing activities.

For instance, if we want to track defects/issues resulting from exploratory testing, we can see them linked to the test issue in Jira/Xray, which will then allow us to check them in the Traceability report.

Overall, these challenges, though daunting, are manageable. With the right approach and tools, testers can navigate the complexities of exploratory testing, turning these challenges into opportunities for delivering insightful and thorough software testing.

Future outlook of Exploratory Testing

Exploratory Testing is becoming more acknowledged as an indispensable part of the testing strategy, especially given the limitations of conventional scripted testing. The ability of ET to adapt and respond to the complexities and nuances of modern software development is exceptional. As we look towards the future, several key trends are emerging that are set to shape the landscape of exploratory testing.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI has the potential to significantly transform exploratory testing by automating certain aspects of ideation and, more so, data analysis processes. Leveraging AI in software testing in the correct way can enhance the tester’s capabilities, enabling them to focus on more complex testing scenarios and extract deeper insights from test data. AI can assist in identifying patterns and predicting potential problem areas, making ET more efficient and effective.

Integrations with other tools

The future of exploratory testing will see greater integration with various development, testing, and business analysis tools. This compatibility will streamline the testing process, enabling seamless data flow and communication across platforms. One of the pain points this trend will aim to address is losing time in writing automation scripts as a result of ET. Such integrations will enhance the overall efficiency of the testing process, allowing testers to leverage a wider range of tools and resources during their exploratory sessions more easily.

Enhanced collaboration

As software development becomes more collaborative, exploratory testing also adapts to facilitate better teamwork. Tools like the Xray Exploratory App incorporate features that promote collaboration among testers and between testers and other stakeholders. This collaborative approach ensures a more comprehensive understanding and coverage of the software, leading to better testing outcomes.

Compliance and reporting

Exploratory testing is being used more and more in ensuring compliance, areas like Non-Functional Requirements testing (security and performance), to help find more convoluted flaws and bottlenecks in intricate software systems. The trend is not surprising as the cost of compliance is increasing, both from the customer and the regulatory perspective.

With the increasing emphasis on compliance and accountability in software development, exploratory testing has to evolve to provide more robust reporting and documentation capabilities. The ability to generate detailed and meaningful reports is essential, and tools like Xray are focusing on enhancing these aspects to meet the growing compliance demands.

The Xray Exploratory App is at the forefront of these changes, continually adapting and evolving to meet the future demands of exploratory testing.

Chart new heights in testing with Xray Exploratory Testing App

Exploratory Testing has become indispensable in our increasingly sophisticated and customer-centric digital landscape. Its importance has expanded across various sectors, including e-commerce, healthcare, and finance, highlighting the universal need for high-quality software experiences. The unique approach of ET, with its focus on discovering the unknown through rigorous analysis and testing heuristics, positions it as a key strategy in addressing the complexities of modern software systems.

The Xray Exploratory App stands out as a vital resource in harnessing the full potential of exploratory testing. The tool enhances the testing process by addressing the everyday challenges of planning, context switching, documentation, and reporting. It enables testers to navigate the intricacies of ET with greater efficiency and effectiveness, ensuring comprehensive coverage and insightful test results.

Explore the capabilities of the Xray Exploratory App and see firsthand how it transforms the exploratory testing experience. Dive into the world of enhanced software testing with Xray and discover the difference it can make in delivering superior software quality.

Author

Ivan Filippov, Solution Architect for Xray.

Ivan is passionate about test design, collaboration, and process improvement.

Xray is an EXPO Platinum partner at EuroSTAR 2024, join us in Stockholm.

The future is here – is QA ready for it?

June 3, 2022 by Fiona Nic Dhonnacha

Thanks to Jani Haapala, DevOps Architect at Gofore, for providing us with this blog post.

William Gibson famously said, “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”. In software development, we constantly talk about future trends and future methods that are coming one day, but so often fail to see that in most cases, the future is already here – but maybe not yet in your context.

The problem with QA and testing is that it always seems to play catchup with these trends and methods. QA is mostly reacting and adapting to challenges that the future is bringing to us, rather than proactively creating or defining them.

So, if there’s already a recognized need, how come we’re not answering it? In my opinion, it’s because, in some cases, those of us in QA are still living in the past.

Living in the past

Some of us are still living in the past – although we might not realize it. In these situations, I see that QA as a function fails to provide the value that it should. I have found out that there are two major contexts where QA is still living in the past:

QA is a step: in many cases companies have adopted agile, and are driving fast toward DevOps. Some companies are already doing DevOps in some form. But QA still seems to be mostly a manual step on these fast phased cycles. Developers are having CI/CD pipelines; build and unit testing is happening automatically but when it comes to functional testing, end to end testing, and system testing, it often tends to be something that “needs to be asked from QA people”. This separates QA to its own manual silo, and creates unnecessary handovers. Instead of this, QA people should drive toward automated testing that is fully integrated to the CI/CD pipelines that development is using. Test automation is not a tool that testers use; it’s an automatically triggered set of tests by commit of code.

QA is about running tests: QA is often still fixated on ‘creating tests’ and ‘running tests’, and it seems that the only function of QA is to be the executor of tests. This leads to a situation – with test automation in particular – where there’s thousands of test cases that might pass and might not, or nobody cares. Tests are becoming mere ‘experiments’ that fade over time. So, QA and testing should be all about bringing valuable feedback to people that need it. They should focus on thinking about the most valuable thing that we can get from the system, and how to present that to those who need it. And remember, most valuable things change, and so does the importance of any given tests.

The future that we live today

So, what are the latest trends that QA should take note of sooner rather than later? What’s already on our doorstep, and needs immediate attention? Let’s hop on the train early, figure out what kind of feedback is needed, and learn how to provide that. Some of the future scenarios that we are already living include:

The ‘XaaS’ movement: in the past there was a huge ‘XaaS’ moment – ‘Something as a Service’ shaped our daily lives. Rather than creating everything themselves, development teams started to consume services. Cloud services, version controlling services, deployment services, and so on. After that, we found out that these services and platforms could be controlled programmatically. So, the new ‘XaC’ boom started. ‘XaC’ means ‘Something as Code’, and that means that everything is done by creating a code file for it. Examples of these are Infrastructure as Code, Configuration as Code, Storage as Code, and Detection as Code. For this modern need, QA also needs the ability to test, verify, and provide feedback on how these code files are working

QaSec ownership: if QA is considered to be a silo, then I have a story about InfoSec! InfoSec is often an even more separate action than QA. InfoSec is mostly done completely separately, and if InfoSec tries to suggest something, it’s only considered if it doesn’t affect the daily work, or make it more complicated. In the future, InfoSec should follow in the footsteps of QA – and be part of QA. Having QA and Sec combined to one QaSec needs to have real impact to development. Too often agile managers are cut down so much that nobody is in charge of overall quality or security. That’s why QaSec needs to be owned and recognized as one of the key stakeholders of development.

New architectures: The world is truly evolving. People who were running systems of physical machines or virtual machines are now running the same services on clouds in the form of service meshes and microservice architectures; or even without any maintained resources on just lambda functions. QA needs to be very aware of both today and the future architectures to be able to give proper feedback on these. QA can’t also test those if they are stuck on ‘just using’ something that was set up for them; they need to be actively involved in creating and improving these to define safe production environments, and get production-like environments for their needs.

Get ahead of the future

So, if we want to be proactive instead of reactive towards new trends and ensure our validity, what could we do? I don’t want to start doing too much guesswork here, but some future “safe bets” that will eventually take over the world are:

New methods: new methods are coming, and those methods need the capability to adopt. QA might be done on different stages or in different contexts. For example, one of the promising ‘new’ methods is Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): that’s Google’s take on DevOps, and focusing on reliability. SRE is an extremely useful practice when companies are having more large scale software production. There’s likely more than one, and they can grow rapidly in popularity.

RPA: Robotic Process Automation is something that we already see companies experimenting with. This enables companies to automatically connect legacy systems together to form long, fully automated business processes. RPA used to be available only from vendor companies with a high price tag, but more and more RPA is now done with pure open-source software. In many cases, QA can repurpose their test automation knowledge and tooling to start implanting RPA solutions also.

Artificial Intelligence: If RPA is the first step into full process automation, AI is mostly the target. Even though AI sounds both cool and scary, the reality is that we are far away from general AI that works just like a human. In QA’s scope the near future is very interesting when it comes to testing early AI applications, or using AI as part of the testing. People’s first reactions is to point out that AI can’t do the same things as humans, or make decisions – but that’s not the point (at least right now). The point is to help people make the right decisions with a faster lead time.

Get into the high performers group

If you recognize yourself embracing the future, please, be loud about it! Keep presenting at conferences, and spread the word on how to get ahead of the game, and help your fellow QA people join the high performers group. But if you see yourself in the past or present group, please start taking advantage of all of this, and begin the journey to elevate yourself to the high performers group. It just takes a willingness to learn, and some time, to get you started on your journey.

Author

Jani Haapala, DevOps Architect at Gofore

Jani works as a DevOps architect at Gofore. He is passionate about measurement, feedback, and continuous automated quality feedback loops. Jani’s journey started from manual testing and has evolved to full-scale software development automation. Jani thinks that automation can help everybody and increase value in anything.

EuroSTAR Programme Review Process

March 1, 2021 by Suzanne Meade

Ever wonder how conference submissions are reviewed or how the overall review process works? Well we can tell you that the EuroSTAR Conference Programme is the culmination of a community wide collaboration.

Led and crafted by the EuroSTAR Committee, who first call for submissions in line with a theme chosen by the Programme Chair. In 2021, this is Fran O’Hara. Testers far and wide then submit their suggested talks. Each year, there are hundreds of submissions to be reviewed, and, in order to create a balanced and varied programme, each submission is reviewed by up to 5 people (anonymously i.e. talk details viewed, not the submitters’ name).

This is where the community get involved and each year, the EuroSTAR team welcome reviewers from the testing community. Some are past speakers, some have been involved with shaping EuroSTAR since the beginning and all are valued members of the EuroSTAR family.

This is time intensive and we are very grateful to each of our reviewers for their time and dedication. Following the community review, the Programme Committee will then come together to start crafting this year’s programme of talks.

This blog is a behind the scenes introduction to a first time reviewers experience, written by Sérgio Freire of Xray, and details how he approached his reviews.

EuroSTAR Behind the Scenes – Sérgio’s Experience

I was invited to review some submissions for EuroSTAR 2021 testing conference. I had never done it before, and even if time is scarce I understand that this is important for many who submit during the Call For Speakers; it’s also a learning experience for me. But how have I tackled this task? How can I make sure I’m fair enough to everyone? Can I test my review process somehow? This is the story of how I tested my review process. Let’s check it out.

Background

Before starting, it’s important to understand the conference context. EuroSTAR 2021 theme is “Engage”. Engagement is a broad topic. It’s about involvement, commitment, challenging, seeking understanding. We deep dive problems and challenges, we embrace them and we overcome them, no matter if they live within us or in our teams. Engaging is, in my perspective, about giving a step forward.

Infrastructure and supporting assets

The review was done using an online tool where we can easily jump between submissions. The tool itself has an interesting and scary bug that may mislead you to think that your already reviewed submissions/scores are lost… however, I found out that it is just a UI glitch 🙂 a forced browser refresh solved the issue.

EuroSTAR Programme Submission tool

To assist me as a reviewer, I had scoring instructions that I read before starting reviewing the submissions. These instructions were always open in one of my screens.

Criteria

There were 5 main criteria for me to score:

engaging
new ideas
scope
relevant to theme
overall feeling

I felt a bit of doubts on “engaging” vs “relevant to theme”, as the theme is “engaging” and thus some overlap exists. I used the scoring instructions several times, to decide how to score each one of them. Nevertheless, I would prefer a more clear separation between them as they’re not independent variables. The “scope” criterion also left me some doubts, as we’ll see ahead. Finally, there was an open text field “comments” where we could leave a qualitative assessment.

How I did it?

Day 1

I had a setup a quiet room (i.e. my office), so I could read and think carefully. I went over each one of the submissions and scored them; I skipped the “comments” section on purpose so I could not loose much time with them in the first iteration but also to try avoid a bit of bias. Whenever scoring, I regularly looked the scoring instructions if some criteria was not clear to me. I noticed that I was probably assigning “scope” not the meaning it should, as the scoring values were almost identical. Even so, I decided to look at it more carefully on a second iteration. Besides leaving the scores on the online tool, I also took notes in a spreadsheet; thus, I would have a backup 🙂 and I could use it for analysis.

EuroSTAR Programme Review Process

After scoring all submissions, I decided to go over the submissions once again to leave qualitative comments, that I structured in these bullets:

First impressions: Mostly based on the title and takeaways.
Takeaways & The Day After: Is it clear what to learn in the end of this session?
Final assessment: My overall feeling, i.e. a brief summary.
Would I attend: A yes or no, or eventually a perhaps.
Cliffhanger/invite to discover: Was there any mystery left? Any invite to learn something intesting during the session?
Suitable for: beginner, intermediate, advanced.

I was curious to understand if I had some bias that would be reflected more towards time. Thus, I traced a chart with the average scored and a trend line. The result was not shocking. I also made a column with the max score I add assigned in a specific criterion… and I didn’t see any relevant change with time.

Sergio's review process

I slept over and I was curious to see what would happen whenever I iterated on this.

Day 2

I went over the submissions once again, but in reversed order. Why? To avoid some possible bias related with time and exhaustion.

In terms of criteria, I also did a subtle change. While in the first day I considered “scope” as the criterion for being adequate for the time slot, in the second day I considered more the message clarity because it would be a factor that would help the fit for the available time slot.

Even though overall scoring is a bit lower, the results are not very different from the 1st iteration, where the chart shows also a similar trend line.

EuroSTAR Programme Review

In the spreadsheet, I calculated the absolute difference on the average and on the total score.

Sergio's blog

I flagged in red suspicious cases, that would affect my confidence:

absolute average scoring difference >= 0.5
absolute difference in individual scores > 1
absolute total scoring difference > 2

Gladly, only a few reviews appear that I need to have a look at once again. After going over them (i.e. scoring) in this localized 3rd iteration, I seem to be in my confidence interval except for one submission that remains flagged. Why? Well, because in the total score it had 3 points of difference. I read that submission all over and scored it once again. In the end, it was once again in my confidence interval.

sergio review process chart

Remember the “Comments” section? Well, I decided to go over it and look at “would I attend” bullet and compare it with the “overall feeling” criterion, that implictly should have that reflected. I notice that my decision to attend was correlated with the “overall feeling” criterion but it was not a consequence of it.

Conclusions and final thoughts

On the review process

I had quite a few doubts at start, especially this one: am I going to be fair? But also, I had doubts about how I would perform in this task, my biases, etc.

After looking at the results, my first iteration was trustworthy. I scored the submissions a bit lower during the second day, when I performed the 2nd, 3rd and 4th iterations. However, my first iteration was balanced and scores should reflect that.

I don’t assign 5 or 0 easily. I need to be quite impressed or reject something completely, which for me was not the case.

Scoring talks can be relatively fast but if you want to implement a process such as this one or your own, you’ll spend a lot more time. Even if you don’t, if you consider all the points that can affect a single criterion then it will consume more time indeed.

This whole process of revieweing submissions is also a discovery process about how each one of us works and is able of handling tasks. What works for someone, may not work for someone else.

On submitting a talk

Talks touch us in subtle different ways, so we value them differently. It makes sense, from a quality perspective: we assign value accordingly with our own definition of quality.

There are some generic rules that apply though in most cases and questions that you can think of:

Having a clear message, not that long not that short is crucial; if we get lost, we tend do discard it rightaway.
Why should we attend? What can we expect from it?
How will that talk help the attendee?
How does that talk align with conference?
Is it presenting something new, or your own learnings and challenges?

I’ve done a few submissions on the past and I have been unlucky most times. Yes, true. Therefore, I still have much to learn in this matter. I remember when I did a scientific submission for a Usenix conference few years ago, and even though it was a different audience, I had to iterate on the paper a couple of times before it was accepted and I was invited to present. Therefore, as everything, we need to iterate and learn.

Going over this review process, being on the other side of the fence, made even more clear some points mentioned above. By understanding the challenges a reviewer faces, when looking at dozens of submissions, I am a bit more aware of the things I need to have in mind for any submissions I may perform in the future.

It was an interesting thing to do and I’ve learned a bit more on the overall process of submitting (and reviewing) talks for testing conferences. I also appreciate the effort reviewers and program committees have to make, no matter what conference we’re talking about, because this is a process that requires considerable effort if you want to do it right and make it fair.

Note: the 2021 EuroSTAR Conference is taking place 28-30 September this year instead of November and the programme is usually launched at the end of April.

RECEIVE EUROSTAR PROGRAMME NEWS

Sérgio Freire – Xpand IT – Portugal

Sérgio Freire is a solution architect and testing advocate, working closely with many teams worldwide from distinct yet highly demanding sectors (Automotive, Health, and Telco among others) to help them achieve great, high-quality, testable products. By understanding how organizations work, their needs, context and background, processes and quality can be improved, while development and testing can “merge” towards a common goal: provide the best product that stakeholders need.

Sérgio spoke at EuroSTAR 2020 and you can check out his personal blog at www.sergiofreire.com

Why Speak at the EuroSTAR Conference

January 21, 2021 by Suzanne Meade

An experience talk from EuroSTAR 2020 speaker, Jorgen Lund:

Speaking at a conference is a daunting task for most people. There are so many inner voices telling you why you can’t or shouldn’t do it. I want to be that outer voice, telling you why you CAN and why you SHOULD!

My name is Jørgen. I’m a two-time, moderately successful speaker at EuroSTAR. I’m also suffering from some undiagnosed stage fright/anxiety.

Being anxious about doing public presentations is a common phobia – but we all experience it in different ways. I’ll tell you my story, and hopefully you can relate.

In school, I was a really obnoxious child. Sitting in the front row, raising my hand every time the teacher asked a question, and never being shy about pointing out others’ mistakes. I was also the smallest boy in the class, had a funny voice and some front teeth that were eager to see the world, until I had dental correction done in the 8^th grade – making me an easy victim for kids to get back at me. Being good at school stuff was my one thing to hang my hat on.

But answering questions is one matter – you can pop your head up when you have something to say. Attending oral exams – when you’re in front of people who don’t know you, but judge you based on your knowledge and ability to present it, is another. I worried for days ahead. And in the moment, I couldn’t think clearly, my heart was racing, my speech stumbled, and my mouth dried up in seconds. In high school for an oral exam, I got so nervous that I vomited in a trash bin when I had to pick the exam question (fun fact: a friend told me, when I told this story, she had done the same thing – you’re not alone out there!).

I’m 40 now – and while school and high school are a long time ago, those traits are still part of me today. Every public speaking engagement is a new exam. The good news is that it hasn’t stopped me from doing what I wanted to do. When I’ve opened up about my anxiety, I have found nothing but empathy and understanding – and I may have finally started realizing that many of the small mistakes that pile up in my head, are sometimes imperceptible to those listening.

I hope that by sharing my story and offering a few hints about my own EuroSTAR presentation, I can encourage you to quiet your inner critic for a short while and submit your story – big or small!

Why you CAN

First, a few words on psychology that has helped me see the world in a different way. I’m no expert – I only hold a YouTube degree in basic psychology. It helps me to understand my responses to certain situations – which is a good way for me to ‘hack’ my anxiety. I also have the attention span of a TED talk, so instead of recommending some books to collect dust on the shelf, I’ve included a few inspirational videos.

At EuroSTAR 2019, I was introduced to Carol Dweck’s theory on growth mindset vs. fixed mindset and the impact of a growth mindset’s ability for kids to thrive and succeed in school. A central part of a growth mindset is understanding that you’re always on a journey towards something. I think in many ways EuroSTAR embodies a growth mindset. Nobody attends to test if you know your stuff. People come to the conference to learn, connect, share, inspire and be inspired. I’ve met nothing but curious, helpful, friendly and compassionate people – from the delegates to the speakers, and the whole EuroSTAR staff. If you’re selected to speak, you are among friends all the way, who only want to help you succeed.

https://youtu.be/hiiEeMN7vbQ

The second part is about Imposter Syndrome. If you feel like you’re not skilled enough, not eloquent enough, or your ideas are not interesting to others to stand on that stage – there’s an above average chance that you’re doing just fine, and you’re just suffering from this common condition. Don’t let that nagging doubt convince you that you shouldn’t give it a go. Mike Cannon-Brookes, who’s the CEO of a ‘small’ Aussie tech company called Atlassian made a TED talk on the subject here:

https://youtu.be/ZkwqZfvbdFw

Why you SHOULD

Are you passionate about testing or other aspects of your work life? Then I’m sure there is someone out there who wants to hear about your passion!

EuroSTAR is a very diverse crowd. Some attendees have been around since the beginning – others are attending their first conference. Their projects and organizations are diverse as well. What’s trivial to some, will be a real eye-opener to others. Each year, the programme committee put together a program that has something for everybody – which means that what is near to your heart, is likely to appeal to somebody else as well.

Another reason why you should apply is, it’s good for you! You get to practice a lot of useful skills – writing a good abstract, creating a video to present your idea and showcase your speaking style (unless you’re part of the Tik Tok generation who grew up recording yourself) – and if you get selected, putting together a good presentation, and getting some experience under your belt in front of a crowd of wonderful people. And if you don’t get selected, maybe your idea will mature for another year and you’ll be clearer on your message, or you’ll get a new and even better idea that might not have come if you didn’t submit the first one!

It is likely to put you out of your comfort zone – but you’re never in too deep, and you’re always among friends. You don’t grow as a person if you don’t occasionally push the boundaries a bit!

My EuroSTAR Experience

By some miracle, I got selected to speak at EuroSTAR back in 2014. It wasn’t a great performance by any means, and the feedback reflected as much. It’s been nagging at the back of my head for a while. After some years of shying away, I applied again in 2019 where I didn’t get selected. I did attend the conference in 2019 as a delegate and really got hit by the EuroSTAR bug again. I wanted to go back! When the theme for 2020 was announced at the end of the conference, I was all in. Testing in the Wild. My biggest passion, making software that works for our military customers in the wild, was right in line with the theme.

I put all my energy into making a good abstract. I solicited help from some colleagues to zoom in on the key points of my presentation. I’ve shared my ideas with testers in my own department, testers in other departments, and colleagues in other job functions as well. It helped me get a better grasp of what was important, and whether it would be relevant to others as well.

The EuroSTAR team highly recommends submitting a video along with your abstract. This was another one of those mental barriers for me, but I enlisted the help of some colleagues in our marketing department to help me record it. Being comfortable in front of a camera and a crowd of one was a good, first step for me. I also sent the final result to my parents to see – for some reason it’s less scary for me to get up in front of a crowd of strangers than to present it to the people close to me.

I went into the registration system early to learn what information was required. At first, it was a bit overwhelming for me, so taking the time to letting the sections materialize really helped. I maintained an offline copy of the registration formular until I was ready to submit. The system does allow you to save a draft online, but I found it more accessible in a separate document – and easier to get feedback from my colleagues. There’s also some bits in there, like writing a bio and summarizing your speaking experience that takes a little time – don’t let it linger till the last minute.

It was a nerve-racking period for me, trying to put together the best possible presentation, and then enduring the excruciating waiting period until the speakers were announced. I had poured my heart and soul into it, and if it wasn’t gonna happen this year I would have been at a loss of what I could have done better. But in the end, it was all worth it, and getting accepted was a great confidence booster.

Since this post is already getting very long, I’ll spare you the details of how the preparation and presentation itself went – but in the end it turned out alright. I got a very respectable grade for my presentation. As a true imposter, I of course don’t trust any of the nice things people say to me – but anonymous reviews is a small window of truth!

After EuroSTAR, my colleagues in the marketing department were kind enough to put together a small video spot (shameless self/company promo alert). I can tell that I’m nervous in the video, but I feel that I’ve managed to not sound like a complete idiot – which is a major milestone for me! So even if it was a long and stressful journey, I can see the progress I’ve made

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/systematic_walk-a-mile-in-your-users-boots-activity-6737715389016375296-vGZ_

To sum it all up in the immortal words of the British speed metal band Dragonforce:

We all face our fears in the world,

We all hold our place in the (EuroSTAR) universe,

For eternity…

Check out the EuroSTAR Call for Speakers and consider submitting for this year. Submissions close on November 15th.

Author

Jørgen Lund, Systematic A/S, Denmark

After graduating with a master’s degree in Computer Science, I found my way into testing. Over the past 12 years, I have been part of building, testing, training, deploying and supporting software for our users – and I have used all of the knowledge gathered to become a better tester. Today, I work as a Senior Test Manager where I coach other Test Managers and Testers, implement strategic initiatives and train new employees in testing.

8 Things You Need To Know About EuroSTAR Testing Conference Sessions

August 19, 2019 by Fiona Nic Dhonnacha

Keynotes? Track Talks? Lightning Strikes? Get to Know All the Different Conference Sessions!

Every year the EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference invites thought leaders, industry innovators and global trailblazers to share their knowledge, showcase their expertise and spark new ideas. What does this mean for you? 4 days of invaluable learning, new connections and fresh inspiration – all in one place.

We’ve got incredible keynote speakers, and many of the world’s leading experts presenting tutorials, track talks and so much more. But what’s involved in these sessions? Here’s your chance to find out, and make sure you know your Track Talks from your Lightning Strikes. Read on and get ready to accelerate your career!

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Keynotes

Our keynote speakers this year give their expertise and insights on hot testing topics: Chris McKillop looks at popular myths about what AI is, and what the future of AI means for a wider society. Fiona Charles tackles difficult questions on the ethics of technology, and unveils the truth behind the cost to our privacy. Dona Sarkar explains how to run your own insider program within your organisation; and Alexandre Bauduin shares his experience leading the complex testing challenges of a real-time Boeing 777 Flight Simulator!

Tutorials

Every year we carefully select the EuroSTAR Conference Tutorials for our delegates. They are designed to allow you to choose an area you want to explore in greater detail, or just dive into. There are 12 amazing tutorials to choose from and they are divided between Monday (6 tutorials) and Tuesday (6 tutorials). Topics include Python, Risk in Testing, Games & Testing, Performance Testing, Test Designs and much more. Tutorials are in-depth training sessions with expert speakers. This is where you learn practical new skills that you can apply to your job right away!

Track Talks

Track talks are 45 minutes long, and feature a range of themes and topics such as tools and automation, techniques, engineering and more. This year we’ve worked incredibly hard to ensure that there’s something to suit every tester – we want you to leave enlightened and inspired! Over 30 new & expert speakers will give a track talk on UI, agile, DevOps and lots more. We have invited many great speakers, including Jaroslaw Hryszko, Marina Bechaalani, and Martin Boesgaard, to name a few.

Lightning Strikes

The concept of Lightning Strikes is to challenge speakers to give an engaging talk in just 4 minutes! Five speakers each have 4 minutes and just two slides to give a complete presentation on their chosen topic. If they don’t finish on time, lightning will strike and they have to leave the stage immediately! Who will convey their points clearly and quickly? Who will be unceremoniously struck down? This year, we have added a second Lightening Strikes session on diversity (Thursday), where 5 speakers briefly share their thoughts on inclusion and diversity in testing.

Workshops

Workshops last 1 hour 45 minutes, and are designed to stimulate your logical and critical thinking, as well as spark creativity. It’s an energetic, hands-on way for you to learn new skills and get valuable testing practice. Workshops this year include planning and testing releases, puzzle solving and storytelling for testers.

What Else is Going On at EuroSTAR?

On top of our amazing speaker sessions, we also run interactive sessions. These help you find solutions to your testing problems, make new friends, and get hands-on testing experience!

Test Lab

First, it’s Test Lab: run by testers for testers, it’s your opportunity to gain hands-on testing experience on ideas you’ve heard about at the conference. It’s also a chance to learn something new outside of the conventional conference talks and your everyday working environment. Test Lab is for everybody, no matter your level or experience. Join fellow testers and QA professionals in completing practical challenges, exercises and games. A perfect way to improve your testing in an open, friendly atmosphere.

Test Clinic

The Test Clinic helps you solve your software testing problems, with the help of our onsite test experts. Our ‘Test Doctors’ are industry experts with years of testing experience and knowledge. They’re on hand to offer coaching and guidance on ideas and solutions. Every year the Test Doctors strive to solve 100% of problems, and won’t send you home until you have a solution to implement on your return! Is there something slowing your team down? Do you have an idea that could help others improve? Bring it to the Test Clinic!

Huddle

Everything we do at EuroSTAR is to help testers achieve their full potential and grow as a community. A huge part of this is Huddle, where experts share their knowledge with the testing community. Huddle is completely FREE to join, and you gain full access to resources across all the latest topics in software testing and quality assurance. It’s all free of charge! Huddle comes to EuroSTAR in the form of soapbox sessions, speaker couch sessions, games, giveaways and lots more. It’s also an ideal place to go if you’re a first time attendee.

Now you know everything about the different EuroSTAR Conference Sessions! There’s only one thing left to do… book your ticket!

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Say Yes to End-to-End Tests!

July 22, 2019 by Fiona Nic Dhonnacha

End-to-end test automation has been generally avoided for what were once good reasons. But today’s technology allows us to automate end-to-end tests effectively and without causing too much overhead.

Why end-to-end testing was originally avoided

Automating end-to-end tests is a tricky business. Many leading practitioners over the years have advised against doing ANY end-to-end test automation. They say, do a good job of automation at the lower levels, and do end-to-end testing manually once and trust your lower level tests to protect against regressions.

As a result of this, we often see the test automation triangle pictured below. The shape of the test automation triangle is predicated on traditional associations about the cost of troubleshooting test failures and feedback cycles at each level. Traditionally, the closer you were to the bottom, the easier it was to find the root cause of the issue. Therefore, they recommend that you 70/20/10% split between unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, respectively.

But no matter how much testing you do at lower levels of granularity (unit, integration, etc.) the complete end-to-end is the only thing that brings together all the pieces and configurations while focusing on the true end-user functionality and experience.

No matter how much granular testing and tracing is done at the unit and integration level, the fundamental issue is that we’re spending less time on the user experience, and more time testing how we hope the application works. We’re losing the ability to surface problems to the tester in an easy-to-understand fashion.

Cindy Sridharan makes it clear in her story about distributed tracing. The service graph she draws below depicts dependencies well, but when it comes down to debugging a scenario where a specific service is experiencing issues, such a granular view isn’t particularly useful. If there is a slowdown with the front page, there are many dependencies you’d need to start digging into to find the root cause.

Source: https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/distributed-tracing-weve-been-doing-it-wrong-39fc92a857df

Putting more focus on unit or integration testing puts us into the same scenario. From the end-user perspective, we lack test coverage and it becomes harder to troubleshoot issues when tracing issues from the user-experience point of view. So the case to be made is – does today’s technology allow us to automate end-to-end tests effectively and without causing too much overhead?

mabl’s part of a wave that can change the shape of the automated testing triangle.

Times have changed

Unit and integration tests just aren’t aligned with the user experience. Additionally, there is a class of manual tests that were reserved for manual execution because they were too difficult to automate, not because they truly required human observational powers and reasoning.

So the questions we’ve asked ourselves is: Why avoid automating end-to-end tests to avoid the problems with it? If the end-user is as important as we preach they are, why not fix the problems with end-to-end test automation so we can do it better? Faster? Reliably? Easily?

With mabl’s ease of creation of robust end-to-end tests and rapid cloud execution providing quick feedback, we’re removing the constraints that suggest the end-to-end tests should be a taper. mabl also uses big data and machine learning to lower that pain, and we do this in a way where we aren’t intrusive. We create machine learning models from the tons of test output that already exists as the tests are executed, learn from the data, and surface insights and predictions about the quality of the application under test which ranges from functional test failures to more nuanced issues like visual changes and performance slowdowns.

By eliminating the cost and difficulty of end-to-end test automation, we allow the top of the pyramid to broaden, eventually perhaps becoming a testing hourglass, with the end-goal of benefiting the end-user experience.

The bottom line is, end-to-end testing has become stigmatized because of reasons that no longer apply with the innovation we’ve seen in test automation offerings in recent years. But end-to-end tests are way too valuable to avoid doing because they best align with the user experience.

So if the recurring argument is that end-to-end testing is too expensive… what if we just made it cheap?

About the Author:

Chou Yang

Chou is an engineer turned marketer who originally studied art. She enjoys her days at mabl engaging with the testing community via meet-ups in Boston, via Twitter, and on the mabl blog. You can find her napping in random nooks in the mabl office, and at [email protected]

How to Improve the Test Data Management Process with Data Simulation

July 10, 2019 by Fiona Nic Dhonnacha

Good test data is hard to come by. Learn how to use data simulation to improve the test data management process and save valuable time normally spent waiting for test data.

Good test data is hard to come by, and test teams are often left waiting for test data to be produced for them. According to a recent survey from Sogeti, up to 60% of application development and testing time is devoted to data-related tasks, and many project overruns are due to inefficiencies in test data provisioning. In general, up to 20% of the average software development lifecycle is lost waiting for data!

To improve this process, testing teams can use service virtualization to augment traditional test data extraction. With this method of data simulation, testers can quickly build meaningful test data by capturing realistic test data from interactions between components in their existing system (real and virtualized), and building data models that can be shared and controlled directly by testing teams.

How do you benefit from data simulation?

The process is as follows:

Define monitors: Monitors are proxies that intercept and record the data traffic between users and servers.
Capture: Test data is captured by monitors and recorded from existing testing via functional, performance and security testing already in place by the development team. The application under test likely has dependencies on various types of services such as databases, legacy mainframe systems and many others. As test automation is executed the transactions and data between the application and services is recorded by the monitors and stored in the virtual service repository.
Create: The captured transactions and data are sent to the service virtualization engine to create simulated virtualized services with associated test data.
Deploy: The created services are stored and deployed to a virtual service repository allowing for later consumption.
Manage: Orchestration of these virtualized service is required to make service virtualization work in a
CI/CD workflow.
Consume: Test data management and integrated orchestration of these virtual services means automated API and service-level testing is robust, easily repeatable and easier.

How does it work in practice?

A good example might be replacing a reliance on a shared database by swapping it with a virtual service. This allows for parallel and independent testing, that would otherwise conflict. With data simulation, testers can generate, subset, mask, and create individual customized test data for their needs.

By replacing shared dependencies such as databases, service virtualization removes the needs for the infrastructure and complexity required to host the database environment. In turn, this means isolated test suites and the ability to cover extreme and corner cases. Although the virtualized dependencies are not the “real thing,” some actions (e.g. an insert and update operation on a database) add some complexity to virtualization.

After capturing transactions and data, there is full control over the contents of the data from within the data manager. In addition, a model is abstracted automatically from the data based on database extraction or through the interactions observed during the recordings. This create model, as illustrated below, allows for better understanding of the data structure and relationships. This understanding is key to the next steps of masking, generating, and subsetting.

Quickly getting secure, real data for testing

Test data is hard to procure and a risk to manage. A solution based on secure, real data capture provides the best way to get the data you need, as fast as you need it. Service virtualization helps teams capture this data earlier in the development process, to be easily used for testing. With this modern approach to test data management, testers can securely store and manage test data, customize data sets for their needs, reduce the risk and liability of using production data, and reduce overall project risk and costs. For more information, you can download the free whitepaper: Tired of waiting for test data? Here’s the solution to your test data management headaches.

Chris Colosimo is a Product Manager, with expertise in SDLC acceleration through automation. Chris strategizes product development and deployment of Parasoft’s Continuous Testing solutions (Parasoft SOAtest, Virtualize and Continuous Testing Platform). Being a service virtualization and API testing subject matter expert and focusing on the concept of Continuous testing at speed, he works with developers and testers to discover constraints, evolve process, and facilitate the change management required to adopt agile and DevOps principals throughout an organization. Keen to share his knowledge and vast experience he frequently writes blogs and can be followed on Linkedin.

Expo Hero Winners

June 24, 2019 by Suzanne Meade

The EuroSTAR Conference experience is second to none. For over 25 years, EuroSTAR has provided a welcoming space for the largest European gathering of testers and quality assurance professionals.

In addition to the unbeatable learning sessions, EuroSTAR encompasses the largest Software Testing Expo in Europe. Within the Expo, each company that exhibits also contributes to the overall atmosphere of the conference. Over the years, many Expo partners have helped to enhance the delegate experience with unique activities and experiences.

This year, we wanted to ‘up the game’ so we put it to the testing community of test tool and service providers to tell us what unique activities or experiences they could bring to #EuroSTARConf 2019. We raised the stakes by offering an Expo exhibitor package worth €5,500!

Wow did the community respond!!!

We received so many entries and suggestions it was a massively difficult decision for the team to decide the winner. Eventually after hours locked away in a boardroom (with no coffee!!!), the winner was announced …

2019 EuroSTAR Expo Heroes

We are delighted to be welcoming mabl to the EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference in Prague. We loved their energy and approach to the challenge and know our delegates will too! The team at mabl really thought about the experience element and they also took note of our 2019 conference theme of ‘Working Well’.

Working Well is about balance. Software engineers, QA professionals and testers need to be able to “balance” speed and quality, particularly in DevOps. To help emphasise the need for balance (and keeping it fun), mabl are going to have a balance board at their Expo booth.

Yes, you read that correctly! All EuroSTAR attendees can try it out and see if they can balance successfully! There are raffle tickets given to all successful balancers with a cool prize up for grabs at the end. The longer you stay on, the more raffle tickets you are given! How fun is that?

We loved this idea and how it fits with the conference and our eternal search for balance in this hectic working world. We hope you will join us in Prague and pay a visit to the mabl booth in the EuroSTAR Software Testing Expo.

mabl will be joining a wide range of test tool and services providers at EuroSTAR – check out the additional Expo partners.

If you haven’t been before, the annual EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference is an amazing celebration of the craft of testing in Europe. It is the largest conference on testing in Europe with the biggest variety of topics. The conference takes place in November in a different European city each year. The conference is held over 4 days with over 60+ sessions including tutorials, workshops and talks as well as non-stop networking.

At EuroSTAR, we believe in the power of community and we help the testing community to build powerful connections!