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Over the last one decade the profile of software tester has undergone tremendous changes. Testing has become show-stopper for several application/product implementations and business has realized the importance of structured testing of applications before release. Testing has created several levels and types, and specialization in these various types of testing has increased the intrinsic value of a software tester. From being a monotonous test case executor, several career options have evolved in front of the testing community.

Career options for software test professionals

Of late, testing is looked after as a good professional career for many of the aspiring youths. As mentioned above, from being test engineer one can move to senior test engineer, test lead to test manager; else can become QA lead, QA Manager. The options available in the testing tools side are enormous. There are numbers of functional, performance, security testing tools besides test management tools like Quality Center from HP, CQTM from IBM etc.,

The demand for niche skills like SOA testers, Security testers are on the increase. There is dearth of skills in test automation areas – scripting skills in the tools languages like VB, Java and other scripting languages like Perl, Shell, Python etc. Technical resources with capabilities to evaluate automation tools, create automation framework and reusable components are on demand. There is always a demand for good performance testers who can analyze the performance test results, identify the bottlenecks and suggest tuning techniques.

Specialization has come to stay in testing career – following are some of the key areas where one need to specialize to move ahead in career path in testing apart from good knowledge in software lifecycle testing process.

• Domain Knowledge – Good knowledge in domain area of the application adds value to the testing professionals. There are ever living domains like BFSI, Telecom, Health care, manufacturing, embedded etc. Numbers of certifications are available for each of these areas where the tester can get certified.
• Automation Testing Tools Knowledge – There is great demand for automation and performance testers. A good skill on scripting languages of these tools is basic necessity for succeeding in test automation. Knowledge on creation, validation and enhancement of test automation framework is very much required.
• Certifications – QAI, ASQ, ISQTB and several other institutes are offering testing specific certifications. These certifications improve the confidence of the clients on the testing professionals. CQTM, PMP are some managerial certifications, which help the testers to scale up in the professional ladder. Certifications on the testing tools offered by vendors like HP increases the technical competency of the individual.
• Niche areas in Testing – Experts predict that the niche areas like SOA testing, Security testing are gaining momentum in the testing space. Many tools are emerging in these areas. As testing professionals we should be aware of where the industry is heading and update our knowledge in those areas.

Knowledge updation is a continuous process. Several websites like offer excellent insight into various facets of the testing arena. Team members should spend at least two hours in a week in selected websites to update themselves to the current happenings and events.

As the saying goes “you need to run continuously to keep yourself in the same place”, as testing professionals we should always work towards sharpening our testing skills to succeed in this competitive environment.

Source: http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com

Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.

It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It is a conceptual framework that promotes foreseen interactions throughout the development cycle. The Agile Manifesto introduced the term in 2001. Agile management methods can also be applied in development projects other than software development.

Source: PicNetTV

The Client

Our Customer is a Online News Community http://www.newsfromfriends.com . User can get their personal newspaper and share thoughts and address them to special persons

The Requirements

Customer wanted to make sure their users privacy and content are secured enough, few of their security test requirements are below:

• SQL injection vulnerability
• Cross site scripting
• Business workflow securities
• Authentication security
• Brute force authentication breach testing
• Firewall security testing
• Web server files security

The Solution

• Identification of Application Input e.g. Files, environment variables, parameters in URL, through form submission etc., config files and registry
• Identification Application Output e.g. Files, Environmental Variables, Network Traffic, The Windows Registry, Console/Form, Database Source
• Logical tests Authentication, login, Email confirmation, business work flow securities, data encryption etc.

The Technology

• PHP
• Linux
• Apache

Contribution

• Breach finding using cross site scripting and SQL injection
• Breach finding using Brute force authentication
• Link injection, other user’s profile access breach and their content as well
• Hidden folders and direct files access from web server
• Email security and Data encryption security

You can also download the case study here.

The Client

Our Customer is a Internet marketing company exclusively for the travel industry providing online hospitality marketing and consulting service for worldwide hotels, resorts and travel clients.

The Requirements

• Scalability: Platform must be able to support a very high number of concurrent users.
• Efficiency: Customer expectation includes the highly efficient application with minimal page navigation response time.
• Reliability: Platform must scale rapidly to meet the business goals of attracting a larger user base and supporting multiple formats
• Fail Over: Application should be able to behave functionally correct under high load and should have the Fail Over control

The Solution

• Performance testing on HTTP, HTTPS protocols
• Performance Tests on UI, AJAX etc
• Identify Performance bottlenecks and suggest measures to overcomes them
• Performance tests based on number concurrent users
• Monitoring the server parameters like CPU usage, threads count, connections etc.
• Profiling the application through Dot Trace and SQL profiler

The Technology

• Microsoft .NET
• AJAX
• SQL Server
• IIS Server
• Kapow Data Mining

Contribution

• Response time for actions covered under test.
• Server stats analysis and suggesting bottlenecks:
  • Bottleneck due to resource usage of Kapow which is running on the same web server.
  • Suggestion for the optimum threads count.
• Capturing the time consuming Stored Procs.

You can also download the case study here.

Test Specification

It is a detailed summary of what scenarios will be tested, how they will be tested, how often they will be tested, and so on and so forth, for a given feature. Trying to include all Editor Features or all Window Management Features into one Test Specification would make it too large to effectively read.

However, a Test Plan is a collection of all test specifications for a given area. The Test Plan contains a high-level overview of what is tested for the given feature area.

Contents of a Test Specification

Revision History

This section contain information like Who created the test specification? When was it created? When was the last time it was updated?

Feature Description

A brief description of what area is being tested.

What is tested?

An overview of what scenarios are tested.

What is not tested?

Are there any areas that are not being tested. There can be several reasons like being covered by different people or any test limitations etc. If so, include this information as well.

Nightly Test Cases

A list of the test cases and high-level description of what is tested whenever a new build becomes available.

Breakout of Major Test Areas

It is the most interesting part of the test specification where testers arrange test cases according to what they are testing.

Specific Functionality Tests

Tests to verify the feature is working according to the design specification. This area also includes verifying error conditions.

Security Tests

Any tests that are related to security.

Accessibility Tests

Any tests that are related to accessibility.

Performance Tests

This section includes verifying any performance requirements for your feature.

Localization / Globalization

Tests to ensure you’re meeting your product’s Local and International requirements.

Please note that your Test Specification document should be in such a manner that should prioritize the test case easily like nightly test cases, weekly test cases and full test pass etc.

• Nightly - Must run whenever a new build is available.
• Weekly - Other major functionality tests run once every three or four builds.
• Lower Priority - Run once every major coding milestone.

What is Software Testing? A basic to start with:

Software testing is the process used to help identify the correctness, completeness, security, and quality of developed computer software.

Testing is a process of technical investigation, performed on behalf of stakeholders, that is intended to reveal quality-related information about the product with respect to the context in which it is intended to operate.

This includes, but is not limited to, the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding errors. Quality is not an absolute; it is value to some person. With that in mind, testing can never completely establish the correctness of arbitrary computer software; testing furnishes a criticism or comparison that compares the state and behaviour of the product against a specification.

An important point is that software testing should be distinguished from the separate discipline of software quality assurance, which encompasses all business process areas, not just testing.

There are many approaches to software testing, but effective testing of complex products is essentially a process of investigation, not merely a matter of creating and following routine procedure. One definition of testing is “the process of questioning a product in order to evaluate it”, where the “questions” are operations the tester attempts to execute with the product, and the product answers with its behavior in reaction to the probing of the tester.

Although most of the intellectual processes of testing are nearly identical to that of review or inspection, the word testing is connoted to mean the dynamic analysis of the product; putting the product through its paces. The quality of the application can, and normally does, vary widely from system to system but some of the common quality attributes include capability, reliability, efficiency, portability, maintainability, compatibility and usability.

A good test is sometimes described as one which reveals an error; however, more recent thinking suggests that a good test is one which reveals information of interest to someone who matters within the project community.

Software testing is an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks of software implementation. In this video we describe the fundamentals of software testing.

Different types of Software Testing processes are described below:

• Unit Testing
  It is a method by which individual units of source code are tested to determine if they are fit for use.
• Integration Testing
  Here individual software modules are combined and tested as a group.
• Functionality Testing
  It is a type of black box testing that bases its test cases on the specifications of the software component under test.
• Usability Testing
  It is a technique used to evaluate a product by testing it on users.
• System Testing
  It is testing conducted on a complete, integrated system to evaluate the system's compliance with its specified requirements.
• Performance Testing
  It is testing that is performed, to determine how fast some aspect of a system performs under a particular workload.
• Load Testing
  It refers to the practice of modeling the expected usage of a software program by simulating multiple users accessing the program concurrently.
• Stress Testing
  It is a form of testing that is used to determine the stability of a given system or entity.

How to monitor Unix resources from controller?

There is no need for any LoadRunner installation to be on a Unix/Linux Machine to be monitored. However, the machine must have the default RSTAT daemon installed and running. The controller establishes a UDP socket connection with the UNIX machine. It first communicates with port 111 on the Unix machine and this port is then mapped to the dynamic port on which the rstatd is working. The controller then queries rstatd and all communication takes place through this established UDP socket connection.

Starting the rstatd process in Unix

To monitor UNIX resources, you must configure the rstatd daemon. Note that the rstatd daemon might already be configured, because when a machine receives an rstatd request, the inetd on that machine activates the rstatd automatically.

To verify whether the rstatd daemon is already configured:

The rup command reports various machine statistics, including rstatd configuration. Run the following command to view the machine statistics:

>rup host

A remote host will only respond if it is running the rstatd daemon. If you do not receive a response, or if you receive an error message, the rstatd daemon is not configured.

To configure the rstatd daemon:

1. Run the command: su root
2. Go to /etc/inetd.conf and look for the rstatd row (it begins with the word rstatd). If it is commented out (with a #), remove the comment directive, and save the file.
3. From the command line, run:
   > kill -1 inet_pid
   where inet_pid is the pid of the inetd process. This instructs the inetd to rescan the /etc/inetd.conf file and register all daemons which are uncommented, including the rstatd daemon.
4. Run rup again.
   If the command still does not indicate that the rstatd daemon is configured, contact your system administrator.

Which port is rstatd daemon running on?

You can run a UNIX utility called rpcinfo and identify the rstatd's port number. By running > rpcinfo -p you will receive a list of all RPC servers registered in the host's portmapper, along with the port number.

Apache JMeter is open source software, a 100% pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions.

Apache JMeter may be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more). It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types. You can use it to make a graphical analysis of performance or to test your server/script/object behavior under heavy concurrent load.

HP QuickTest Professional software provides functional and regression test automation for software applications and environments. Part of the HP Quality Center tool suite, HP QuickTest Professional can be used for enterprise quality assurance.

It works by identifying the objects in the application user interface or a web page and performing desired operations (such as mouse clicks or keyboard events); it can also capture object properties like name or handler ID.

• QTP also uses a "human" like technology for object identification
• During Record Time QTP tries to learn properties of a GUI object on which operation is performed
• During Run-Time QTP compares the stored object properties with actual properties of object available on screen and uniquely identifies an object independent of its location on screen
• The stored object and together with its properties is called TEST Object
• During Run-Time, the actual object available on the application under test is called Run-Time Object
• This is Quick Tests "Test Object Model"
• Information about the Test Objects is stored in Object Repository
• Add-ins help in instructing Quick Test in advance of the nature of object to be recorded so it reduces the time required to learn its properties