I am in the process of revising for the ISTQB Foundation exam and was wondering if you can pass the exam just by reading the syllabus available on the ISTQB website? Or do I need to read a software testing book alongside the Syllabus??
Yes , sure all exams questions focus on syllabus chapters and on words expression, you able to get more info from other sources to improve you knowledge but for exams syllabus
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I was promoted to manager and I need to adopt a methodology to manage the programmers here.
I read a lot about Scrum but in my case, we have a tester here and I couldn't find a place for tests in Scrum. Will it be during the sprints or at the end of them?
We have 3 C# programmers, 2 VB, 1 ObjectiveC and a Web Designer/Developer. Is Scrum the best option for us?
Thanks in advance for any help and sorry for any typos, my English is not good =)
If you are trying to introduce SCRUM have a read of Scrum from the trenches it helped me enormously. The definition of the user stories etc being done should involve passing tests and I am sure your tester will be key to deciding on when a feature is done.
I have never worked on a team where testing was more in focus than when using scrum. As the other answers state, testing should be a part of the done criteria of the sprint item.
I've had good experience with the rule, that definition of system and user tests should be written as the first activity of a sprint item. Also, no item should be accepted as done without the proper level of unit and integration tests.
This implicitly means that an item should not be "doned" by the persons that the solved the item. IMHO, that should be the responsibility of other members of the sprint team -- in your case it could be the tester.
Regards,
Morten
Every backlog item should be tested before considered "done", i.e. the testing is done during the sprint.
If you refer to "test" as the "demo", it should be done at the end of the sprint, with product owner, customer (and other people in charge) present.
Is testing good thing? Yes! Then do it all the time!
"Testing phase" is a term from waterfall projects.
In agile (I assume you trying to be agile since you are setting up as a scrum team) you are focused on being able to adapt and adopt quickly - testing is the key in that process.
Do it often and do it all the time - feedback will be provided often and team will be able to adopt quickly and timely.
Creating a testing phase (whenever it is scheduled for) - you will slip into waterfall mode or better yet - scrumfall. Think about the feedback - at the end of the 'testing [phase' which some after many other phases. Lots of waste that you trying to avoid by being agile and by using scrum.
There are no people with primary skills being testing - it does not matter - let them learn how to test their product/application. Invest time (and money) in that - it will pay off big time as they move forward.
There is no test phase.. test is part of each iteration..
but above is in theory.. in practice you may have important dates by which you will like to ship something - so sometimes teams label iteration(s) close to such dates as stabilization iterations where no new features are added and only must fix bugs are done..
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Need some ignition for learning Embedded Systems [closed]
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Closed 6 years ago.
I'm a computer systems engineering student. i'm interested in designing embedded systems but i don't know where to begin learning this, and what topics are essentially needed to proceed in this domain.
So can you please tell me what topics do i have to study, and what books are available there in market or online that can help me???
please help me
p.s. normally as an engineering student i have basic knowledge of circuit theory and microcontroller realm.
Take a look at the Arduino.
From the site:
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
There are some good articles on the subject here:
http://www.ganssle.com/articles.htm
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I am about to go for an interview for a software testing summer job. What questions should I ask the professor about this + I have never done software testing before, any good reference material you can recommend will be appreciated.
thanks
You should be prepared to discuss a variety of testing terms, such as:
"black box" testing, "white box" testing, etc.
unit tests
functional tests
smoke tests
BVTs (Build Verification Tests)
the differences between stress testing and load testing
performance testing
globalization testing
interoperability testing
manual testing vs. automated testing (when?, why?)
api testing
security testing
regression testing
code coverage testing
(etc...)
You likely don't need experience in all of them, but you should express an awareness.
A general knowledge of the following is helpful (refer to IEEE 829 for a start):
- test plans - what should be in a good plan?
- test cases - what should be in a good test case?
- test design specifications
- incident reporting (including bug tracking)
- software specifications - what does one look for?
You should start thinking about how you would test different things. What are the base cases? Are there any boundary cases? What could be wrong with any given product or item? Think creatively...
For a few starting references on testing, I suggest looking at the following:
Cem Kamer's book on software testing
Wikipedia for some more starting points
IEEE 829 (related articles should be sufficient to get you thinking, as the full spec is good for insomniacs)
If you've never done software testing before, it would be a good idea to learn some things quickly.
I'd recommend checking out the Black Box Software Testing course, available free (without an instructor) at http://www.testingeducation.org/BBST, or in an instructor-led version that is free to members of the Association for Software Testing (http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org). This is a university-level course, hours and hours of video, supplementary materials, quizzes, self-tests, and pointers to other information.
James Bach and I co-author and teach a course called Rapid Software Testing (http://www.developsense.com/courses.html). The course notes for that are available for free at James' Web site, http://www.satisfice.com/rst.pdf.
I've written a lot of articles on testing for Better Software magazine. They're available free at http://www.developsense.com/publications.html.
In addition, there's a blog post for you: http://www.developsense.com/2009/02/how-can-trainee-improve-his-her-skills.html
There are several testing communities online where you can ask questions and get mentorship. http://www.softwaretestingclub.com and http://www.testrepublic.com are two of them.
Best of luck.
---Michael B.
Besides the questions you will be asked, don't forget the interview is actually a conversation. And you look much better if you ask questions yourself. So, let me say few things I'd ask if I were you :)
For me, when it comes to working as a tester, most important is communication. How well you can communicate with team members, managers, team that develops the software you test.
Do they use some kind of bug tracking system, if so, what system is it? Is it the same system the development team uses?
Does this tool cover most of communication needs, or there gonna be a lot of calls / email exchanging resulting in a total mess in discussions about issues?
Is there any automated tool used for testing? This gets you quite close to what are your responsibilities on this position, so will probably be covered in the interview anyway.
Do you get 2 monitors ;) ? (Really, getting a second display was like a huge improvement for me in tester job). Do you get the tools that make your work faster and more effective?
Terms, definitions and tools are important thing... but analytical skills, logic, communication and other skills may be more important.
Maybe It won't be a summer job, but a career.
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In an answer to the question Documents for a project?, Chris Ballance replied that "User Stories" and a "burndown chart" are the two most useful types of project documentation for a developer.
My question is, do you know of any good example[s], which I can see (for example on the internet, or in a book), of these kinds of documentation?
If possible I'd be happy to see many examples, including:
Small/short/simple examples
Big/long/complicated examples
Famous examples
High-quality examples
I don't find this an easy topic to Google for: I find lots written about it, but fewer demonstrations showing it.
A very good place to start as far as books are concerned is User Stories Applied and Agile Estimation and Planning both by Mike Cohn. This have excellent examples and good starting points for anyone first coming to agile methodologies.
As far as website resources they are few and far between. Probably a good place to actually start would be searching for those keywords on Google Images as many people take photos of their burndown charts and User Stories. This helped me a lot when starting. Here are some samples: Burndown Chart, and User Stories
Please note however while a burndown chart is a simple report that you run on your current story points left in an iteration, User stories are more complex than that and do require a bit of reading to wrap your head around. Start with User Stories Applied book for that.
Hope that helps!
I think for both of these questions, you can do a lot worse than scan over Alistair Cockburn's web site. In particular, he has a great article about burndown charts and some different ways to generate them:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/Earned-value+and+burn+charts
(thoug I echo the earlier poster's recommendation of Mike Cohn's work).
One of the tricks is deciding what kind of documentation is good for YOUR project. Do you have many developers, spread over time and space? You will need bigger, heavier, more detailed stories. Do you have one or two devs working in the same place? You can get away with lighter ones. Has the team worked in the system (if it's legacy) for a long time? Light stories will probably do. Is the team new to the system, or are its business requirements complex? This pushes you in the more-detail direction.
If you're on a "small" project by any of the dozen definitions of small, you may be fine with very light stories. Here's an example, again from Cockburn's site:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/Examples+of+ultra-light+use+cases
A few months ago, we started writing the user documentation at the same time as we are developing features. A technical writer is assigned to each Scrum teams.
Having to write the user documentation while developing helps validating the design. The technical writer also participate in the design of the application.
This is in addition of release burndown and sprint burndown.
Additional documentation is created by the team when they feel it is useful to communicate with the product owner. This became less important as we are learning to write better user stories.
Consider reading Ambler's "Agile Modeling". He makes a very strong case as to why just creating tons of full UMLs is a fairly bad idea, and gives some good examples.
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I work in a shop that is certified at CMMI level 5. This certification is important because it gives us access to certain customers and contracts. I'm looking at how to blend Scrum with CMMI. I've found some info on mixing Scrum with CMMI-3, but quite a bit of it is "hand wavy" and wouldn't hold up to intense scrutiny. Specifically, the organizational KPAs seem challenging.
What experiences have you had (good and bad) mixing the two processes?
This seems an interesting paper by the SEI folks at Carnegie Mellon (not just about Scrum though):
CMMI and Agile are compatible. At the project level, CMMI focuses at a high level of abstraction
on what projects do, not on what development methodology is used, while Agile methods
focus on how projects develop products. Therefore, CMMI and Agile methods can co-exist
CMMI or Agile: Why not embrace both (PDF)
Here is an experience report on the results of introducing Scrum into a CMMI Level 5 environment to replace waterfall projects for large defense and healthcare contracts (pdf).
Abstract:
Projects combining agile methods with
CMMI1 are more successful in producing
higher quality software that more
effectively meets customer needs at a
faster pace. Systematic Software
Engineering works at CMMI level 5 and
uses Lean Software Development as a
driver for optimizing software
processes. Early pilot projects at
Systematic showed productivity on
Scrum teams almost twice that of
traditional teams. Other projects
demonstrated a story based test driven
approach to software development
reduced defects found during final
test by 40%. We assert that Scrum and
CMMI together bring a more powerful
combination of adaptability and
predictability than either one alone
and suggest how other companies can
combine them.
HTH,
I just happen to find a blog on this exact topic: Agile CMMI blog
A starting point for a discussion on marrying Agile methods and CMMI.
It links to several articles
Agile CMMI: No Oxymoron
Agile Programming and the CMMI: Irreconcilable Differences?
It found the whole of interest so I decided to share it here.
Another recent article providing real life experience on this topic is "Mature Scrum at Systematic", co-writtent by Carsten Ruseng Jakobsen, Jeff Sutherland
In addition to the previously mentioned documents, I found another one: Agile Methods and CMMI: Compatibility or Conflict? The emphasis of this paper is on Extreme Programming (XP) and how its methods can be applied within an organization attempting to remain compliant with the CMMI framework. Although it isn't Scrum, it might be an interesting read.
Another interesting Jeff Sutherland's paper on that subject is "Scrum and CMMI Level 5: The Magic Potion for Code Warriors"
Is is said : "Results show that projects combining Agile Methods with CMMI 5 are more successful in producing higher quality software that more effectively meets customer needs at a faster pace."
If you can read french, here's a very good article on that subject : Synergies entre CMMI et les Méthodes Agiles
See short but detailed comparison at http://www.processgroup.com/pgpostmar09.pdf
On EuroStar 2009 conference Gittie Ottosen spoke about how they do agile at their company. What's impressive is that this company Systematic is creating software for air-crafts, military etc. They do it in compliance with CMMI 5, ISO 9001 and AQAP 150&2110. So I guess agile can be applied to systems with high regulations. Maybe try to look up that presentation, and try to get more info from him.