My various other presentations are also available here: My Presentations

University of Auckland recently upgraded to PeopleSoft Campus Solutions v9.
In fact it was more of an implementation rather than an upgrade. Why an implementation? Well for various reasons, and to name a few:
Firstly, University was on a 10 year old version of PeopleSoft SA v7.6
Secondly, technically it was almost impossible to have an in-place upgrade. So the plan was to start afresh.

1 – Data Migration: While the plan was to start fresh, all the existing data was still supposed to be migrated across.
2 – Business Process: The business processes were re-written. Number of staff members was also affected by this change.
In saying so no institution that I am aware of has ever implemented an out-of-the-box or a so called vanilla version of PeopleSoft systems. We were no different…
2 – Enhancements: A long wish list of customisations was ready even before the process workshops had started.
3 – Interfaces: In addition to that there were number of systems that integrated to Campus Solutions – and all this integration was supposed to be re-developed using Web-Logic Integration (WLI) messaging system.
4 – Identity Management: To top that off identity management was being dropped from PeopleSoft and our internal Identity & Access Management (IAM) system was supposed to be re-implemented and integrated to PeopleSoft CS v9 system.
5 – Infrastructure: Wait there is more – finally, the infrastructure where all this was planned to be hosted was new as well.

Well, with these many changes in scope, there was no doubt that it will require thorough testing. Not just business process testing, but also all the other types of functional and non-functional testing like, usability, integration, performance, load, security, etc.

The complete project – from planning to implementation – was 20 months long. If you ask any traditional Project Manager they would say – testing will start some time halfway through the project and the Test Manager is only required may be a month before that. But senior management had decided they wanted to be prepared rather than sorry at the end of the project. As a result we had the Testing Manager involved in the project from the beginning. The testing team also started on the project much earlier than norm.

This was one of the aspects where we took a different approach from some of the traditional Project Management approaches.

The presentation will cover what else was different! An in-depth overview of approach taken by University of Auckland in terms of test planning and testing for PeopleSoft Campus Solution v9 implementation.

My take on future of testing has always been – in fact I think it is the current state now, that:

1. Testing is not just functional GUI testing
2. Desktop apps are a thing of past
3. With the advent of Web 2, SOA, Cloud, etc. it is getting more and more technical
4. Performance
5. Security
6. Usability
7. Integration
8. Automation
9. …are the areas where the testers of today need to develop skills in

I have interacted with all kinds of testers, testers from different schools, contexts, methodologies, level of experiences, and most of them specialise in functional testing. But if you would really like to be future-proof – then I think Technical Testing is the way forward.

To add fuel to the topic Goranka Bjedov did a great presentation recently at a conference in Wellington: STANZ

In the presentation she shares her past experiences in software testing, especially last couple of years of her life when she comes across some hard reality of life/software quality. And she ends her presentation with the following summary:

1. We can reduce dev time (and costs) by writing productivity tests
2. We can bring in quality by adding smart system tests in right places
3. Think performance, scalability
4. Think usability
5. We can reduce number of machines needed in dat centers
6. We must start calculating and communicating the value of our work (dollar amounts)
7. We must stop being the cost center

I was testing the ‘churn’ sample from the book. The actual issue was I had one ruby file which contained the code base called ‘churn.rb’ and then there was another file to unit-test the code called ‘churn-tests.rb’. Both these files were under a custom folder under ‘D:\blah\blah\code\’

‘Churn-tests.rb’ includes ‘churn.rb’ file to be able to test it. The command used to include is: “require ‘churn’”.
Initially in previous versions, since both files were in the same folder, Ruby would simply load the code file – ‘churn’. But as of Ruby v1.9.2, as part of the default installation, the code directory: “.” has been removed from the $LOAD_PATH.

As a result my code (unit-test) just wouldn’t work. I tried various options but no luck.

Finally, I came across few ways of fixing it, and those are:

1 – Provide the relative path:

require ‘./churn’

2 – Get current file’s path and reuse it:

require File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), ‘filename‘))

3 – Same as above but bit more readable:

require Pathname.new(__FILE__).dirname + ‘filename’

4 – Spell out the complete path, but obviously that’s not ideal

Hope that comes handy to someone.

Happy Coding… oops… Testing!

The original list is not available any more. Dazzlepod has though made the list available without the passwords so people could check if any of their email addresses have been compromised. The list is available here: http://dazzlepod.com/lulzsec/?page=1

Requirement:
There are almost 62,000 email addresses and Dazzlepod has divided the list in to 120 pages.
I would like to go through the list and check if any of mine or my family member’s email has been compromised. Going through 120 pages and searching for almost 10 aliases on each page is a daunting task.

Solution:
So I went ahead and automated the process, that is scripted a spider (kind of). The spider goes though all 120 pages and reports if any of the aliases I know of have been compromised.

This script is created using iMacros plug-in for Firefox.

Instructions:

• Download and install Firefox (if you don’t have it already).
• Download and install iMacros for Firefox
• Click here to download my iMacros script and copy it to iMacros folder. It is mostly (C:\Users\<username>\Documents\iMacros\Macros) in Windows-7 environment.
• Open the script in editor and update the values in var mynames = new Array(“alias1“,”alias2“) with your aliases. Do not include domain name and suffix.
• Now run the script and you should get the response in 5-10 minutes. Depending on number of aliases and website speed.

If your browser blocks the download of a ‘javascript’ file then here is the script for your reference:


var i, j, retcode;
var report;
var ret;
var macro;
var jsLF = "\n";
var iPages = 120;
/*NOTE: Change the list in next line to include all the email aliases you'd like to check.
E.g.: ("alias1","alias2","alias3","alias4")
*/
var mynames = new Array("alias1","alias2")

alert ( report );


UPDATE:
1 - There is a longer list now on Dazzlepod with almost 260,000 emails: http://dazzlepod.com/lulzsec/final/
2 - They now also have a search box, so that makes this script redundant

This week Steve talks about usability, how it is gaining importance now in whether it is software or service industry. His current and past experiences in the industry while working for some prominent clients in New Zealand like Air New Zealand and University of Auckland.

I personally have worked with Steve and he is great colleague, friend and person to work with. Always turned on and always has that great new idea up his sleeve that will make your product better usable.

Here is the link again to the podcast. Listen before it goes behind the paid firewall.

Happy Listening!

There were lots of tweets coming off there as well: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23anztbtest2011

My pick of the lot was Lee’s presentation ‘Testing Trends and Innovations’. He touched on various topics on what are some of the latest trends in testing. Some of them which I could note down are below.

Virtualization

Applications being deployed on virtual machines (environments) and not on stand-alone servers. Similarly use of VMs for test lab.
He specifically mentioned of a situation where he visited a major client who was showing off his test-lab. They had to make sure their application had to be tested on 26 different OS/Browser/Hardware configuration and had more than 26 machines in his test lab. Lee asked the Test Manager “…isn’t it expensive…?” and pat came the reply – “…compared to what…?” “Compared to us being a newspaper headlines for our application not working on a certain platform? Guess not.”

The times have changed now and in fact a full-fledged test lab could be setup on a single high-end server with number of VMs running at same time.

Testing in Cloud

Quite related to the previous topic, except these VMs are not owned by the company but are hosted by service providers. These VMs are available on an as-and-when required basis and end up being cheaper than a can of Coke.

Crowd Sourcing

How cool would it be if you created an application and made it available online for the crowd (people) out there to test it out? They provide you fresh set of eyes, people with great experience and also end up being cheaper as you don’t have to hire them as permanent employees.

In my opinion this is not always practically possible – specially with IP and sensitivity of the product. But why not use it when possible? There are some companies out there who provide this service already: uTest and Mob4Hire.

Testing Books

You’re at an operation bed and the Neuro-Surgeon is about to operate you. You ask him/her – “what books have you read on Neuro-surgery?” The response is – “none”. What would you do?

Similarly if the customer asks you (a tester) – “what books have you read on testing?”. What would your response be?
It is a shame that many (or most of the) testers don’t take their profession seriously and have never read a single book on testing.

Best Practices

I guess enough has been said about this – that there are no “best practices” or “golden bullet” for testing anything.
More often than not you have to go with: Plan –> Action –> Review –> Plan –> Action –> Review… approach.

Exploratory Testing

Non-existence of Best Practice smoothly leads us into Exploratory Testing. And of course there was mention of James Bach, Michael Bolton and Cem Kaner. They are the evangelists of ET and promote the Context-Driven approach of testing – which I am a big fan of.

Free Press

Gone are those days when you had to own a press to get heard! Nowadays it’s quite easy to have blog and get heard by millions all over the globe.

Weekend Testing

Lee also mentioned the initiative that started in India by a bunch of testers. These testers were not happy by how testing was done at their workplace and to explore the true potential of their work they started having testing sessions during weekends. During these sessions they would select any online product, application or website and test it. After the session they prepare a testing report – which contains bugs found, new learnings, observations, how the product could have been better, etc. And guess what – obviously they are not given any ‘requirements document’ and no ‘test scripts’ to start testing! This movement – Weekend Testing is now flourishing and already has chapters in Australia & New Zealand, Europe and Americas along with the Indian one.

My Conclusion

I think software testing industry has flourished and changed a lot in last 5-6 years and will continue to do so. To keep up with it I think testers need to:

• Stay abreast with the changes in the industry
• Be aware of and understand the latest technology stack
• Have an open mind to learn new approaches
• Learn new tools – to support their work and not get dependent on them
• And read some books on testing!

PS: All the presentations from the conference are available at the ANZTB website: http://www.anztb.org/downloads.php

The good thing about them is that the interviewees are not restricted to people from just one part of the world; neither to at what stage of their career they are at. We have just released our 25th episode of TWiST. We’ve had participants from all over the world who are at various stage of their career, though most of them are pros and have been around for a while.

My role in this is to identify potential speakers/interviewees from down under and organise recording sessions with Matt. I am also the co-producer of the show. Here are direct links to podcasts from down under:

• TWiST #11 – with Jared Quinert and Brian Osman
• TWiST #17 – with Marlena Compton, Oliver Erlewein and Farid Vaswani.

This is the link to a bonus podcast where I interviewed Geoff Horne: http://www.softwaretestpro.com/Item/4879/Bonus-Thursday/Software-Testing-Test-and-QA.

These podcasts are a great source of knowledge and helps one learn from other people’s experiences. If you are a tester then I’d highly recommend you subscribing to these – TWiST.

Happy Listening!!!

There were some great minds present there and my general feeling was no one is in this industry to just earn their bread and butter, but also because they love the art of testing and care about it’s future.

In addition to various presentations we also had some open discussions and the topic that got everyone excited was ‘Certification’ or ‘Degree’ in Testing.

Carol Cornelius did an interesting presentation on certification. Which as expected was received with mixed responses. Interestingly one of the attendees also raised a concern why don’t we have a university degree for Testing?

There were some other concerns as well like:

• Google is developing a car which drives itself – in future we might have softwares or development platforms which may *test* itself?
• The other common consensus seemed to be that with lately technology changing so drastically and quickly there is a growing requirement for technical testers.

Talking about degrees/certifications in testing – my take on it is yes having a degree in software testing would be a great benefit to the testing industry and hopefully we will have one in future. This degree may cover all types of software testing methodologies, technologies and terminologies. It is then up to each individual what (s)he would like to specialise in. Isn’t this what happens with other degrees or certifications like Chartered Accountant (CA) – people do these courses and then go on to do different stuff?

Certifications are a good start but I think we need some hands-on, practical, detailed curriculum for a full-fledged Degree in Software Testing.

Last year I blogged about ANZTB’s (Australia & New Zealand Testing Board) Test conference and mentioned that if things work out well I might be doing a presentation there – fortunately they did!

Yay – my abstract got accepted by the panel of experts from ANZTB and earlier this year (February 2010) I traveled to Melbourne to do my first International Presentation.

It was a pleasurable experience. Of course I had goosebumps all over, but my wife and David Hayman (current Chairman of ANZTB) gave me all the support and motivation to do my presentation confidently.

What was more exciting was the feedback I received after the presentation. Attendees liked the presentation, especially the topic I presented on. Quite often companies are facing similar problems like ours and they were quite impressed to see how we had tackled those challenges.

Here is the presentation for your reference:

—-