Automation is the buzzword in the entire QA spectrum. Firms in India and abroad have got a new outlook on how the QA efforts can be saved by automation. Some companies have begun to mature in this field and utilizing automation in most effective ways. For a list of myths related to Automation, read http://www.satisfice.com/articles/test_automation_snake_oil.pdf
It is important to educate the senior management about the expectations from Automation. Identifying what to automate and when to do it is as important as it is to plan the entire effort. Managing an automation project is similar to managing a software development project. The most critical part is to write maintainable scripts – scripts which can be reused across multiple releases of the same product with slight modification. That requires defining a set of guidelines before automation begins. Here are a few tips on how to get started with an Automation project:

User story is one of the primary development artifact for the XP project teams. A user story contains just enough information so that development team can reasonably give estimate about completing, tester can discuss how it will validated and customer can see its value.

One of the common question that we hear most of the time is, how user stories are different from use cases. User stories are much simpler than use cases. User stories are very easy to create, discuss and develop. They also do not contain any technical details.

Typically good user stories are defined in the following format

As a I would like to do so that 

This article is written by Mr. Ashish Harsh for us. Thanks Ashish for sharing your knowledge / insight with us.  

Software testing is essentially an exercise of continuous exploration, learning and questioning. This exercise becomes very interesting and challenging at times, when application under test is as complex as Maps. You must have used applications like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps etc. Primary use of these applications is to help users in finding route. As an input to these applications, user gives source and destination and based on this information, maps give them directions to reach from source to destination. You might think from the description that application is simple, but it has got numerous challenges.
As a tester you need to find out relevant queries and also quality of results produced by the system.

In any real world scenario, not all users will do the same transaction. In order to simulate the same, the Performance Analyst must determine the mix of transactions/mix of browsers for every test that needs to be conducted. For ex: Some of your clients may be using IE and some may be using Mozilla
You need to have the data of % of usage. [Which you should collect during Requirement Collection]

This article talks about the following areas in Performance testing.

• Determine the type of Performance tests to be conducted
• Determine the transaction mix
• Methodology for Tool selection
• Considerations while scripting those transactions

The ‘take-away’ from this article would be all of the above and the risks and benefits of each type of Performance tests, which will help you understand the kind of tests that you need to conduct based on your Client’s specifications.

The scope of this article is limited to the need, approach for requirement collection and the steps involved for Performance Testing.

We all know and understand that not “one-size-fits-all”. The approach discussed in this article predominantly fits in to most scenarios but is not limited to or the only process to go about.

Introduction

Performance is a "must have" feature. No matter how rich your product is functionally, if it fails to meet the performance expectations of your customer the product will be branded a failure.

Application architectural design decisions may be greatly influenced by the importance placed by the customer on one or more specific requirements. Incorrect design decisions, made at the outset of a project as a result of invalid assumptions, may become impossible to remedy downstream. The goal of performance testing is not to find bugs, but to eliminate bottlenecks and establish a baseline for future regression testing.

Software testers often automate some mundane tasks which increases their efficiency and add value to the project. This automation can be done using any automation tools or writing your own scripts.

When a task is such that you need to access system information on windows, then one of the best candidate for automation is VBScript. It allows you to access the registry information and other system information easily. Using VBScript does not even require any application or framework for execution. The WSH (Windows Scripting Host) takes care of execution, which is installed by default on almost all Windows OS.

In this part we will explore the security issues related to Authentication and Web Services. Authentication is the core of many web applications, since in the WWW world, we need to check connection from every client to make sure that it is not from a malicious user. Similarly Web services are common place these days, and most of the common applications that you use on daily basis, might be using web services. Threats associated with the web services are very much different from what we have already seen.

In this part we will establish the importance of securing our environment as well for providing complete security to web application. Web application is hosted in the environment, which is accessible from the out side world. Client interact with the server and database, if proper care is not taken vulnerabilities in the environment can be exploited and  as a result security will be compromised. We will discuss, different vulnerabilities related to the environment on which web applications are hosted like stored procedures, command injection, fingerprinting and Denial Of Service.

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