RBCS Podcast

Automobiles can have millions of lines of code in them, and some of that code can have safety-critical implications. Various standards apply to safety-critical automotive code, dictating the level of code coverage required: statement, decision (or branch), or modified condition/decision coverage. To celebrate the launch of our new Automotive Software Testing course, we’re offering this free webinar. If you build or test automotive software, attend to get a taste of what you could learn in this course.

In this free RBCS webinar, join Rex Black, President of RBCS, as he describes in detail what each of these levels of coverage means, how you can achieve it, and how to understand what code coverage tools are telling you.

In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex is happy to welcome José Mata. José has worked over 20 years as a Software Quality Assurance consultant and manager, working in Austin, San Francisco, New York, and Paris.  As a member of the American Software Testing Qualification Board (ASTQB) Technical Advisory Group, José wrote questions for the Foundation Level qualification exams. He is currently a Senior Software Test Engineer with NarrativeDx, an Internet startup in Austin Texas, providing AI-driven analyses of healthcare data. 

In this session, José and Rex will discuss moving Selenium automated testing from concept to implementation and overcoming basic “gotchas” in bootstrapping Selenium testing.

If you’ve been testing for any length of time, you know that the number of possible test cases is enormous if you try to test all possible combinations of inputs, configuration values, types of data, and so forth. It’s like the mythical monster, the many-headed Hydra, which would sprout two or more new heads for each head that was cut off. Two simple approaches to dealing with combinatorial explosions such as this are equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis, but those techniques don’t check for interactions between factors. A reasonable, manageable way to test combinations is called pairwise testing, but to do it you’ll need a tool.  In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate the use of a free tool, ACTS, built by the US NIST and available for download worldwide. We can’t promise to turn you into Hercules, but you will definitely walk away able to slay the combinatorial Hydra.

Join Rex and Gary for a joint  presentation on how TMMi can improve your testing and accelerate your business performance since testing is a key contributor to higher profits, customer satisfaction, personnel motivation and a bigger market share.

In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex is happy to welcome Yalonda Haywood. Yalonda Haywood is a person of intention. As a professional speaker, trainer, and rebound coach, Yalonda helps companies and individuals recover in value, amount, and strength after any decrease or decline. The passion to see other’s reach their next level has been the driving force behind Yalonda’s career. Over the past 20 years, her journey has and continues to include speaking, training, coaching, people leadership and building high performing teams in the quality assurance space within information technology. 

In this session, Yalonda and Rex will discuss the key to building stronger IT departments including  possible tension between quality assurance and development and operations teams, keys to creating a different culture that is not dependent on industry, practical steps organizations can take to make the culture shift and more.

In the 2010s, the software testing profession made a lot of big strides. Testing skills expanded significantly across the set of practitioners, and the number of professional testers grew.  However, there remains one place where testing remains challenged, and was unable to surmount that challenge in the 2010s. Tune in to learn what that challenge is, and to get Rex’s thoughts on how to succeed in the 2020s decade, which starts just two days later!

Is software testing a waste of time and money?  Many people outside of the testing profession seem to think so, and, based on the relative paucity of money devoted to testing compared to other activities in the lifecycle, it’s certainly not a high priority for many organizations.  Is that smart?  Why do we test software?  What benefits, goals, and objectives does testing serve?  Attend this presentation to learn solid, hard-headed, convincing reasons why testing is one of the smartest investments you can make, and why organizations that invest in testing receive long-lasting benefits from doing so.  Rex will lay out the case for software testing and answer your questions.

Just like creating code for user stories, creating and maintaining automated tests for user stories have characteristic velocities.  Are you measuring them?  Do you know what good looks like for these metrics, and can you recognize the warning signs of a serious test automation death spiral when it emerges? In this One Key Idea webinar, Rex will explain how to use two simple, easy-to-gather metrics to calculate automated test creation velocity and automated test maintenance velocity.

Exploratory testing is a name given for a technique of using knowledge, experience, and skills to test software in a non-linear, investigatory fashion. Is it a powerful and important part of each professional tester’s repertoire, or actually magic quality pixie dust? Is this the only real way of testing, or is there room for other forms of validation as well as verification? What are the origins of exploratory testing, and who actually invented the technique (as opposed to coining the current name)? Does it always degrade into an unmanageable, unaccountable, random bug hunt, or are there ways to instill order, measure coverage, and build confidence with it? In this webinar, Rex will explore and burst some of the myths of exploratory testing.

Performance testing is easy, right?  Grab a tool, record a transaction with the server, ramp up a thousand virtual users...  What do you often get?  A hot mess!  Performance testing is likely the kind of testing most likely to be done poorly.  It does not have to be that way.  Join us to learn what performance testing is not: not easy, not guaranteed, but not impossible to do well.  Much of a good performance testing program is not about using the tool at all; instead it includes all of the ISTQB buzzwords: static testing, early testing, planning and preparation.  Learn the basics of successful performance testing and improve your performance test project.