Europe’s Premier Software Testing Event World Forum Convention Centre, The Hague, Netherlands

“The Future of Software Testing”

Preparing Your Team for the Future Fabian Scarano, PA Consulting Group, Denmark WWW.QUALTECHCONFERENCES.COM

Preparing your Team for the Future Contribution to EuroSTAR 2008

Fabián Scarano Thursday 13 November 2008

Welcome to the Future

© PA Knowledge Limited 2008. EuroStar 2008 presentation Nov.ppt

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Agenda

 Preparing the scene

 Communication and abstraction  Creativity, stress mitigation  The future tester’s profile

 SOA example  Teams and inter-teams performance  Conclusion

© PA Knowledge Limited 2008. EuroStar 2008 presentation Nov.ppt

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Produce more, Perform better, Care for your Team

Competition is tougher: Test specialist, knowledge area, high IQ

Leverage Scarce Resources

Shorter product cycles: Agile, extreme, rapid

Higher customer demands: Quality, Performance, Availability

© PA Knowledge Limited 2008. EuroStar 2008 presentation Nov.ppt

Achieve and IT Sustain Competitive Speed

Maintain High Quality

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Do we make the most of the tester’s potential when we focus on excellent technical skills, a special knowledge area and requiring a high IQ?

Produce more, Perform better, Care for your Team To make the most of our test team it is necessary to focus on the technical skills, a high IQ and the soft skills Which soft skills areas?

Abstraction, creativity, optimism and communication within the team Open mind to: working together with different cultures, accepting “wild” solutions, exercising more empathy Integration of teams with diverse goals and optimisation of the final product with the different teams

If emotional competences are relevant today, in the future they will become essential for any competitive test team in the market.

© PA Knowledge Limited 2008. EuroStar 2008 presentation Nov.ppt

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Communication: Abstraction

Is the process or result of generalisation by reducing the information content of a concept or a observable phenomenon, typically, in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose (Wikipedia)

Is the thought process wherein ideas are distanced from objects (Philosophical terminology Wikipedia)

How did the language of mathematics develop? And what is it that enabled us to use this language not only to manipulate quantities and shapes, but ultimately to model our world and Universe, to successfully predict eclipses and the return of the comets Page 7 © PA Knowledge Limited 2008. EuroStar 2008 presentation Nov.ppt

Red Happiness 3 R4

Example: Requirement Specification Definition Case Cantor is our user and he is defining the set of Requirements, which the test team has to review, organise test cases, discuss with project manager and plan. He knows that it might not be that obvious and then he offers a crash course of infinite sets 1) Some definitions: - A set is a collection of elements Some sets of numbers are N= Naturals

Z= Integers

Q= Rationals

R= Reals

Z



N



2) Now

Q



- A set is countable iff its cardinality is either finite or equalt to 0

R

- The cardinality of a set is the number of members it contains Notation: for set S the cardinality is |S|

|N|, |Z|, |Q|, |R|

|N| =

0

- Two sets have the same cardinality if they can be put to a one-to-one correspondence; or, If A ~ B, then |A| = |B|

Then, is it true that

|N| < |Z| < |Q| < |R| ?

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[0,1]



When we know that in the interval [0,1] we can have all the N or

© PA Knowledge Limited 2008. EuroStar 2008 presentation Nov.ppt

&

1/N

Example: Requirement Specification Definition Case Intuition in this case is false. The inequalities |N| < |Z| < |Q| < |R| are false; however not all infinites are equal in cardinality! 3)

The set of Integers has the same cardinality as the Natural numbers. For every Integer number I can assign a Natural number that can count it  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 0, 1, -1, 2, -2, 3, -3, 4, …. The set of Rationals has the same cardinality as the Natural numbers. For every Rational number I can assign a Natural number that can count it 

1

2

3

4

5

1 1/1 2/1 3/1 4/1 2 ½ 2/2 3/2 4/2 3 ⅓ ⅔ 3/3 4/3 Then |N| = |Z| = |Q| are denumerables because the cardinality is equal to

© PA Knowledge Limited 2008. EuroStar 2008 presentation Nov.ppt

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0

Example: Requirement Specification Definition Case 4)

Definitions: - A set is uncountable if its cardinality is greater than 0 - The number of real numbers is the same as the number of points on an infinite line, where c is the cardinality, hence c =|R| The set of Real numbers is uncountable or |R| >

0

If we assume that we can put the Reals into a one to one correspondence with the Natural number we get to an absurd. Take the Reals between 0 and 1, express all the fractions as 0.ddddd…. Now under our assumption try to pair off the natural numbers with the Reals between 0 and 1.

5)

The continuum hypothesis (CH) asserts that there is no cardinal number a such that 0 < a < c If we assume that this is true then

© PA Knowledge Limited 2008. EuroStar 2008 presentation Nov.ppt

0