Before I get into the things I found interesting in the Software Test & Performance a bit of commentary. This issue was 36 pages, and and 15 of those were dedicated to the STP Spring conference brochure. As a result there was less actual content in it. That said, the content that made it in was actually pretty good.

The Performance Tester’s Survival Guide by Justin Callison is a series of bullets around things he has learned in his career. Though aimed at performance testers according to the title, they are good things to keep in mind for your testing career.

  • Be a Technical Rosetta Stone
  • Learn To Translate
  • Find One Hole and Dig Deep
  • Automation is Software Development!
  • Get to know the Architect
  • Admit When You Do Not Understand
  • Perfect is the Opposite of Good
  • Tools are Just Tools
  • Extract, Aggregate, and Visualize
  • Understand Reliability vs. Validity
  • Think Like a User
  • Get Agreement on Goals and Objectives
  • Develop Process and Methodology
  • Data is King
  • Learn From Production
  • Performance with Manual Testing

Ross Collard also contributed the first in a series of article which included a list of Types of Data:

  • Test data means data used in testing.
  • Live data means data encountered in live operation.
  • Captured data is a copied sample of transactions from live traffic workflows.
  • Extracted data is a copied sample of stored records from databases and files.
  • Extracted data may be in loaded forms (e.g., in a test database ready for use), and unloaded forms (e.g., data is ready for a database build effort).

  • Only live data that is captured or extracted can become test data.

  • Expected, valid data means the manicured, legitimate data that we expect to encounter.
  • Real data or actual data is what we could feasibly encounter, regardless of whether it is considered legitimate, e.g., data extracted from a corrupted database.
  • Impossible data cannot occur.
  • Atomic data is fundamental, and cannot be derived from other data.
  • Derived data is not fundamental.
  • First-order…
  • Higher-order…
  • Metadata is data about data, e.g., metrics
  • Derived data is not fundamental.
  • First-order is derived directly from atomic only
  • Higher-order is derived from atomic and lower-order…

He then ends it with three questions we need to consider when thinking about using Live data in our testing

  1. What live data should we utilize?
  2. How do we capture and manipulate this data?
  3. How do we use it in testing?

And to end this list of lists, there are Ten Steps To Automated Validation by Matthew Hoffman. I don’t think I disagree with any of them.

  • Your automated tester should have some software development experience.
  • Plan out your test scenarios. It is crucial to design the tests before recording the scripts.
  • Organize your tests.
  • Scripts should cleanup the data created.
  • Be certain of your assertions.
  • Scripts should test for negative scenarios.
  • Tests should execute on various environments.
  • Use configuration management.
  • Schedule regular test runs.
  • Report and distribute results.