Welcome to the Silverpath Spotlight, an e-newsletter from Silverpath Technologies that discusses how to get more out of your testing efforts and highlights company news. If you have queries or article ideas, email us through our website.
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Upcoming Training Events
April 28 – May 19, 2010 May 21, 2010 |
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Silverpath Expands Training & Mentoring Services
Silverpath's training services can introduce new practices or evolve existing ones relevant to your current needs, injecting knowledge and experience that is not available with your in-house team and would be otherwise too time-consuming to obtain. To minimize any interruption to the attendees' project responsibilities, our courses can often be delivered in half-days over the course of a week or weeks, as preferred. Silverpath’s Training and Mentoring services.Contact Us to arrange for these or other training workshops to be given on-site at your company. |
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Featurette: Designing an Effective (Agile) Smoke Test
By Trevor Atkins - Sharing an answer to a couple of recent customer queries in hopes that it is generally useful as well: The ability to give early feedback during testing is a cornerstone to providing value on a software project. A well designed smoke test is one part of a strategy that can enable that feedback. How do you determine what to put in your smoke test? First, ask what are the critical behaviours that need to be working. Then consider the types of changes that have occurred since the last test cycle and what you need to check to gain necessary confidence that these things and what they impact are in "working order". Finally, prioritize which other areas of the system you need to review in more detail than others (eg: what would you do next if you had some extra time). In general, you should plan to execute the "breadth" of "breadth and depth" testing in a smoke test, reporting readiness and severe issues continuously as you go. For example:
Successive passes, outside of the smoke test, would then go deeper into riskier areas; areas that have had a lot of change, are relatively more complex, are business critical ($$$), have been problem areas in the past, or haven’t been tested in “depth” yet. Testing would continue to delve deeper following these priorities, guided by the Test Strategy, as time/budget and resources permit -- it is very unlikely you will have all the time you feel you need. Note: Do not constrain yourself to documented detailed test cases in your smoke test. Utilize checklists, matrices, use cases, user stories, etc. Make sure to customize the above outline to fit with the unique balance of quality requirements, scope, and constraints you need for your project.
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About Silverpath Technologies
Silverpath Technologies provides results-centric consulting and training services targeted at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of quality and testing activities across the software development lifecycle through the application or modification of processes, techniques and tools. For more information, visit http://www.silverpath.com. |
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