It’s that time of year again.  The call for papers for the Rational Software Conference 2010 is now OPEN.  This year, the conference has a new name, Innovate2010.   The new name reflects the new reality of software delivery, where we area all trying to design and build the smarter products and services we need to build a smarter planet.

The Rational Tester will be chairing the Quality Management track at the conference, and looking for any and all topics related to smarter quality management.  As always, if you submit a paper and get accepted, you’ll get a free pass to the conference, which will be held in Orlando from June 6 to 10.  Some ideas for topics to get you going:

• Innovative uses of any of our quality management solutions: Rational Quality Manager, Rational Functional Tester, Rational Performance Tester and/or Rational Service Tester
• Quality Management strategies, tips and tips
• Case studies on your quality management implementation

Really, the list is endless.  If you have something you feel passionate about, put it on paper – or in slides – and come tell us about it.  The conference is a great opportunity to share experiences, meet the engineers behind the solutions and network with IBMers and your peers in the Quality Management industry.  Hope to see you there!

]]> http://rationaltester.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/innovate-2010-the-rational-software-conference/feed/ 0 Brian Innovate 2010: The Rational Software Conference http://rationaltester.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/attention-you-have-now-left-the-ibm-web-site/ http://rationaltester.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/attention-you-have-now-left-the-ibm-web-site/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:42:34 +0000 Brian http://rationaltester.wordpress.com/?p=283 ]]>

A quick welcome today to everyone arriving from the Rational mothership – www.ibm.com/software/rational.   Today, live on the Rational home page went a link to the Rational Tester Blog and our bro blog, Quality Manager Blog.

We’ve been running this blog since September 2007, and use it as a forum to discuss various issues on software quality management as well as insight into the IBM Rational software quality portfolio.   We’re glad to have you and look forward to hearing from you in the future.

I.  Am.  Amazed.

Before I discuss the source of my amazement, allow me declare my bias.  First, I work for IBM – and while there’s no poster in the lunchroom that says “Microsoft Bad” – there is definitely a strong spirit of competition here.  Parked in the bull’s eye on our competitive  dart board is Microsoft.   However, from a purely personal perspective, I have great respect for Microsoft.  I run Windows XP, I live in PowerPoint, and I generally respect their ability to run a software business.  I’ve even defended them when I thought they were unfairly attacked.

But…

This is too much.  Bing, the Microsoft search engine went dark for 30 minutes yesterday.  Why?  The following note appears on the Bing developers blog:

The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.

Effectively, what they’re saying is that the were performing system configuration testing on a production system.   Whoa.  It’s one thing to perform functional testing on a production system; I can easily see how Microsoft testers would run Bing searches on their live system.  But to run configuration tests, where you are actively modifying configuration attributes on a production system – especially one of such strategic importance.  That’s risky – too risky, some might say.  That type of testing should be done in a lab, in house, in as close to a replica of the full production system as possible.  At least a scale model.  Microsoft has those types of resources.  Why that didn’t happen here, I can only imagine.  Surely, Microsoft knows better.  I hope.

Lately, Rational and really, all of IBM has been talking about Smarter Products.  Smarter products, in an oversimplified definition, not sanctioned by anyone in marketing, are the next generation of products in which hardware and software come together to deliver more than a single purpose, stand alone product.   The combination of hardware + software makes these new products instrumented, interconnected and intelligent.  The simplest examples you might have heard are things like the latest smart phones or the latest advances of automobile technology such as embedded guidance and services like OnStar.

For the most part, this is simply a reflection of latest innovations in hardware and software.   However, integrated, smart products have been around for long time.  As an example, anyone who has been on a air plane in the last 50 years has been aboard a smart product.   But what happens when these smarter products fail?

Last week, a “glitch” in the FAA systems caused over 2,000 flight delays.  The impact went far beyond frustrating flyers, impacting military operations and costing the airline industry an estimated $100 million dollars.  All of this in a span of 4 hours.  The cause?  One circuit board.

The case highlights the importance of quality management, and the broadened scope of quality management in this new smarter world.  With Smarter Products, not only will testers be required to validate the functionality of software, they’ll need to validate the functionality of that software on its target platform.  And validation will need to be done on the hardware components that host the software as well.  One can easily point in this case to a single circuit board failure, but should there not – in a system of such importance – have been a software based failover diagnostic warning system?   The definition of smarter products focuses on products being instrumented.   As Michael Ball, a University of Maryland professor who specializes in aviation operations research noted, “A good communications system should have enough redundancy that a failure shouldn’t hurt it that badly“.

Granted, this is a 50 year old system.  And our ability to engineer smarter products has advanced significantly since this system was created.  Hopefully we can learn from this outage, and adjust our quality management techniques for smarter products to prevent this type of failure in the future.

One aspect of the testing vs. quality issue is that of  scope.  Testing focuses on measurement of application fitness for use, while quality focuses on the process of creating, delivering and running an application.  As an illustrative example, from a quality perspective, requirements are a key element of application quality.  From a pure testing perspective, a requirement is merely an input, a given.  Something to be taken at face value, and perhaps worse, something that may not even exist in the first place.  Simply put, quality requires more than testing…it requires a process from requirements through development to delivery and operation.  (Now – whether a tester has much impact on all those areas is up for debate, but I digress.)

On November 5th at 1pm (EST), Brian Beveridge from Greenridge Business Systems will speak about his own experiences and the benefits of a collaborative process for delivering software quality with Rational requirements and quality management solutions.  His is more of a quality perspective – and the Rational Tester expects this to be an interesting interview.  I’ll be dailing-in, and I encourage you do to the same.  On my wish list of questions, Mr. Interviewer, I’m hoping there’s an opportunity to find out about  some of the most common problems he sees at his client sites with regards to requirements and quality management?

I love to learn from others ‘ mistakes.  Hopefully Brian Beveridge will have some good ones to share.

The conference team at Pulse 2010 called for an interview earlier this week.  The transcript of this interview just went live.

For the uninitiated, Pulse 2010 is IBM’s annual service management conference.  For the first time at the conference this year, the conference team has invited Rational to participate.  As a result, there are three Rational Tracks each of which will have 12 sessions.  The Rational Tracks are:

• Smarter Products Delivery and Management
• Change Management for Applications and Services
• Quality Management for Applications and Service

The Rational Tester was asked to chair the Quality Management track.  The main responsibility here is to weed through all the conference submissions to select the cream of the crop of presentation content for the conference.

During the interview, I was asked a couple of key questions: What content are we looking for?  and What makes for a good presentation?

To read my responses, please see the Pulse 2010 blog page with the Rational Tester Pulse 2010 interview.

The week of February 21-24, IBM will be hosting their annual Pulse 2010 conference in Las Vegas!  Woohoo!

In the past, the conference’s main focus has been on the IBM Tivoli tools which IT operations personnel  use to manage a dynamic IT infrastructure.   This year though, the focus is on the larger objective of Service Management.  The larger Service Management focus means that while it remains critical to keep your applications up and running, it is as important to focus on the development of those services.  Accordingly, at this year’s Pulse there’s a “Software Delivery Lifecycle Management” stream which covers the Quality Management, Change Management and Delivery of Services.

The call for papers is now open, and consider this your invitation to participate.   If you’re a software delivery professional creating, building and testing applications and services we want to hear from you.  Come share your knowledge and expertise with a larger service management community, and in turn hear what other software delivery professionals are doing as part of their service management efforts.

Speakers get a free conference pass, which entitles them to attend all sessions, keynotes, meals and events at the conference.  I haven’t seen the keynote line up yet, but last year Magic Johnson was on board – have a look.  The Rational Tester will be there – this is one not to miss!

The Rational Tester has been traveling a lot lately – you may have noticed a recent posting drought.  One of these trips was to the STANZ 2009 conferences in Wellington, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia.  The presentation I delivered was the Wisdom of Crowds.  This presentation is essentially a report on testing best practices followed by IBMers – from our technical implementation teams, our tool building teams and our consulting groups.

Another of the presentations at this conference was Becoming An Expert Tester from James Bach.  An excellent presentation in its own right, I found that in combination with my own brought out an interesting conundrum faced by testers.  The Expert Tester presentation focused on things an individual can do to hone their skills as a testing professional.  The Wisdom of Crowds presentation  focused primarily on quality processes that teams can implement to improve the quality of their end product.   Put another way, one presentation focused on testing, one on quality.

It struck me afterward that this is an issue that testers struggle with on a daily basis.  It’s crucial to consistently improve one’s skills as a tester, learning new approaches and techniques – but the big payoff, in terms of delivering a better product comes when the whole team focuses on quality driven software delivery.  The catch, of course, is that as an individual, it’s much easier to improve one’s skills as a tester than it is to impart change on quality practices that impact the entire software delivery team.  Put another way, you can be the best auto mechanic in the world, but if your job has you working the production line for the Edsel, you’re not going to have that much of an impact.

While I have no grandiose plans for an elaborate series on this topic, I have labeled this post as “Part 1″ – as there’s lots more to explore on this thread.   Let the discussion continue…

Greetings to all the fine attendees of the STANZ 2009.  I appologize for the delay in posting, I simply did not get to a stable connection long enough to get this up any sooner.  Hope everyone enjoyed the presentation, and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Rational Tester – Brian Bryson STANZ 2009 Keynote Presentation

Completing the trio of IBM Rational v8.1 updates is our look at IBM Rational Service Tester v8.1.  In terms of updates, the primary enhancements in this release are:

• Updated integration with IBM Rational Quality Manager Express Edition and IBM Rational Quality Manager Standard Edition V2.0 and V1.0.1
• New Service Stubbing enables testing of SOA applications prior to the development of all components
  • Automatic stub creation from Web Services Description Language files
  • Visual editor to modify stub behavior
  • Automatic stub deployment prior to test execution
• Expanded environment support for NTLM and Kerberos authentication and support of attachments using the DIME format

The first and third items in the list are architectural features.  The updated integration ensures continued compatibility with the upcoming Rational Quality Manager 2.0 release.  The third item shows Rational Service Tester’s  continued commitment to supporting all Web Service protocols and technologies.

Service stubbing  is a very powerful technique for unit and component testing which enables developers to start testing portions of their applications before the entire application is complete.  A service stub is temporary replacement for a web service.  It returns a preset value for a given input, without really performing any computing. As an example, consider a web service that validates a credit card.  The true web service would take as input the credit card number and expiry date, verify this information, confirm it’s validity and return a “valid/invalid” result.  However, during development, this complex piece of code may not be available on day 1, but it may be required in order to start testing a order processing use case.  In order to enable testing of an order, a developer could create a stub credit card validation service that would simply return a “valid/invalid” result for a given credit card number.  No processing would happen in the stub, just a simple lookup that would return valid for a given credit card number, and invalid for another.

Service stubbing with Rational Service Tester enables the testing of your SOA application prior to the creation of all services. Stubs are automatically generated from WSDL files and will be automatically deployed before test execution. After the generation of service stubs, the Visual Editor can be leveraged to modify stub behavior to meet specific testing scenarios. For example, simulation of error conditions such as an external service being unavailable or answering with a fault message are typical uses.  This enables web service testers to test incomplete systems, or put another way, to test their applications sooner.