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by Dorothy Graham, Programme Chair, EuroSTAR 2009

EuroSTAR is a truly international software testing conference, attracting delegates and speakers from around the world. In 2008, over 800 delegates from 32 countries focused on “The Future of Testing”. EuroSTAR 2009 will concentrate on what we need to do in practice today – our theme is "Testing for Real, Testing for Now."

EuroSTAR 2009 will be a time of sharing experiences and learning new ideas that we can use straight after the conference. Hearing what other practitioners have done - what worked and what didn’t work - can save a lot of time, effort and frustration. Save time by putting into practice the lessons learned by others!

by Erik van Veenendaal, Rob Hendriks, Jurian van de Laar, Bart Bouwers, Improve Quality Services BV, The Netherlands

More and more organisations make efforts to improve their software development processes. The reference model that is most often used is the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). In this model practices that are related to verification and validation activities are described, but the level of detail is too limited from the viewpoint of the test professional. To fill this gap, the Test Maturity Model Integration (TMMi) has been developed by the TMMi Foundation [www.tmmifoundation.org], using the TMM framework as developed by the Illinois Institute of Technology as one of its major sources. The TMMi provides a structured approach for test process improvement. Testing as defined in the TMMi is applied in its broadest sense to encompass all software quality-related activities. Within Europe the number of companies using the TMMi is increasing.

At the EuroSTAR 2008 conference, Michael Bolton gave a talk entitled, “Two Futures of Software Testing” which was rated as the highest-scoring track session at the conference . Conference attendees also chose the talk as the winning entry for the CapGemini Award for Innovation. Here he provides a number of answers to questions that people have asked since the presentation.

 Q: How can we predict the future of software testing?

A: Well, we can’t, obviously. The talk was about possible futures, because (as my friend Fiona Charles titled her EuroSTAR presentation), The Future of Testing is Ours to Make. In one of the futures that I proposed, testing is about demonstrating correctness—developing tests that show that the functions in the program produce the right answers. When those tests pass, we say that we’re done. To me, that’s part of the dark future. In the brighter future that I’m rooting for, testing is motivated by asking questions about value. That requires human investigation and rapid learning—understanding the product and the systems that interact with it. That, in turn, includes learning about the context, and in particular the human-related systems—the problems that the program is trying to help us solve, the way people interact with the program, and the way people value it. It also involves investigating adaptability—not merely demonstrating that the program can work in the lab, but that it will work in situations that we might not have anticipated when we set out to write it.