Conference

I seem to have been tardy in updating the web site (6 years)

I struggle to remember exact dates for some items. I did a Keynote at the London Tools Fair on Alternative tools, and I hosted a panel session at the Tools Fair a few years later. I did a workshop at the Sigist that I can not remember the date of, and I know I have missed a few other things off the list.

Live Talk

Vimeo. Links to the slides and videos are available on the message board.

Practice Session

I also uploaded the practice session of the talk to youtube part1 part2.

Part 1

Part 2

I facilitated a session on free and open source test tools at the Test Management Summit. This post contains an edited form of my notes prior to the event and some amendments and additions based on the discussion from the session.

Slides

What makes me think I have enough experience to talk about this?

I have coded and designed commercial, free and open-source testing tools. I have used open source, free and commercial test tools. I try to keep up to date with the available open-source and free test tools - less so with the commercial tools (for reasons that I will explain later). I do not claim expertise with all the tools but my well honed sin of avarice leads me to continually seek out, download, ‘own’ and ‘use’ the tools. Giving me the ability to talk, seemingly, knowledgeably about the tools.

A presentation of my interpretation of context driven testing, particularly to non-testers and what they can expect from their testers when the testers become context driven.

Presentation to be delivered at the North London BCS 16th March 2005

There are 3 pdfs:

1. Draft paper .pdf.
2. Slide Handouts .pdf these are the presentation slide handouts
3. Long presentation slides .pdf Slides for the long presentation version (not delivered)

Some basic ’things’ which have come out of preparing this paper, for me, are summarised below and are hopefully clearer in the pdfs.

“A Test Tool is Any Tool that can help me, in any way, with my Testing.”

A related stickyminds.com paper is Being Resourceful When Your Hands are Tied which was co-written with Danny Faught.

This page is the supporting page for a talk, and paper, on Alternative Testing Tools.

On various pages on this site you will find tools mentioned that are not part of the mainstream cannon of testing tools. I tend to think of these as Alternative Testing Tools. But I wanted to investigate what that phrase really meant to me.

This page is the supporting page for the talk that I gave at EuroStar 2003 on becoming a better tester, specifically by beta testing software.

You can

• download the paper, or the presentation.
• Find links to all the tools and web sites mentioned.
• Read Additional Points and information not in the paper.

The Paper and Presentation

[Paper .pdf (975kb)] [presentation .pdf (227kb)]

Additional Points

Some of these points have come out from comments made by the reviewers of the paper (thanks: James Lyndsay, Robert Sabourin, James Bach) and through my continued use of beta testing and thinking about beta testing since the paper was written.

Practical Experiences With Graph Based Software Testing

Alan Richardson gave a talk at StarEast 2003 based around his experiences with Graph Based Testing.

You can read the 27 page supporting paper as a pdf file here.

Tool Changes and New Tools

Some tools have new versions since the paper was written and I have stumbled across some new tools.

• Graphopt has a new version
• Tintfu has been updated
• here is another dot editor for windows DynaGraph
• Tulip is designed to visualise large graphs, and uses its own graph file format, but can import from GML. It does have some fairly complicated install dependencies.
• PAJEK is another visualisation tool for large graphs.

Simple Spreadsheet

In the paper I mention how simple it would be to construct a spreadsheet that you can use to create the graphs and use to build extra functionality with.