Services & Workshops

A typical workshop starts with automatic measuring and visualization of your software system. The as-is-architecture gets visible; violations against your architectural principles are identified; quality flaws within your system are detected; components with poor modularity are revealed that slow down your development efforts. Based on the findings, solutions are worked out and discussed.

Workshop subject: „Testing: strategies, methods and pitfalls” 

Customer demands:

• Increasing software quality
• Cutting down the costs for quality management by automated testing
• Establishment of developer tests (developer write automated tests)

Target group:

• Software developers
• Project managers

Workshop: testing techniques and strategies

• The participants of the workshop get to know the concept of automated developer tests. A focus of this workshop will be the recognition of the benefits and advantages of automated tests.
• The participants learn how automated developer tests are structured and ascertain important strategies and methods during the creation of the test.
• The participants learn the methodical approach to develop tests systematically and to assure a high testing quality.
• The participants will be sensibilized for specific failures during the test development and learn how these failures can be avoided.

Workshop: test automation infrastructure

• Development of a Continuous Integration Infrastructure (CruiseControl) with the objective to carry out automated tests of the code and it´s execution at different time intervals (e.g. per check-in, nightly, weekly…).
• Adaption of the CuiseControl test reporting’s: in case of failure or success different groups of people will be automatically informed by email.
• Development of a concept to structure the production-codes and test-codes.
• Development of a concept to organize and distinguish unit tests and integration tests.
• Compilation of a concept to organize and structure test datas.
• The already existing project structures of the production code will be enlarged by exemplary test-code-projects.
• Creation of exemplary (dummy-) test cases, to highlight the structure and execution of the test-codes.
• Demonstration of the operation of the testing- and ContinuousIntegration-infrastructure by exemplary test cases.

Workshop: test case creation - hands-on

• The participants have gathered test cases at selected modules for the existing software system (or at the software system to be re-engineered). The discussed strategies and processes are being used practically.
• Identification and discussion about possible specific features in the context of the internally operated tools.
• The gathered test cases are coded into test code and executed automatically by the testing infrastructure.
• Experiences and insights at the implementation will be discussed together, to ensure the exchange of experiences between all team members.
• During the realization of the test case quality pitfalls will be discovered, discussed, and sustainable counteractive measures installed.

Workshop: initial quality assessment

• Analyzing and evaluating the implemented test cases used by the developers on a day to day basis.
• Potential difficulties at the creation of test cases will be discovered, discussed and solutions will be developed.
• Identification of potential low quality points in the test code that restrains and slows down the software development on a medium-term to long-term basis.
• The writing of automated tests in the context of development processes will be reflected, and if necessary ways of optimization will be worked out.

Workshop cycle: quality monitoring

• Evaluation on a regular basis from Software Diagnostics of the current standpoint of the source code as per its quality.
• The evaluation concerns both the production code (code, developed for the product applied at customer side) as well as the test code (code for the specific and experimental execution of the production code).
• The purpose of the evaluation is to identify points within the code that hold a bad risk for later maintenance.
• One part of the regular evaluation is a workshop to discuss discovered low quality points in your code.
• The purpose of the workshop is to identify essential reasons and processes, that are responsible for low quality points, and to draw implementation concepts to avoid flaws in the future.
• To evaluate your software quality Software Diagnostics will use internally the product Studio. Studio enables the monitoring of the quality and of the development activities for large software projects.