Notes from STAREast conference

[Frank Cohen <fc...@pushtotest.com>]

Here are my notes from the STAREast conference last week in Orlando, 
Florida:

Approximately 500 quality technicians attended the STAREast conference 
this week in Orlando, Florida. While the Java software development 
community has JavaONE, the STAR conferences have become ‘the’ place for 
the Java QA community. And they had a lot to see and do this week. Here 
are my notes:

WorkSoft (http://www.worksoft.com) launched Certify 6.0, a tool to 
automate checking a server-side Java application against the original 
functional specification. Certify is a 3rd generation test tool that 
avoids scripting to do functionality tests of new software builds. 
Pricing starts at $5K per seat plus additional fees for extra features.

McCabe and Associates (http://www.mccabe.com/index.php) introduced 
their new “Enterprise Quality Reporting” tool to do static analysis of 
Java code. In static analysis your Java code is parsed for the most 
common coding errors. The tool becomes part of the McCabe IQ platform, 
which also includes tools for debugging and runtime exploration. 
Pricing is $33,000 for 5 users.

Sanctum (http://www.sanctuminc.com/) announced the beta release of the 
Java version of their security checking utility. The tool does a 
security check of browser-based applications. For example, the tool 
will send HTML form element values that are larger than the maximum 
size allowed. The tool has about 50 tests overall. Their .NET version 
is already shipping.

I hosted a table at lunch of people interested in open-source test 
tools. The following tools came up as interesting. (Keep in my that I 
am maintainer for the TestMaker tool, so my pride may color some of the 
comments.) I heard these tools mentioned:

- JMeter (http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/index.html) - Sony Music is 
using JMeter to test browser-based applications. Strengths: Easy 
recording of HTTP/HTML actions for playback. Weakness: Need to code in 
Java to extend it.

- TestMaker (http://www.pushtotest.com) – Good multi-protocol test 
framework and utility that uses Jython as it’s scripting language and 
supports most of J2EE’s APIs. Many said they would like to see a MaxQ 
recorder-like function in TestMaker.

- MaxQ (http://maxq.tigris.org/) - Watches HTTP traffic with a Web 
host, translates log of traffic into Jython (http://www.jython.org) 
scripts, playback the scripts for regression tests.

- OpenSTA (http://www.opensta.org/) - a solid Corba-based test tool.

- The Grinder (http://grinder.sourceforge.net) Open-source framework 
for building tests.

The commercial tests tools demonstrated at STAREast included tools from 
Mercury Interactive, Empirix, Compuware, Segue, Rational. All the tools 
have matured to a point that I find it hard to tell the difference: 
They all provide beautiful graphical environments to build tests, they 
use MS Internet Explorer to record browser-based application actions, 
they provide environments to run multiple concurrent copies of a script 
(either locally or remotely) and they feature pretty reports, knobs, 
graphs and dials. Price points are $30,000 - $150,000 depending on 
options. To a large extent they are all targeting the QA technician 
that doesn’t do much coding.

TestQuest (http://www.testquest.com/) showed off their new black-box 
tests for the extended versions of Java. For example, TestQuest has 
software emulators written for the Java set-top box OS. They’ve been 
working for Sun on these projects for a while.

In his opening remarks Lee Copeland, Program Chair for STAREast, asked 
the audience for a show of hands for people that have not been to the 
conference before. 3/4 of the audience raised their hands. This 
enforced my thought that QA is still a land of newbies and a great 
starting point in an IT organization. Lee’s remarks also showed me that 
the QA community has a good representation for women in technology. The 
audience was at least 40% women – from my unscientific survey of the 
audience. I wish the JavaONE audience was as mixed.

-Frank


--
Frank Cohen, Founder, PushToTest, http://www.PushToTest.com, phone: 408 
374 7426
Come to PushToTest for free open-source test automation solutions that 
test and monitor
Web-enabled applications, especially Web Services for scalability and 
reliability.



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