QW2001 Paper 7T1

Mr. Don Cohen
(Princeton Softech)

Requirements For A Comprehensive Testing Environment

Key Points

Presentation Abstract

This presentation outlines the driving forces in the business community today that are behind the increased importance of a comprehensive testing scheme, including application quality and “time to market” for customer-facing applications, and the processes and tools that need to be in place in order to accomplish the testing job.

The presentation will look back over changes to the business climate over the last five years that have precipitated a heightened awareness of application quality and ‘time to market” and why testing is becoming a “critical business need” for many IT groups today. The presentation will also look at the advent of “test factories” as a new approach to testing by large corporations, both domestically and internationally.

Once the heightened need for testing is established, the presentation will survey the processes and tools that must be present in every IT organization if they are to have a “fighting chance” to meet the new Service Level Agreements. It will further explore the “must have”, “nice to have” and “other” facilities typically embodied in these tools and the reason why such capabilities are important.

Examples of the sub-topics covered include; the key requirements when using automated testing (scripting) tools, creating meaningful test data in a relational database environment (for both new and enhanced applications), dealing with differences between the production environment and the test environment, and the value of intelligently comparing test results in an automated manner.

About the Author

Don Cohen is Vice President of Research and Development at Princeton Softech, a New Jersey-based provider of DB2 productivity software. He has been involved in the development of sophisticated system software products in the areas of communications, operating systems, languages and relational databases for over 20 years as a developer, development manager, product manager and VP at Bell Laboratories, Applied Data Research (ADR), Computer Associates (CA), Automated Data Processing (ADP) and Princeton Softech. Mr. Cohen has been a speaker and trainer at conferences and for clients in Europe, Australia, South America and North America.