Risk based testing in the context of software engineering, is more than just prioritisation. During any IT project, the test phase is usually one of the most demanding parts of the project and it is essential that nothing important falls through the net.

The main challenge faced by software testing professionals is how to test as many aspects of a piece of software as possible, but with limited time, budget and human resources. There is never enough time to test everything and this would be a prohibitively expensive undertaking on most complex software engineering projects. Therefore, it is important to target limited testing resources at the most important components of the software under test.

How can resources be targeted most effectively? Software testing professionals are usually well-versed at prioritising their work depending on the demands of their projects. However, prioritisation is a simplistic process which does not take into account all of the external factors which should be considered. Prioritisation is usually undertaken based on the personal opinion of the project management or the influence of a few individuals. It is therefore a risky process and one which can result in important elements of a software application being incorrectly de-prioritised and forgotten about, only to become defective and come back to bite the test team after the project has gone live.

During these tough times when both human resources, time and budgets are under increasing pressure, the test phase is often seen as an easy target by project managers keen to cut costs or regain lost ground in earlier phases of their projects. The test phase is a popular target for cost cutting and both human resources and time are often reallocated to the design and development phases, meaning that testing professionals need to work smarter than ever to do their jobs effectively.

Faced with an infinite number of tests which could be run against a software application, but with limited time, human resources and budget, simple test prioritisation is not enough to get the job done properly. Risk based testing is an alternative to simple prioritisation techniques and can help improve the effectiveness of testing and at the same time reduce the time and cost of the test phase of a project.

Risk based testing focuses on allocating two ratings to the (business) requirements under test. The two ratings are:

- Likelihood of Failure
- Impact of Failure

The likelihood of failure is the risk that a feature or component of a computer system or software application will fail when it is being used by its customers. This rating can be allocated based on prior experience of the system or based on advice from the system’s designers. The likelihood of failure is usually rated as High, Medium or Low.

The impact of failure is rated based on what will happen should the component or feature fail to work when the system or application is being used. The impact of failure can be defined as Highly Visible, Visible, Invisible

It is important to note that not all failures or defects will stop a system or software application providing a service to its users. Many defects will not even be noticed by the end user of the system.
By using the risk based testing ratings, limited test resources can be intelligently allocated to testing the most important elements of the system which are both highly likely to fail and highly visible to the end-user. Those features or components which a medium risk and highly visible or visible should also be considered for testing should time allow. The ratings also demonstrate to us that some high risk but invisible defects and likewise some low risk but visible defects could be safely de-scoped from the testing phase or tested where time and budget permits.

This is a short article designed to provide an introduction to risk based testing in software engineering and detailed coverage is beyond the limits of this text. It is recommended that you undertake further research before attempting to implement a risk based testing approach on your project.

Natalie Smith is the author. You can learn more about risk based testing at Risk Based Testing

[tags]risk based testing, application testing, software testing, software engineering, quality assurance[/tags]

The industry has been debating decades for outsourcing to India vs. China? Chinese currency has elevated against dollars since recent global recession. It is certainly making talents relative more expensive in China for Western nations. One may argue that India wins the cost saving competition in the near future.

There are however cases where China is beating India for service oriented offshore outsourcing. Not BPO, not ITO, maybe CRO, but most definitely mobile technology outsourcing. So, let’s look at a few factors leading to my argument.

China has been the ‘world’s factory” over the last 20 years, from textile, toy, auto parts, to high tech devices. The official statistics of 2008 from Chinese government indicated high-tech products in China has an export volume of USD 347.8 billion. Such astonishing number makes China second place worldwide for high tech manufacture scale, and first in global market share. There are also 3 of the top embedded equipment manufacturers in China such as Huawei, ZTE and Hair. Therefore, it is not hard to image why China has greater resources and know how to support embedded software developements in smartphone devices comparing to India.

Although India is known for application development outsourcing, China has better ecosystem for mobile application developments. By April 2009, there are total of 678.8 million mobile phone subscribers in China. The scale of Chinese mobile market is explosive considering there are only around 300 million total populations in the United State.

China is laying out massive infrastructure to meet its growing network demands. Beginning in 2009, 3 largest mobile operators in China will invest combined of $30 billion dollars on 3G network infrastructure over the next few years. It will certainly stimulate the entire industry value chain. Downstream software vendors can ride on the trend and strengthen mobile technology capabilities. It will not only help them profit from domestic opportunities but also give them an edge over Indian providers. Perhaps most importantly, it gives technical talents in China broader adoption to 3G access as end users than India. It will help them to innovate when developing mobile products for clients oversea.

More over, video game today is the most popular application on smartphones. China’s online gaming industry has promising growth with projection to reach $3 billion dollars by 2010. China is a great source of talents for anyone interested in building games on mobile devices. So, should you outsource to India or China? Let the argument begins.

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[tags]Offshore software development, Mobile Application, China, India, Offshore outsourcing[/tags]

As of today, more then 10,000 applications have been released at Apple Store. Most of these applications are developed by budding entrepreneurs. This article aims to provide holistic overview of application trends at Apple store and then describe few selected applications.

IPhone applications are categorized into 19 categories at Apple store, including Games, entertainment, Utilities, Education, Finance, Weather etc. Amongst 10,000 applications submitted at store, 23.10 % are Games. This was expected as IPhone was initially positioned as “fun & cool” device. Hence, we see a lower number of business applications, accounting only 2.69 % of total applications.

However analysts predict the proportion will change significantly in 2009. Finally, there are still 51 Applications submitted in Weather category despite the fact that IPhone has a built-in weather application.

To substantiate IPhone Applications trends, we can also review number of applications submitted at App store each month. Alone, during the month of September, 2008; a total of 2912 applications were submitted at Apple store. No wonder this was right after 4 months of App. Store launch.

Following September 08, each month had more than 2000 Applications released as App Store. Considering trends, Analysts divide the era in 3 stages of technological innovation:

1.Testing Waters:- From May,08 to September, 08
During this era, developers submitted applications to evaluate IPhone SDK capabilities and understanding market dynamics. During this stage simple fun applications were submitted by developers. On consumer side, IPhone users tried each application and were willing to spend 4-5 US $ on each application as trial.

2. Complex Applications:- October, 08 to January, 09
During this stage, entrepreneurs are using their experience of stage 1, to build more complex applications. During this stage analysts expect to see more complex applications being submitted at apple store and expect a major surge in application submission before Christmas and at New Year.

Consumers have become matured, and are not willing to try paid applications without reading reviews. However, consumers are still trying every free application but the usage of free applications is limited to trial only.

3.Business Strategies:- Feb, 09 to May,09
Analysts expect that the third phase will focus on building marketing and revenue strategies for IPhone applications. The “Open Marketplace”, App Store, will require sophisticated marketing campaigns to differentiate product from others. During this phase the major investment would go into marketing and customer acquisition, while investments on product development will be lower.

To substantiate the arguments presented above we selected following applications for review naming “iThrown” and “Starvin Sharks”.

1.iThrown:-
iThrown is developed by Magnatron Kinetics, in cooperation with GenITeam. This fun application allows users to check how far they can throw their beloved IPhone, without really throwing it. The application was rated as top-free download during first week of October. The application was released at end of phase 1, “Testing Waters”. The application became extremely popular amongst young IPhone owners, who used the application to demonstrate cool-gadget to their peers and friends.

The application used accelerometer technology to identify IPhone movement to evaluate force and strength. The application got rave reviews. However, in order to retain the user base, Magnatron Kinetics needs to enhance the application and keep adding new features.

Starvin Sharks:-
This is a simple competitive game with very attractive graphics. The application is worth noticing for its emotional marketing tactics i.e. 10 % donation of revenues to Share10percent organization. The application is built by Scribium in partnership with GenITeam. The application got a slow start and needs to employ strong marketing tactics for high promotions.

This article is submitted by GenITeam - IPhone Developers. You can contact us to Hire IPhone Application Developers and to Outsource IPhone Development.

[tags]development, iphone, software, application[/tags]

Microsoft was looking for best approach in advanced programming concepts developed by various software programming companies; Suddenly it turn its attention toward C sharp programming interface to develop most critical applications.

Microsoft was keen to create powerful interface to interact with the NET integrated environment. So, it was the next step to develop such programming language that could solve complexity that may be produced by many programming handlers all over the world.

C sharp is strongly typed OOP or an object oriented programming interface that is designed to develop an optimum blend of simplicity, comprehensiveness, expressiveness and very important is performance.

Performance of a programming language is directly proportional to its simplicity of designing that gives better approach to generate programs & run or execute that program flawlessly and rapidly. All these features of a good programming language are well satisfied by c sharp.

This is just because of its integral inheritance from previous famous programming languages like C, C++ & Java etc. In addition to simplicity provided by sequential programming languages like C, it also fulfills all features of C++ and those of Java.

The NET platform is created with various programming runtimes like JVM called as java runtime environment and those carried out with sequential programming languages called as sequential runtime environment. It also provides Inner classes to implement intrinsic functions.

C sharp and NET are a little symbiotic: some features of c sharp are there to work well with NET, and some features of NET are there to work well with c sharp (though NET aims to work well with many languages). The c sharp language was built with the hindsight of many languages, but most notably Java and C++.

C sharp compiles into machine independent language independent code which runs in a managed execution environment. C sharp also provides garbage collection coupled with the elimination of pointers (in c sharp restricted use is permitted within code marked unsafe).

Garbage collection feature is very much useful one when it comes across invalid pointers and references that do not exist anywhere in the memory. A powerful reflection capability of c sharp includes inheritance, polymorphism, virtual functions, overloading & much things newly added to it.

In case of c sharp there is no need including header files, as all code scoped to packages or assemblies, no problems declaring one class before another with circular dependencies. In c sharp, all classes descend from object and must be allocated on the heap with new keyword.

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[tags]C sharp, C++, Performance, OOP[/tags]

Office Automation involves the planned application of integrated information handling tools and methods to improve the productivity of people in office operations. Although the handling of information by office people is the focus of office automation technology, other aspects of your business will be affected.

Office automation is a key function of the IOVC strategy and technology approach to building a successful business so first let’s discuss a few key areas that can be handled by office automated technology and then we will discuss the results upon your business.

Managing your books - Well you know how the government requires that you must keep track of your income and expenses. You can do like a lot of folks do and manage your books manually or you can get your accounting system setup and with one touch of a button, your accounting system can automatically perform your work for you.

Managing your email - When you have a lot of email, it continually uses up way to much of your time. This means you spend too much time in one area and you suffer in another area. Well if you are building a list via email then you need to put this process on auto pilot with an auto responder.

Making appointments - If you have done it manually, you know how time consuming it can be. But if you get the right automation software and automate your appointment process activities then your customers get access when you are not available. So add a contact management program to your business systems and never miss another appointment again.

Manual writing tasks - There are many writing activities and one of the most frequent areas to automate is word processing. Get your work into an automated process and start to determine how you can use the automation capabilities built into MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There is a lot more automation capabilities built into these software programs then you can imagine.

Consider the needs of your business and your daily schedule. Decide what you like and don’t like before you put an office automation system into your business. When it is time for an automated process you should develop a cost for doing the work manually and build a case for spending the time or the money to automate that process. Keep in mind; you don’t have to automate your business overnight, so take the time to think it through.

If Success Is Mandatory Now in your business, then Gregory Burrus Automated Business Builders your Solutions Coach invites you to learn more for free this very powerful, very profitable and proven Attraction Marketing strategy at http://www.automatedbusinessbuilders.com/

Greg Burrus mission has always been to help people in business succeed through the use of automated technology solutions.

[tags]office automation, automation, iovc, gregory burrus ,[/tags]

Adding a simple email form or contact form to a website can often be a tough task for a first-time programmer or small business website. A lot of people who start a website or a small internet business use simple templates to put a website online while having little or almost no knowledge of HTML programming.

Creating a functional email form or contact form, as simple as the form itself may be, is almost impossible for an inexperienced programmer that doesn’t have more advanced knowledge of PHP and HTML programming. Many beginning programmers or small business websites simply include a clickable link using a “mailto” tag that pulls up the user’s email client software so that the user can simply send a regular email to the webmaster.

So, what does a programmer have to do to install an email form on their website? First, the form itself must be created using HTML. That’s the easy part. After that, the programmer must create a very complicated and lengthy PHP file to process the form and email the answers to the form back to the website owner. The name of the file that is most commonly used to process email forms is “Formmail.” Formmail has been used to process and email the results of web forms for over nine years. Since 1997, it has been downloaded more than two million times.

In creating this PHP file (often referred to as “formmail.php”), the programmer should include code that blocks spammers from using the email form to send spam through the form. Many times, inexperienced programmers will put a form on their website that does not include code to prevent spammers from utilizing the form to send spam to hundreds or even thousands of people. As a result, the owners of these websites often have to endure an unfortunate consequence - the web hosting company cancels their account once those who’ve been spammed complain to their internet service provider, who then directs the complaint to the hosting company that handles your website. This can be a huge problem.

All of this can be very complicated for a first-time programmer, but there are now many companies around the internet that have sprung up to help programmers add an email form or other more complicated HTML form to their website. These companies usually provide the HTML code for the form, which the programmer must insert into his/her webpage, but the PHP code that processes the form remains on the server of the company that provides the HTML code and the form is thus processed remotely. Simply input the words “email form” into any major search engine and you will be able to locate a plethora of resources and companies that make email forms easy. The most popular website that provides this service is freedback.com, which receives as many as 300,000 hits per day, but there are many other reliable services out there that provide this service, but usually for a monthly fee if the form is going to be used frequently. However, there are many online tutorials available that teach programmers how to build a form from scratch and install the script to process it.

Jim Pretin is the proprietor of a network of websites which includes http://www.forms4free.com, a service that provides all the code necessary for an inexperienced programmer to add a simple email form to their website in only 2 minutes

[tags]email form[/tags]