development

Testing an application's robustness and tolerance for failures in its natural environment can be difficult or impossible. Developers and testers buy tool suites to simulate load, write programs that fill memory, and create large files on disk, all to determine the behavior of their application under test in a hostile and unpredictable environment. Herbert Thompson describes and demonstrates new, cutting edge methods for simulating stress that are more efficient and reliable than current industry practices. Using Windows Media Player and Winamp as examples, he demonstrates how new methods of fault injection can be used to simulate stress on Windows applications.

• Runtime fault injection as a testing and assessment tool
• Cutting edge stress-testing techniques
• An in-depth case study on runtime fault injection

How can Test Managers present information about test results so that the correct message is received by decision-makers? Testing generates a huge amount of raw data, which must be analyzed, processed, summarized, and presented to management so the best decisions can be made quickly. Lloyd Roden shares his experiences as a test manager and as a consultant about communicating with and disseminating information to various levels of senior management. Develop your skills to become a "trusted advisor" to senior management rather than the "bearer of bad news". Find out innovative ways to keep the information flowing to and from management and avoid losing control of the test process, particularly near the delivery date. Learn the seven monitoring techniques Lloyd recommends for reporting on different aspects of the system under test.

Modern optimizing compilers  are becoming increasingly dependent on dynamic profile information. Because the profile information collected by these compilers also is sufficient for QA, it is likely that code-coverage analysis will become an integrated development environment option. This integration should help to simplify your code development and testing processes and should also improve the accuracy of your coverage information and the performance of your optimized code.

This article discusses the software development practices that were used before the inception of .NET detailing which ones worked and which ones didn't. The .NET development lifecycle and how to implement it for your team is also explained.