The following is an interview with Ryan Cramer, the CEO of RCD, LLC in Atlanta. Ryan specializes in design and development of medium-to-large scale web sites and web applications, and we are grateful he has shared his thoughts with us regarding software testing.

What is your technical background?

This is the second installment of an email interview with James Christie, independent software testing consultant and owner of Claro Testing Ltd. In the first part, James talks about his views on usability testing, and in this second part he discusses leaders in usability testing, KPIs, test automation tools, cloud computing, and testing blogs.

Living in Scotland, James has worked with large global organizations such as IBM, and he provides consulting services as leader of Claro Testing Ltd. His consulting includes setting testing strategy and budget, writing test plans, supervising test execution. and creating testing processes.

Who are the top 3 usability testing experts that you know? No need to list yourself, that is a given.

Recently I've become aware of the existence of videos on YouTube relative to the software testing industry. Ok, I realize that I'm not cutting edge. You may have been watching these videos since before Andy Griffith went into syndication. Yeah right.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice if someone had screened out those that are difficult to understand or lacking in relevant content. After scanning through several of them today, it is obvious to me that I have a much different point of view than some of the reviewers that give most of these a thumbs up. Some are good. Many are not. I hope by pointing you to a few of my favorites over the coming weeks, you will gain some value from my wasted time and spare you the pain of watching all the bad ones.

Here's a video presentation by one of the most well-known gurus in the software testing industry - James Bach. The posted summary is below the embedded video. Please let me know if you find this helpful.

Becoming a Software Testing Expert

A headline in one of the LinkedIn testing groups caught my attention this morning. Sergey Lesnikov posted a new discussion thread titled, Top 25 Programming Errors for Software Testing. It is on the Software Testing - ISTQB/ISEB group.

Quick summary:

• International collaboration from cyber security organizations
• List of bugs that enable cyber crime
  

"I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me." - John Cleese

Project studies by IBM, GTE, TRW, and several other large corporations have shown that an error in requirements detected in later phases of the software development life cycle increases costs by:

• 500% for architectural design
• 1,000% for coding
• 2,000% for unit testing
• 5,000% for acceptance testing
• 10,000% for maintenance

With such an impact on project costs, there is no wonder that few software development efforts come in under budget and on time.

When is software testing finished?

Determining when testing is completed is not always a simple matter. In any significant application, it is impossible to prove that the software will never fail. As an example, Microsoft employs thousands of professional testers for their Testing and QA Teams. These testers receive excellent training and tools. They have extensive backgrounds in software testing and quality assurance.

One of the most important roles on a software development project team is Testing and Quality Assurance. This role on the team is charged with verifying that the application or system complies with the functional requirements. Or put another way, this role finds the bugs.

When we talk of software testing,
technical prowess in white box testing involves detecting vulnerabilities
in the logical structure of the code implementation. White box testing
is also referred to as glass box testing, clear box testing and structural
testing. It requires testers to create test cases to test the internal
path of programs. The tester should have strong programming skills to
choose the appropriate inputs for checking the accuracy of program logics
in order to get the required output. White box testing should ideally