Technology advancements are driving changes in business models and customer expectations. Customers now demand personalized, high-quality services delivered through various digital channels. This trend of pervasive computing allows businesses to gather data from multiple sources to make quicker, informed decisions. These changes require testing approaches, strategies and methods to adapt. Software testing is also evolving, with a shift from quality assurance to business assurance and more agile development cycles. Testing must become more innovative and collaborative to validate emerging enterprise solutions. Pairwise testing provides a balanced approach to maximize test coverage with fewer combinations, helping address challenges of exhaustive testing within constrained cycles.

1. The influence of technology advancements in driving Business value across
Industries to adapt to the new digital consumer behavior is increasing by the day. The
new age consumers are highly informed, assertive and demand higher quality and per-
sonalization of services delivered to them. Another key trend impacting the industry is
pervasive computing–providing an environment for power of computing - anywhere,
anytime, any device. The biggest outcome of pervasive technology is the ability to
make quicker decisions at the right time by analyzing data and gathering intelligent
information from the abundant data sources and various channels - portals, social me-
dia, blogs, end-use behavior etc. All these trends need QA to respond with appropri-
ate QA solutions, strategies and methodologies.
We are indeed living in ex-
citing times and this is a
unique opportunity to im-
agine and create solutions
for future using the possi-
bilities of computing. We
are seeing multiple trends
in the Domain of Software
Testing: There is an increas-
ing shift from Quality to
Business Assurance; Cus-
tomers are looking at Out-
come and Value based
models. Software develop-
ment model and cycles are
increasingly becoming more
Agile. QA as a discipline
needs to be more agile,
adaptable and innovative
With growing importance of
quality, testing become
paramount in releasing
software to client
Editorial...
B U S I N E S S N A M E
and the role of tester is
even more complex - to
understand the Business,
Technology & Process as-
pects and provide an inno-
vative and smart QA solu-
tion. In addition to this,
QA is gradually becoming
more technical and has de-
veloped its own niche disci-
plines (for example: mobile
testing, cloud testing, SOA,
BI testing, Big Data testing
etc.). This journey for vali-
dating tomorrow's enter-
prise requires a lot of focus
on innovation, co-creation
and collaboration.
At Marlabs, we need to be prepared to take advantage of the emerging opportunities
to address Business challenges. This newsletter is one of our efforts to enable the Test-
ing team to connect not just with their fellow members but also with folks outside
testing realm, to be aware of Industry, Software, Testing trends and share ideas and
best practices in a spirit of shared learning.
Issue: Sept 2013
Marlab’s
I N S I D E T H I S
I S S U E :
Notes from CDO 2
Why Testing is
not Dead !!!
2
Marlabs Updates 4
Quality News &
Views
5
Intro to Pairwise
Testing
6
Cartoon Space 7

2. Notes from CDO ..
Over the last 2 years, as a business strategy, we are investing on Software
Testing considerably. Though we are competing in a crowded market, we feel
that, we can be a differentiator in terms of value creation for our customers. To
enable us to be a differentiator, we have to build a passionate team who enjoys
Software testing and are ready to come up with creative ideas in Testing which is
customer centric, through productivity improvement, cycle time reduction to make
Testing cost effective.
As a career too, software testing is challenging, crea-
tive and needs very good communication, analytical,
problem solving and questioning skills. Initiating a
News Letter of this kind is very thoughtful, at the same
time continuing this with quality and timeliness is equal-
ly challenging. Wishing the Software testing team all
the best.
Anil
Raghavan
T E S T D I G E S T P A G E 2
Why Testing is not Dead ...
By Rajesh Prabhu Natarajan
During the 6th Annual Google Test Automation Conference 2011, the opening keynote ad-
dress “Test is Dead” was presented by Alberto Savoia, which you can see at below link (which I
can’t embed here due to file size limitations):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1jWe5rOu3g
What is so evident is that the fine line between white box testing and black box testing is
getting transparent and thinner by the day. Let’s go in to history for a moment. A couple of
decades back, there was not a concept of independent testing (rightfully so) because of the
lesser dependency towards online and real-time applications. It was a time when the develop-
ment process itself was very fragile. The roles in a project group was not separate and devel-
oper was almost taking care of all phases of the project. It was an OK approach just because of
the smaller size, complexity and the way applications were used.
So called Older way of software testing:
a. Requirement
b. Design and Code
c. Testing
d. Maintenance

3. Testing is an infinite
process of
comparing the
invisible to the
ambiguous in order
to avoid the
unthinkable
happening to the
anonymous.” -
James Bach
Testing Is Not Dead
After lot of years now, the value of independent testing is questioned again.
1. What if the developer either takes care of testing or does extended testing along with
white box testing?
2. What if I do not have testers or have <5% of developers with very minimal testing?
3. What if I release the app without testing and take care of defects as it comes from my
customers?
These are very valid questions that needs careful thinking. Much talked Modern way of soft-
ware testing:
Requirement ==> Testing
Design and code ==> Testing
Maintenance ==> Testing
Note that the key difference is not just in phases but also about the roles on who is doing each
of these testing. This assumes mostly that developers does testing too; which is probably a bit
going back in time before the concept of 3rd party independent testing came in to existence.
The answer to decide if testing is required may lie in the below questions.
1. What does the app do?
2. Who are the audience?
3. Is that mission-critical?
4. What is the defect tolerance level?
5. How much risk is business willing to take?
and the most important of all…
6. How disciplined is your development team to write better code?
Answers to these questions will decide the depth of testing that may be required.
While the new approach talks about a much more agile/dynamic/optimized testing approach, this
may not be applicable to all areas particularly in verticals like BFSI, Aviation etc., This approach may
apply more towards verticals like media and communication based apps which has a higher toler-
ance level towards defects.
Hence don’t get carried away when someone says testing is dead.
Testing in my view will live forever.
T E S T D I G E S T P A G E 3
continuation of ‘Why Testing is not Dead’ ...

4. T E S T D I G E S T P A G E 4
Trainings 1. The following trainings were conducted at our offshore loca-
tions
a. Automation using RFT
b. Performance Testing Best practices
C. Selenium training
2. As part of TKG session, we are had an overview of the below projects in July
a. FORTITUDE Project
b. POLARIS Project
c. ENDURANCE - MAINTENANCE PROJECTS
Certifications Congrats to Vanitha Shivakumar and Santhi Priya for clearing the ISTQB foundation
level certification
Tools The infrastructure for Testlink has been setup within Marlabs and is available for project
use. You can access this at : http://tcoe.marlabs.com/Testlink/login.php
Please contact Admin.Testlink@Marlabs.com for access
External
Conferences
Few of our colleagues recently attended the Step-In summit 2013 Testing conference at
Bangalore. The conference had many interesting and thought-provoking sessions on
current and emerging topics of testing
Publications Couple of technical articles were published in Toolsjournal.com :
a. ‘Test Data Management for Non-functional testing’
by Ramesh Viswanathan
b. ‘Maximizing the utilization of Test Automation’ by Vikas Joshi
…. Few members from Marlabs testing team have attended an STeP-IN SUMMIT 2013 - the 10th Interna-
tional Conference on Software Testing. During the conference different events have been planned to ensure
that there is maximum take-away to address different needs for all levels of professionals.
The conference theme “Next Generation Testing: Learning from the past; Preparing for the future” has been chosen,
keeping in mind the evolution of Software Testing into a sophisticated discipline over the last two decades
while acknowledging the fact that the Post-PC era is challenging old paradigms and methods of working.
STeP-IN SUMMIT 2013 endeavors to extract the best from past learning while focusing on new technologies,
models and methodologies to address current challenges.
Below are few of the interesting session which was part of conference.
1. The Value of Testing
2. How to bullet proof Releases
3. Tactics in testing social networks
4. Testing the shrinking world
from Sriharsha Kumar

5. T E S T D I G E S T P A G E 5
Free Testing Magazines
(eBooks)
May 2013
TeaTime with testers April/May
Better software magazine about agile
Testing Circus May
April 2013
Testing Circus April
Logigear magazine about Test Automation
NZTester April-June
Professional tester magazine (the trouble
with good ideas)
Automated Software Testing magazine
TESTmagazine April issue
March 2013
Tea time with testers
Testing Experience
OZTester April-June
TestingCircus March Edition
Better software magazine
Agile Record - Kanban
February 2013
Logigear Februari - the rapidly changing
testlandscape
Testing Circus
Test Magazine
Professional Tester
January 2013
Tea time with testers
Better Software magazine Lessons learned
from Ancient wisdom
News & Announcements..
 Enterprise Tester 4.8 brings tighter integration with Atlassian’s JIRA
Link : http://www.ministryoftesting.com/2013/08/enterprise-tester-4-
8-brings-tighter-integration-with-atlassians-jira/
 The Evolving Skill Set of Tomorrow’s Top Testers by Scott Barber
Link : http://www.ministryoftesting.com/2013/08/the-evolving-skill-
set-of-tomorrows-top-testers/
 Building an efficient component-based test automation framework
(whitepaper)
Link : Click Here
 Getting Started with API Testing
Link : Click Here
 Why Agile Development Fails (Sometimes)
Link : Click Here
 Security News You Won’t Want to Miss
Link : Click Here
 SmartBear Collects 5 ATI Automation Awards at TestKIT Conference
Link : Click Here
 Why HTML5 Tests the Limits of Automated Testing Solutions
Link : Click Here

6. “Everyone knows
that debugging is
twice as hard as
writing a program in
the first place. So if
you are as clever as
you can be when
you write it, how will
you ever debug it?”
– Brian Kernighan
The Software Test Manager has the challenging responsibility of ensuring highest
levels of Quality within increasingly shorter Cycle times. While Quality requires greater
Test coverage, Exhaustive testing has the practical constraints of reduced cycle time and
the need of quick testing turnaround times.
Business applications are getting increasingly complex, with multiple possible
scenarios for a given Business functionality. The need to cater to a diverse market
means that applications have multiple input conditions and a range of values for each
of the inputs.
A dilemma for the Tester is how to ensure Quality under these circumstances?
Exhaustive testing for all the inputs and their range of combinations is very time con-
suming and often impractical idea. On the other hand, an incomplete coverage raises
the possibility of slipped defects.
Pairwise testing is a test technique based on combinatorial methods and pro-
vides a balanced solution which ensures maximum Test coverage with a reduced number
of test combinations.
How does Pairwise testing work?
In any complex software system, defects or failures can be categorized as:
• Single Modal—in which something works or fails by itself, independent of other
factors
• Dual Modal—in which even though two things work individually, they fail when
paired together
• Multi Modal—in which three or more things in combination don’t work together
The underlying principle is
1. The vast majority of defects are caused by the interaction between a small
number of factors ie. single and dual modal causes .
2. The number of failures resulting from the interaction of more than 2 parame-
ters is progressively less
3. Testing a large number of random combinations results in inefficient tests
Hence, the focus is on a technique which optimizes test case design to identify single
and dual mode failures.
The below figure illustrates how the impact of test case optimization increases sig-
nificantly as the number of test factors increase :
T E S T D I G E S T
Introduction to Pairwise Testing
By Rajesh Sundararajan
P A G E 6

7. T E S T D I G E S T P A G E 7
continuation of ‘Introduction to Pairwise Testing ...
Let’s understand this better with an example:
Take the case of a software to select cars which has the below options
Manufacturer: Honda, Toyota, Maruti (3 options)
Category- Hatchback, Sedan, SuV (3 options)
City: Bengaluru, Mysore (2 options)
Exhaustive testing of all possible scenarios/combinations will require 3 X 3 X 2 = 18 tests.
Let’s apply the All pairs technique.
The number of test cases where each column pair value occurs at least once is 9. If we take the example of
“Honda” in the Manufacturer’s column, we can see that it forms a “pair” with each of the values in the other col-
umns at least once.
Original rows – 18; Optimized rows – 9; Savings/Benefit = 50% . As the
number of variables and their options increase, the benefits will be that
much higher.
The above example was simple and we could organize the All –pairs
manually. How do we do this using a tool? There are many Free and
Web-based tools listed at http://www.pairwise.org/tools.asp . Use any
of them and share your experience.
Points to note:
All-pairs is a technique and needs to be understood well and evaluated before applying it.
It is very similar to and often confused with Orthogonal Arrays. Both use the basic principle of “paired varia-
bles”, but Orthogonal arrays are “Balanced” as they have all pairs equal number of times.
Cartoon Space...