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T-Mobile Czech Republic started testing VoLTE technology, that is IP telephony over LTE. A nice article was published about it in the Czech news (see [1] for an English summary). VoLTE should be generally available for customers from January! (more…)

The demand for profiq's services from Silicon Valley based hi-tech companies is increasing. This brings new opportunities for technical talent in the Ostrava region. People started seeing us as a competitive alternative to existing IT vendors on the job market of the region, even before moving to Ostrava. Opening a new engineering center in Ostrava increases our dedication to being the alternative. Most of all, we are now even closer (couldn’t be any closer than that :) ) to university students to enable them to work on technically challenging projects. We…

Here comes a testing focused article after a series of technical blogs! It is based on experience with projects managed through waterfall processes and it continues the series about tackling test complexity. It is about a luxury that we so often ask for and we often don't have in testing: to be involved early in the product development process. What does it mean actually to be involved early in the process? Why is it so important? And how does it help tackling test complexity anyway? (more…)

Engine Yard is a platform as a service (PaaS) company that focuses on deployment and management of Ruby on Rails, PHP and Node.js servers in order to provide to customer a quick and simple way to deploy applications. They provide also a local version of Ruby on Rails server on Gentoo Linux so anyone can test how it works. I wanted to run the Engine Yard Local on CentOS 6.5 to test sample a Ruby application without the use of cloud services but I have faced some difficulties during deployment that…

I gave a short overview of OpenAM Session Upgrades in a previous article. This is a follow-up that intends to describe the process of configuring it and discussing some of its implications. This blog was sitting back half done as a Draft for several months. It was originally written based on ForgeRock OpenAM 10.x . OpenAM 11 has been released since then. I'm finally finding the time for finishing and publishing the article. It should apply for OpenAM 10.x as well as OpenAM 11.  (more…)

profiq just announeced strategic partnership with ForgeRock for system integration of open-source and standard-based Access and Identity Management (IAM) products. This is a fundamental milestone in fulfilling profiq's system integration and system testing strategy. We have spent the last 8+ years with deploying and testing ForgeRock products and their predecessors and looking forward to offering an extended service to customers in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary with ForgeRock. (more…)

SSO authentication introduces some technical challenges besides providing obvious benefits. Imagine for example that you need to assign different types or levels of authentication to different resources or different actions within a domain. E.g. you allow users to view information, if they successfully authenticate using user name and password, while you may require them to insert a special security code besides user name and password, if they want to start editing. Or you allow users to access general content using user name and password, while accessing specific content (e.g. admin…

This article follows-up with the series of  articles about tackling test complexity, adding a view on the importance of product knowledge, when coping with the complexity of testing. Let's assume that you understand already, who your customers are;) I managed testing of a large integrated suite of software products on one of my past projects. Each product had its years of individual history already, when the decision was made to release them as a suite. And each of them was quite complex on its own, even without considering integration with…

Understanding customer needs for being able to do good testing sounds like commonplace that doesn't need a special discussion. And testing projects often omit to discuss them indeed. Testing teams often start their project involvement with reading functional (or non-functional) specifications, skipping the customer view. I'm still mentioning it on the first place in the introduction of approaches to tackle testing complexity. (more…)

Software complexity is one of the most significant challenges that a software tester may face. Testing software that is complex usually requires a breadth of knowledge and experience. The goal that the tester needs to accomplish with regards to complexity is: to test the software in a reasonable time and at a reasonable cost. As an example, think about ways to test upgrades of a database system with the following support matrix that gives altogether billions of combinations to test. Can this test scope be reasonably covered? Maybe. Let's see…