SQE STARWEST Conference Brochure 2008

COnCUrrent SeSSiOnS MONDAY, MAY 16, 8:30-5:00 tHUrSDay, OCTOBeR 2, 1:30 p.m. T11 TEST MAnAGEMEnT T14 PERfORMAnCE TESTInG Managing your Personal Stress Level Randall Rice, Rice Consulting Services, Inc. in a recent survey of 130 U.s. software testers and test managers, Randall Rice learned that 83 percent of the respondents have experienced burnout, 53 percent have experienced depression of some type, and 97 percent have experienced high levels of stress at some time during their software testing careers. Randall details the sources of these problems and the most common ways to deal with them—some healthy, some not. There are positive things testers and managers can do to reduce and relieve their stress without compromising team effectiveness. By understanding the proper role of testing inside your organization and building a personal support system, you can manage stress and avoid its destructive consequences. Randall identifies the stress factors you can personally alleviate and helps you deal with those stressors you can’t change. Avoid burnout and don’t be taken down by unreasonable management expectations, negative attitudes of other people, unexpected changes, and other stressors in your work. T12 Performance engineering: More than just Load testing Rex Black, QA Software Consultant/Trainer Performance testing that is done once or a few times as part of the system test is not the right approach for many systems that must change and grow for years. Rex Black discusses a different approach—performance engineering—that is far more than performing load testing during the system test. Performance engineering takes a broad look at the environment, platforms, and development processes and how they affect a system’s ability to perform at different load levels on different hardware and networks. while load testers run a test before product launch to alleviate performance concerns, performance engineers have a plan for conducting a series of performance tests throughout the development lifecycle and after deployment. A comprehensive performance methodology includes performance modeling, unit performance tests, infrastructure tuning, benchmark testing, code profiling, system validation testing, and production support. Find out the what, when, who, and how to conduct each of these performance engineering activities. As a performance engineer, you’ll learn the questions you need to ask—early in the project—to identify risks for load, stress, capacity, and reliability. T15 TEST TECHnIquES reloadable test Data for Manual testing Tanya Dumaresq, Macadamian Technologies, Inc. Do you need to execute and then quickly re-execute manual test cases under tight timelines? Do bugs marked as “Cannot Reproduce” bouncing back and forth between developers and testers frustrate your team? would you like to have more realistic, production-like test data? Join Tanya Dumaresq as she explains the hows and whys of developing and using pre-created, reloadable test data for manual testing. By planning ahead when designing test cases, you can cut test execution time in half and virtually eliminate those “works on my machine” bugs. learn how to create and load test data in different formats and choose the one that is best for your application under test. sometimes, you can even use the application itself to create the data! you’ll end up with test data and an environment far more representative of your users’ world than if you create data on the fly during test execution. T13 SPECIAL TOPICS test Management for Very Large Programs: a Survival kit Graham Thomas, Independent Consultant in large organizations with multiple, simultaneous, and related projects, how do you coordinate testing efforts for better utilization and higher quality? some organizations have opened Program Test Management offices to oversee the multiple streams of testing projects and activities, each with its own test manager. should the Program Test Manager be an über-manager in control of everything, or is this office more of an aggregation and reporting function? Graham Thomas examines the spectrum of possible duties and powers of this position. He also shares the critical factors for successful program test management, including oversight of the testing products and deliverables; matrix management of test managers; stakeholder, milestone, resource, and dependency management; and the softer but vital skills of influence and negotiation with very senior managers. Relating experience gained on several large testing programs, Graham shares a practical model—covering the key test management areas of organization, people, process, tools, and metrics—that your organization can adapt for its needs. AGILE TESTInG Driving Development with tests: atDD and tDD Elisabeth Hendrickson, Quality Tree Software, Inc. A perennial wish of testers is to participate early in the projects we test—as early as when the requirements are being developed. we also often wish for developers to do a better job unit testing their programs. now with agile development practices, both of these wishes can come true. Development teams practicing acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) define system-level tests during requirements elicitation. These tests clarify requirements, uncover hidden assumptions, and confirm that everyone has the same understanding of what “done” means. ATDD tests become executable requirements that provide ongoing feedback about how well the emerging system meets expectations. Agile developers who also are practicing test-driven development (TDD) design methods create automated unit tests before writing component code. The result of ATDD + TDD is an automated set of system- and unitlevel regression tests that execute every time the software changes. in this session, elisabeth explains how ATDD and TDD work and demonstrates them by completely implementing a new feature in a sample application. “Excellent learning experience. Get the latest developments in a comfortable environment in one of the most pleasant locations in the world. Overall, a great experience.” — Jan J. nathan Test CaT Leader, nato Programming Centre Call 888.268.8770 or 904.278.0524 to register • www.sqe.Com/swreg 23 http://www.sqe.com/swreg

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SQE STARWEST Conference Conference-At-A-Glance Pre-Conference Tutorials Keynote Sessions Concurrent Sessions Registration Information

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