SQE STARWEST Conference Brochure 2008

COnCUrrent SeSSiOnS tHUrSDay, OCTOBeR 2, 3:00 p.m. T16 TEST MAnAGEMEnT T19 the three faces of Quality: Control, assurance, analysis Stephen Michaud, Luxoft Canada Many of the misunderstandings within software development organizations can trace their roots to different interpretations of the role of testers. The terms quality control (QC), quality assurance (QA), and quality analysis are often used interchangeably. However, they are quite different and require different approaches and very different skill sets. Quality control is a measurement of the product at delivery compared to a benchmark standard, at which point the decision is made to ship or reject the product. Quality assurance is the systematic lifecycle effort to assure that a product meets expectations in all aspects of its development. it includes processes, procedures, guidelines, and tools that lead to quality in each phase. Quality analysis evaluates historical trends and assesses the future customer needs as well as trends in technology to provide guidance for future system development. stephen Michaud describes how to set yourself up in all three roles and covers the skills you need to be successful in each role. T17 PERfORMAnCE TESTInG Life as a Performance tester Scott Barber and Dawn Haynes, PerfTestPlus, Inc. At the core of most performance testing challenges and failed performance testing projects are serious misunderstandings and miscommunications within the project team. scott Barber and Dawn Haynes share approaches to overcoming some of the most common frustrations facing performance testers today. Rather than simply telling you how to improve understanding and communicate performance testing concepts, scott and Dawn demonstrate their approaches through an amusing role play of interactions between a lead performance tester and a non-technical executive. Based on real-life experiences (with names and places changed to protect the innocent, of course), they demonstrate ways for you to address questions such as, “should we be doing performance, load, stress, or capacity testing?”, “How relevant and realistic (or not) is this load test?”, “How will we know if we are done?”, and “what is a concurrent user, anyway?” As you enjoy the interplay, you’ll learn valuable lessons that are sure to make your performance testing better and personally more rewarding. T20 TEST TECHnIquES acceptable acceptance testing Grigori Melnik, Microsoft Corporation and Jon Bach, Quardev, Inc. This is the tale of a team of software professionals at Microsoft patterns & practices group who wrote a book on software acceptance testing. Grigori Melnik was the content owner, writer, and project manager. Jon Bach was the writer, material producer, and the acceptance testing reality checker, ensuring that the project team used its own methods so the book would be acceptable to you, the reader. To develop the book, Grigori and Jon employed key ideas of agile projects—creating a backlog using story cards, working in short iterations, exploring requirements and expectations, building customer trust through iterative acceptance, and staying connected to the customer community through frequent preview releases, surveys, and interviews. They created a heuristic acceptance testing model for knowing when they had reached enough “acceptability” to stop “developing” the book and publish it. Join Grigori and Jon to discover how you can apply an innovative acceptance testing methodology to your software testing. you’ll learn how to implement an iterative and incremental acceptance testing approach on your next testing project. T18 SPECIAL TOPICS adding Measurement to reviews Riley Rice, Booz Allen Hamilton Conceptually, most testers and developers agree that reviews and inspections of software designs and code can improve software and reduce development costs. However, most are unaware that measuring reviews and inspections greatly magnifies these improvements and savings. Riley Rice presents data from more than 4,000 real-world software projects in different domains—defense, commercial, and government. He compares the results of three scenarios: doing few or no reviews, doing unmeasured reviews, and doing measured reviews. For each scenario, Riley compares resulting metrics: defects delivered to customers, total project pre-release costs, total project post-release costs, total project lifecycle costs, project duration, mean time between failures, and productivity. The results are surprising—measured reviews are substantially more effective—and go far beyond what most people would expect. learn how the effectiveness of inspections and reviews is significantly improved by the simple act of measuring them. AGILE TESTInG are agile testers Different? Lisa Crispin, ePlan Services, Inc. On an agile team everyone tests, blurring the lines between the roles of professional developers and testers. what’s so special about becoming an agile test professional? Do you need different skills than testers on traditional projects? what guides you in your daily activities? lisa Crispin presents her “Top Ten” list of principles that define an agile tester. she explains that when it comes to agile testers, skills are important but attitude is everything. learn how agile testers acquire the results-oriented, customer-focused, collaborative, and creative mindset that makes them successful in an agile development environment. Agile testers apply different values and principles—feedback, communication, simplicity, continuous improvement, and responsiveness—to add value in a unique way. if you’re a tester looking for your place in the agile world or a manager looking for agile testers, lisa can help. “The conference is definitely a great place to come to meet the SQA world and get lots of different information and ideas. I traveled 9 hours to get to this conference and I will do it again.” — Valérie Simons-Leblay SQa Manager, ihS 24 Call 888.268.8770 or 904.278.0524 to register • www.sqe.Com/swreg http://www.sqe.com/swreg

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of SQE STARWEST Conference Brochure 2008

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

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.