STAREAST 2005 - Software Testing Conference

PRESENTATIONS

Lightening Talks: A Potpourri of 5-Minute Presentations

Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. Lightning Talks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking and offer the chance to try out conference speaking without the heavy commitment. Lightning Talks are an opportunity to present your single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea quickly. Use this as an opportunity to give a talk for the first time, or the first time on a new topic.
Matthew Heusser, Priority-Health
Making Test Data More Agile

Flexible, reusable, and restorable test data for both the unit and system level is an absolute necessity for testers working on Agile development projects. For teams following a more traditional development process, Agile approaches for handling test data can enhance testing efforts as well. Discussing Agile testing approaches, such the ObjectMother pattern, Peter Schuh explains how testers design tests and test frameworks to survive the ever-changing data structures found in Agile projects.
Peter Schuh, Peter Schuh
Manage Your Testing with SCRUM

Used successfully in hundreds of agile and iterative development projects, SCRUM is a software project management approach that employs fixed cycle time "sprints" and daily "scrums." SCRUM emphasizes self-directing teams and the role of a "Scrum Master" to remove obstacles to the
Robert Galen, Thomson/Dialog
Model-Based Testing Meets Exploratory Testing

When we are faced with software with unknown requirements or software in an unstable condition, exploratory testing is a cost-effective test technique. Once a product is more stable and settled, the value of exploratory testing drops off rapidly. Model-based testing, on the other hand, provides extremely thorough testing that can run day and night, but it can be difficult to justify the required
Harry Robinson, Google
Moving from Test-Last to Test-Driven Development

Has it ever happened to you? Due to an immovable delivery schedule, time for testing is squeezed and long hours are the norm at the end of a project. Well, let’s move the testing forward in the development process. In fact, teams are learning that, rather than relegating tests to near the end of a project, there are huge benefits to adopting a test-driven process-a more maintainable and robust design, testable code, fewer defects, and a cross-functional highperformance team.
Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software
Navigating the Minefield of Open Source Test Tools

Each year more and more open source development tools, including test tools, are available. By choosing to use open source test tools, companies expect to save money and take advantage of the community of shared development. Recently, there seems to be an abundance of open source testing tools being released, including tools for automated regression, load testing, test management, and defect tracking. But how do you know which tools are right for you?
Jeff Jewell, ProtoTest LLC
Peanuts and Crackerjacks: What Baseball Taught Me about Metrics

Because people can easily relate to a familiar paradigm, analogies are an excellent way to communicate complex data. Rob Sabourin uses baseball as an analogy to set up a series of status reports to manage test projects, share results with stakeholders, and measure test effectiveness. For
Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc
Plans, Processes, and Practices for Successful Test Outsourcing

There are many reasons why outsourcing IT activities requires extra attention, especially when it concerns software testing. Examples of complete failures are common, and "backsourcing" is not uncommon today. Outsourcing test activities requires a comprehensive planning roadmap from the initial idea to implementation steps and ongoing processes. Martin Pol discusses creating a service level agreement for test outsourcing, managing the transition, approaches for cultural adjustments, and ways to monitor the outsourced work.
Martin Pol, POLTEQ IT Services BV
Put an End to the Defect Report-Fix-Check-Rework Cycle

Many software organizations have mature defect tracking processes and tooling. Defect reports are often the primary means by which testers and developers communicate, and many teams run their development priorities from the defect tracking system. Bad news. We now find ourselves swimming in defect reports, the majority of which are irrelevant, out of date, repeated, not reproducible, and difficult to associate to the features we've committed to deliver.
Richard Leavitt, Rally Software Development
Quality Interactions: Bulding Effective Working Relationships

As software professionals, we all care about quality. We focus our efforts on building quality into the code and testing to assess quality and find errors before our customers do. However, there is an important element of quality that comes before all that and is critical to delivering reliable software: quality working relationships and quality interactions. Esther Derby covers pragmatic strategies for building, strengthening, and maintaining working relationships with all stakeholders-managers, customers, team members, and peers.
Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates Inc

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