STARWEST 2004 - Software Testing Conference

PRESENTATIONS

Load Testing the MSNBC 2002 Winter Olympics Web Site

When the Canadian pairs figure skating controversy erupted during the 2002 Winter Olympics, TV viewers hit the MSNBC Web site with a fury. But the site was ready and responded without a hitch due to the carefully planned and executed load testing of the voting applications. The MSNBC site received four to five million visitors a day with sudden bursts of traffic due to breaking news.
Suzanne Wagstaff, KeyLabs
Mainframe-Class Recoverability Testing

The corollary to the axiom "all software has bugs" is "you will never find them all." Even if you could, hardware and environmental failures always are lurking about, waiting to crash the software. If you accept the premise that failures are inevitable, then part of your testing should confirm that the software gracefully recovers from failures, protecting customer data and minimizing downtime.
Scott Loveland, IBM Corporation
Managing Agile Test Departments

What is the impact of agile methods on test departments and testers? How do you manage testing in an agile test department? Robert Martin, an early adopter and proponent of agile development practices, discusses his experiences and recommendations for how to organize and run an agile test department. He describes the principles, practices, tools, and metrics that are important to successful test management within agile development. Agile methods change the role of test departments from verification to specification.
Robert Martin, Object Mentor
Managing the Hand-off from Development

More than half the battle in testing is managing the hand-off from development into the testing workflow. New software development technologies and methods can result in more functionality, delivered faster but with decreased testability. As a test manager, you need to know how the application was built, including the use of dynamic code and third party components, to develop an effective test strategy and a meaningful schedule.
Michael Hansen, WorkSoft
Quality Assurance as a Service Organization

"QA is the bottleneck” ... "Why does QA take so long?" ... "You need to test faster." Often, key project stakeholders either do not understand QA or have difficulty quantifying the effects that increasing or decreasing test time will have on the project. First American CREDCO found the solution was to turn QA into a full service organization, complete with a "Quality Rainbow" menu of options to be purchased. Want it quicker and willing to accept a higher risk? Then select from Column 1.
Sandi Oswalt, First American Credco
Quality Metrics for Test: Evaluating Products, Evaluating Ourselves

As testers, we usually focus our efforts on measuring the quality of products. We count defects and organize them by severity, we compute defect density, we examine the changes in those metrics over time for trends, and we chart customer satisfaction. While these are important, we must apply additional measurements to ourselves if we are to reach the next level of testing maturity.
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
Rescuing a Runaway Test Project

As a testing consultant Geoff Horne often is called upon to help rescue runaway testing projects. In this presentation, Geoff looks at common causes of such problems, what to do to remedy them, and how to prevent their recurrence. If your testing is taking longer than planned ... or you are finding too many (or too few) defects... or your test project has simply lost its way, then this session is for you.
Geoff Horne, iSQA
STARWEST 2004: Interpersonal Skills for Working with Business Stakeholders

As a professional test manager or test engineer, you must keep up with the latest test techniques, management practices, and systems technologies. But that is not enough. You also must interact with and, more importantly, learn to influence executive managers and other non-technical project stakeholders. Even today in many companies, testing and test management are not well understood, and their work is unappreciated by non-technical people.
Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.Com Inc
STARWEST 2004: Model-Based Testing for Java and Web-Based GUI Applications

With the tools existing today, model-based testing for Java applications is extremely difficult to implement. According to Jeff Feldstein, you need a scripting language that allows for creating and manipulating complex data structures and driving your tests with models of the application. Learn about Jeff's success and the obstacles he faced implementing model-based testing for Java and HTML applications.
Jeff Feldstein, Cisco Systems Inc
STARWEST 2004: Testing Dialogues - Management Issues

Many organizations are beginning to deploy Web services as the preferred way to interact electronically with employees, customers, and trading partners. To ensure that these Web services implementations are secure, vulnerability assessment and rigorous testing must be built into the Web services development process. Jack Quinnell describes the current "best practices" in developing and testing the security of an enterprise’s Web services applications.
Facilitated by Esther Derby and Elisabeth Hendrickson

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