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Critical Components of Asset Management Examine how Information Technology (IT) asset management methodologies can reduce your organization's IT budget between five and thirty-five percent. Kathy Shoop discusses the critical components to deploy, the challenges of implementing such a program, and the limitations of asset management tools such as spreadsheets and in-house development efforts. Discover the best practices for implementing an asset management initiative in your organization that will result in immediate cost savings.
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Kathy Shoop, Janus Technologies, Inc.
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Adaptive Software Development Adaptive Software Development (ASD) is targeted for software teams where competition creates extreme pressure on the delivery process. Many process improvement techniques (CMM, ISO) are focused on optimizing practices that involve steadily increasing rigor. In contrast, ASD emphasizes producing high-value results based on rapid adaptation to both external and internal events. Listen as Jim Highsmith explains how the focal point of ASD is fundamentally different from traditional software process improvement approaches. Learn why "a little bit less than just enough" is ASD's guideline for implementing rigor.
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Jim Highsmith, Information Architects, Inc.
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Achieving Software Quality Through Test Automation Process Integration With increasing demands for high-quality software applications in shorter development cycles, it's clear that teams need to go beyond simply running tests at the end of their development cycle. Instead, teams must approach development with quality as their primary objective. Brian Bryson shows you how to integrate automated testing tools with best practices to implement an effective quality assurance process from the beginning (and throughout) the development lifecycle.
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Brian Bryson, Rational Software Corporation
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A Practical Approach to Early-Cycle QA Test Automation Everyone knows that a large body of automated unit tests for classes, subsystems, and frameworks adds to overall code quality. However, the "burden" of unit test automation is frequently placed squarely on the shoulders of developers because of the perception that only a developer can write a unit test. Since QA personnel typically test from the user interface-and usually have to wait until later in the development cycle for the availability of that interface-they're often left to scramble at the end of the cycle to get their testing done. Michael Silverstein reveals a model for early-cycle collaboration between developers and testers where testers augment the developers' unit testing activities without adding additional process overhead.
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Michael Silverstein, SilverMark, Inc.
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Testing Your Software's Requirements Many testing organizations focus primarily on software executable code, but that's not the only thing you can test. For instance, did you ever consider testing your software requirements? When you test only code, you face some big disadvantages, not to mention that design defects often aren't even fixable because they demand too much effort, too late in the release cycle. In fact, it's difficult to even report some requirements defects since the developers have already committed to the design strategy. But if you test your requirements early in the game, you can discover defects before they're cast into designs and code, consequently saving your organization potentially huge rework costs.
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Brian Lawrence, Coyote Valley Software
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What's That Supposed to Do? The Archeology of Legacy Systems In testing utopia, all software products submitted for testing have thorough and comprehensive documentation describing how every program function should work. On planet Earth, however, test engineers usually have to make do under less-than-ideal circumstances. It's not uncommon for test engineers to be asked to verify the functionality of a critical legacy system which has no documented requirements whatsoever. While there are many reasons this can happen, the result is the same: You assume the role of an archeologist sifting through the layers of clues to reconstruct the specifications. Patricia Ensworth gives you instructions and tools so you'll be ready to roll up your sleeves and dig.
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Patricia Ensworth, Moody's Investors Service
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Iterative Software Development - from Theory to Practice This paper describes how an iterative software development process has been adopted in RAFAEL, based on the Unified Software Development Process (USDP) introduced by Rational Inc. The paper identifies the core differences between iterative and waterfall software development, addresses the possible difficulties in applying the iterative
process and details the elements of an iterative software development process tailored to RAFAEL, in view of its activities, work products, reviews and other terminology
adaptations.
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Amir Tomer, RAFAEL Ltd.
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IS and IT Benchmarking: Current Status Are you having trouble making a business case for benchmarking at your organization? Mark Czarnecki delivers his benchmarking expertise in a presentation designed to help participants impact their corporate culture as well as their benchmarking abilities. He reviews the current status of information systems and technology benchmarking, and he explains current benchmarking theory. The presentation also covers generalized database sources for benchmarking.
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Mark Czarnecki, The Benchmarking Network, Inc.
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Get Real! Creating Realistic, Actionable Project Schedules The preparation of a realistic, practical project schedule is an essential management function for obtaining stakeholder commitment, setting expectations, and communicating within the team and organization what is achievable. Doing this preparation well is another challenge-one that must be conquered. Rex Black helps participants see the bigger project scheduling picture by focusing on issues such as constituent tasks, the underlying dependencies between them, and the risks attached to the completion of those tasks.
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Rex Black, Rex Black Consulting Services, Inc.
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Did Your Tests Pass or Fail? Answering with Automation Automated tests using self-verifying data (SVD) can help determine if your query-type tests have the right information or if they are showing you the expected views. In this presentation, Noel Nyman provides a brief overview of an SVD testing method followed by a demonstration of automation techniques that allow you to run random tests on SVDs with millions of records or entries. Using applications such as Microsoft Office, learn how to adapt the techniques taught in this presentation to many different types of applications using most of the common automation tools.
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Noel Nyman, Microsoft
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