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STARWEST 2005: 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 are under-appreciated by non-technical people. Now is the time for you to take action and do more than simply "get along" in your organization. Join Robert Sabourin for a lively session on developing your interpersonal skills, including the skills of communication, persuasion, problem solving, and teamwork. Discover new ways to work harmoniously with non-technical people while efficiently and effectively getting your important testing job done.
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Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc
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Lipstick on a Pig - How Illusion Leads to Crisis in Real World Projects Change, ambiguity, and risk are key issues whether you are running a software project, managing a development team, or leading an entire organization. We learn it over and over again. It's not a matter of "if" change will happen-it's a matter of "when." When a crisis inevitably arrives, how do you respond? As Jerry Weinberg observed in The Secrets of Consulting, "It may look like a crisis, but it's only the end of an illusion." Andy Kaufman looks at key project illusions that threaten success as we lead projects and people in the realm of software development. Whether you're a project team member or a senior executive, Andy provides practical tips you can immediately apply in your organization.
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Andy Kaufman, Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development
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Agile Software Development: The Home of 31 Flavors You've heard of eXtreme Programming (XP) and perhaps Scrum. How about Crystal Clear, Adaptive Software Development, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Rational Unified Process for Agile Development, and Feature Driven Development? These are some of the many variations of Agile development methods. Join Jeff McKenna as he explores the many flavors of Agile development methods and explains the similarities and differences. Find out what aspects of Agile development can help your organization’s development team in its particular environment. If you are considering Agile development and need to decide in which direction to go, this session is for you. Although a one-hour session cannot provide all the information you will need, you can explore what is common-the philosophy, the values, the characteristics-and what is different-the methods, the coverage, the costs-about different Agile approaches.
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Jeff McKenna, Agile Action
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System Implementation Details: Understand, Test, Ignore Join John Lambert to see examples of implementation details that cause problems in GUI-based applications, APIs, and Web systems. Find out how you can develop skills that will help you test your current product and will transfer to entirely different products in the future.
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John Lambert, Microsoft Corporation
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Design Testability and Service Level Measurements into Software Design and architecture decisions made early in the project have a profound influence on the testability of an application. Although testing is a necessary and integral part of application development, architecture and design considerations rarely include the impacts of development design decisions on testability. In addition, build vs. buy, third party controls, open source vs. proprietary, and other similar questions can affect greatly the ability of an organization to carry out automated functional and performance testing-both positively and negatively. If the software or service is delivered to a separate set of end-users who then need to perform testing activities, the problems compound. Join Jay Weiser to find out about the important design and architecture decisions that will ensure more efficient and effective testability of your applications.
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Jay Weiser, WorkSoft
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Customer Focused Business Metrics throughout the SDLC Focusing on the customer throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is difficult to do. Teams often can become mired in technical problems, internal resource limitations, or other issues. Following the customer mantra of "Faster! Better! Cheaper!" Steve Wrenn offers measurement and process techniques that he has used to deliver projects on time, on budget, and, most importantly, meeting customers needs. By focusing on the development cycle from the outside in, his organization provides business-based metrics dashboards to monitor and adjust the project plan throughout the development project. Find out how their performance dashboard helps the team and the customer stay on course and drive directly to the targeted results. Discover an approach to determine what customers really want and match product development to customer expectations.
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Steve Wrenn, Liberty Mutual Insurance Information Systems
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Application Performance and Reliability Management - 24x7 Managing system performance and reliability has never been as significantx0151or as challengingx0151as it is now. These days, most organizations have multi-technology, multi-vendor, multi-tier environments. In other words, it’s a world rife with 24-hour, alwaysx0151on complexity. Add to this the need for continual changes to react to shifts in business conditions, technology advances, and mixes of demands and you have a recipe that calls for the highest level of performance and reliability possible. But getting there is next to impossible. However, new concepts emerging from research labs are delivering usable products such as flexible computing, autonomous computing, and self-tuning systems. These possibilities have revolutionary potential for performance management.
- Examine recommended suites of tools and their limitations
- Look at the major innovations and trends, such as self-tuning systems
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Ross Collard, Collard and Company
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Beyond GUI: What You Need to Know about Database Testing Today's complex software systems access heterogeneous data from a variety of back-end databases. The intricate mix of client-server and Web-enabled database applications are extremely difficult to test productively. Testing at the data access layer is the point at which your application
communicates with the database. Tests at this level are vital to improve not only your overall test strategy, but also your product's quality. Mary Sweeney explains what you need to know to test the SQL database engine, stored procedures, and data views. Find out how to design effective automated tests that exercise the complete database layer of your applications. You'll learn about the most common and vexing defects related to SQL databases and the best tools available to support your testing efforts.
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Mary Sweeney, Exceed Training
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Software Code Inspection for Defect Prevention Thousands of hours are spent testing, but most software professionals find that traditional testing simply isn't enough to ensure code quality. This presentation gives software professionals a complementary approach: software inspection. Learn how software inspection differs from traditional testing, and gain an understanding of principal inspection techniques.
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Jasper Kamperman, Reasoning
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Is Quality Negotiable? Experiences of an eXtreme Programming Tester If you want a higher quality product in an eXtreme Programming (XP) project, you must be prepared to pay a higher price. We make decisions and compromises based on quality versus cost every day. Extreme programming teams are driven to do their best work, but customers have the right to specify and pay for only the level of quality they require. This presentation explores ways to resolve these two potentially conflicting points of view.
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Lisa Crispin, BoldTech Systems
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