Are your testing and quality assurance activities adding significant value in the eyes of your stakeholders? Do you have difficulty convincing decision-makers that they need to invest more in improving quality? Selecting metrics that stakeholders understand will get your improvement project or program past the pilot phase and reduce the risk of having it stopped in its tracks. Todd Brasel and Kent McDonald show you how to avoid getting bogged down in the minute details of test results reporting and approach quality measurement from a systems perspective. They offer practical lessons about using metrics to promote quality improvement initiatives to upper managers and executives-the people who make the real decisions about quality. Learn about common traps and problems of measurement programs and how to avoid them.

Stand in a room full of business analysts and you are bound to hear the phrase "gather and document requirements" way too often. Many of today's business analysts have an image problem, resulting from their limited-often self-imposed-role on projects. However, business analysts have the opportunity to move beyond an analyzing and documenting role to become a trusted advisor to the business. Kent McDonald describes techniques and tools you can use to become a leader in the quest for creating business value and improving organizational performance. In other words, you can transition from gathering requirements to becoming an advisor who offers solutions to business problems. Join Kent and learn to think more like a business owner, help improve decision making in your organization, and much more. Leave with a new set of goals and approaches in your toolkit to start down the path of trusted advisor status.

During the past ten years, static analysis tools have become a vital part of software development for many organizations. However, the question arises, "Can we quantify the benefits of static analysis?" William Oliver presents the results of a study performed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to do just that. They measured the cost of finding software defects using formal testing on a system without static analysis; then, they integrated a static analysis tool into the process and, over a period of time, recalculated the cost of finding software defects. Join William as he reveals the results of their study, and discusses the value and benefits of static testing with tools. Learn how commercial and open source analysis tools can perform sophisticated, interprocedural source code analysis over large code bases.

Have you heard any of these from your development staff or said them yourself? "Our software and systems are too fragile." "Technical debt is killing us." "We need more time to refactor." Having quality code is great, but we should understand why it matters and specifically what is important to your situation. Joel Tosi begins by defining and discussing some common code metrics-code complexity, coverage, object distance, afferent/efferent coupling, and cohesion. From there, Joel takes you through an application with poor code metrics and shows how this application would be difficult to enhance and extend in the future. Joel wraps up with a discussion about what metrics are applicable for specific situations such as legacy applications, prototypes, and startups. You'll come away from this class with a better understanding of code metrics and how to apply them pragmatically.