Conference Presentations

Cloud Enabled Development: Making Fast Go Faster

As software development teams seek greater efficiency and effectiveness, they often find that they are held back by old IT architecture for development and test. They wrestle with low-powered servers, difficult-to-scale static environments, and a slow IT provisioning and change processes. Today, software leaders at Calypso, Centric Group, Serena Software, and others have radically changed the way they build, test, and deploy software-almost exclusively using cloud computing to power their development processes. Some teams report benefits of 75% faster development cycles with 70% lower operating costs. Brian White describes the techniques and practices employed and success factors you can follow to achieve similar results. Brian provides specifics on which application workloads are ideal for the cloud model and how the use of cloud computing supports Agile development practices.

Sundar Raghavan, Skytap, Inc.
Web Security Testing with Ruby

To ensure the quality and safety of Web applications, security testing is a necessity. So, how do you cover all the different threats-SQL injection, cross-site scripting, buffer overflow, and others? James Knowlton explains how Ruby combined with Watir-both freely available-makes a great toolset for testing Web application security. Testing many common security vulnerabilities requires posting data to a Web server via a client, exactly what Watir does. The Ruby side of Watir, a full-function programming language, provides the tools for querying the database, checking audit logs, and other test-related processing. For example, you can use Ruby to generate random data or large datasets to throw at a Web application. James describes common security attacks and demonstrates step-by-step examples of testing these attack types with Ruby and Watir.

James Knowlton, McAfee, Inc.
Lessons Learned from 20,000 Testers on the Open Source Mozilla Project

Open source community-based software development can be extremely wild and woolly. Testing in this environment is even more so, given that it is often less structured than software design and coding activities. What are the differences between testing open source and commercial or corporate applications? What can you learn from the open source community? Take a peek into the open source testing world with Tim Riley as he describes how the Mozilla Project develops and tests the Firefox browser. Tim describes how they monitor new builds, how people all around the world engage in testing, and how anomalies quickly bubble up to the release team. Although some of the tools they use may look familiar, how the Mozilla Project applies them will give you a fresh perspective. Find out how to apply the lessons learned at Mozilla to your projects and unleash the creative power of really smart people inside and outside your organization.

Tim Riley, Mozilla
FitNesse: An Open-Source Tool for Acceptance Testing

Testing is a critical aspect of agile development methods. In the acceptance testing process, testers and customers write the automated tests before the code is developed. Then, developers run the acceptance tests to verify that the code delivers the expected functionality. FitNesse is a
widely used open source tool that helps automate the development and execution of acceptance tests. After a brief introduction about where FIT and FitNesse "fit" in the Agile development methodology, Micah Martin demonstrates the FitNesse tool and how to drive development with FitNesse tests. In a sample project he presents the tool in use and shows how you develop the tests before the code has been written. Find out what techniques you can use to create FitNesse tests and how the framework operates in a "live" development environment. Take away a list of
available resources and some tips to get started.

Micah Martin, Object Mentor
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? Based on his real-world experiences using such tools, Jeff Jewell covers the issues that you are likely to encounter as you evaluate open source testing tools. Learn where to find open source test tools, the challenges you
face in choosing these tools, and what you will need to do once you find the right tools. Find out if your organization is ready to use open source tools and how to find the right tools for you.

Jeff Jewell, ProtoTest LLC
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. With agile methods, you develop tests before the code, and the tests become the detailed requirements documentation. This paradigm shift has a profound impact on both the test team and the programming team. Learn about the test management problems that often arise in making the transition to agile development and common solutions that address these issues.

Robert Martin, Object Mentor
Why is Linux so Reliable?

In the last few years, we have become accustomed to living in a Windows-centric world, and yet software reliability in PC systems is still a long way from being anything desirable. Systems crash on a regular basis, and to many it has become a fact of life. There is, however, an upstart operating system called Linux whose software development process would at best be characterized as chaotic by formal process models. Les Hatton describes the dramatic inroads Linux has made in the PC server market. Learn why Linux is so reliable and easy to work with when its development processes appear to flaunt most of what we believe to be beneficial.

Les Hatton, Oakwood Computing, U.K.

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