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Identify and Maximize Business Value in Development Organizations often invest great sums of money and talent in software projects-often to no good end. A key factor is that many software managers and project teams have, at best, a cursory understanding of expected benefits and little or no quantifiable information about how to evaluate project outcomes-other than cost and end-date targets. Join Paul Robinson to explore a proven software project benefits lifecycle model, including how to: enhance business cases by creating quantitative and qualitative benefit statements; generate business-friendly project success goals and metrics; and track and report the realization of benefits throughout the project lifecycle. Learn how to gain and maintain executive management and team involvement while creating your project business cases, setting business value goals, and monitoring progress.
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Paul Robinson, The College Board
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What Your QA Program Is Missing Many software development organizations have a Quality Assurance (QA) component. Often, QA is just an impressive name for "we do some testing before rolling out our product." True QA encompasses an integrated process that guides software development from inception to delivery using approaches such as CMMI®, Six Sigma, and ISO. The software testing that occurs near the end of a software development process is a separate, standalone activity that assesses "fitness for use" before delivery. Dawn Haynes explains the differences between quality measures and software requirements with an interactive exercise. She discusses ways for you to evaluate and measure progress toward quality goals during development and explores ways to build management support and develop a skilled QA team. So, if you're not implementing a truly formal QA program, come see what you are missing.
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Dawn Haynes, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
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Table-Driven Requirements with the FIT Testing Tool Eliciting and articulating customer requirements-clearly and precisely-is difficult to say the least. Inaccuracies often creep in when translating requirements from business ideas into software models. Working with many clients, Alan Shalloway found that creating a large number of tables with examples-however time consuming the tables are to create-adds to the clarity and precision of requirements. He found, too, that if you can use the same example table as tests, then the time is well spent. Alan presents table-driven requirements as an approach to defining both functional and test specifications. Examine business rules, user interface flows, user-observable states, and other forms of useful tables. Learn how to employ the Framework for Integrated Testing (FIT) to turn table-driven requirements into table-driven tests.
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Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
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Transitioning Your Software Process to Agile Agile software development presents an appealing array of possibilities for building better software-customer focused development, high team communication, frequent releases of production-ready software, and early lifecycle testing. Unfortunately, many organizations who have attempted to develop software using agile methods have not been very successful at transitioning to an agile process. Often, the organization attempts to change too much of its software process too quickly. Jeffery Payne describes an approach to incrementally improve the agility of your organization's software process while continuing to achieve your software delivery goals. Jeffery describes high value agile management and agile development methods-including daily stand-ups, continuous integration, pair programming, and test-driven development-and then prioritizes these approaches by their impact on the organization.
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Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
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Weathering the Storm: Navigating Through Resource Constrained Waters An economic storm is upon us, with rough waters, dark skies, and hard choices on the horizon. Have you taken action to prepare your projects for challenges when "business as usual" seems a likely recipe for disaster? Payson Hall identifies proactive steps for software project managers and sponsoring executives to prepare their projects and portfolios for increasingly resource constrained times. Learn what status information a project manager should have immediately available, what criteria portfolio managers can use to pare down their fleet of projects, how they can work together to prepare for further turbulence, and what you can do to sustain the productivity of your crew. Find out how risk profiles are likely to change, what new risks may emerge, and what you can do to stay afloat through it all.
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Payson Hall, Catalysis Group Inc
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The Dirty Little Secret of Business Regardless of your role in the software lifecycle, there are challenges and roadblocks that stand in your way. How can you deal with difficult people who are obstacles to your ability to deliver? How can you influence someone to act on your priorities even when you don't have the organizational authority? How can you find time to network when you're overwhelmed with day-to-day work? Andy Kaufman shares "The Dirty Little Secret of Business." You won't learn this secret in school, yet it is critical to your success. The secret is simple-it's all about relationships. Andy describes the key relationships you must develop to advance your projects and career. Discover how understanding different personality types will improve your ability to build rapport, influence people, and control situations. Learn what networking is-and isn't-and how to increase the effectiveness of your networks with less effort.
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Andy Kaufman, Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development
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Some Not-So-Crazy Ways to Do More with Less When the world goes sideways, most people freeze, waiting for some clear signal of what to do. That's a really bad idea! Tim Lister suggests that within today's craziness are great opportunities to make big changes in everything-how you are organized, what you work on, how you set priorities, the whole shebang. Now is the best time to change the less than wonderful part of your organization’s culture. For instance, everyone has heard of Faster, Cheaper, Better. How about Slower, Cheaper, Better? Go on a project diet and limit the number of projects that can run concurrently; no new project can start until one actually finishes. And how about assigning an experienced developer to review the specification as it is being written? Many organizations have a sign-off when the specification is done. By then, it is way too late. Also, its time for every team to have it's own personal assistant.
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Tim Lister, The Atlantic Systems Guild Inc
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STAREAST 2009: What Price Truth? When a Tester is Asked to Lie As testers, our job is to report the current state of software quality on our projects. But in the high-stakes, high-risk business of software development, some may pressure us to distort the message. When projects are late or quality is poor, software managers' reputations-even their jobs-may be on the line. Our testing progress report could be the biggest obstacle to a "green light" project status report or an on-time delivery. When testers see project disconnects-rosy status reports and repeatedly late delivery; managers shutting down open discussions of project risks; managers trying to close down testing that is exposing major bugs; or suggestions to "get creative" with the metrics-we need to beware. Fiona Charles discusses the reasons testers must refuse to compromise reality, how to secure detailed records of project progress and status, and the possibility of having to "blow the whistle"-regardless of the consequences.
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Fiona Charles
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STAREAST 2009: Improving the Skills of Software Testers Many test training courses include the topic of "soft skills for testers," specifically their attitudes and social behaviors. Testers are told that to be effective they need a negative mindset and a negative approach. Krishna Iyer and Mukesh Mulchandani challenge this belief. Having trained more than 5,000 testers in testing skills and more than 500 testers in essential thinking skills, Krishna and Mukesh demonstrate that testers must be creative rather than critical, positive rather than destructive, and empathetic rather than negative. Join them as they lead exercises in creative thinking, critical writing, and collaborative speaking to improve your eye for detail, nose for sniffing out defects, and ear for bias. Eliminate the old beliefs that hinder testers and find out how to deconstruct them and inculcate new, more powerful ones into your test organization.
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Krishna Iyer, ZenTEST Labs
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STAREAST 2009: Five Things Every Tester Must Do Are you a frustrated tester or test manager? Are you questioning whether or not a career in testing is for you? Do you wonder why others in your organization seem unenthusiastic about quality? If the answer is "yes" to any of these questions, this session is for you. Julie Gardiner explores five directives to help testers make a positive impact within their organization and increase professionalism in testing. Remember quality-it's not just effort, it's effort and quality; it’s date and quality; it's functionality and quality. Learn to enjoy testing and have fun-the closest job to yours is blowing up things in the movies. Relish your testing challenges-it;s you against the software and sometimes, it seems, the world. Choose your battles-take a stand on issues that are vital and let the small things go. And most importantly, remember that the only real power we have springs from our integrity-don't sell that at any price.
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Julie Gardiner, Grove Consultants
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