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Key Project Planning and Testing Issues for Internationalization When preparing for internationalization of software, officially called W3C Internationalization (I18N), preparation and careful planning are the keys to high productivity during and after the initial development project. By putting in more effort up front, less effort will be required in subsequent localization activities. Also, I18N pseudo-localization testing will help you ensure that you can deliver localized versions of your product in the least amount of time. Learn about the important issues surrounding internationalization: translation verification, double character, Unicode, multi-currency, local culture concerns, native language support, and more. Find out how to perform localization testing without an in-depth knowledge of locale specific issues or native linguistic skills. Help your organization succeed in the challenging work of internationalization while your team keeps its sanity as well.
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Alym Rayani, The Symbio Group
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Building a Winning Team: Hiring, Developing, and Nurturing Your People With the changing landscape of software development, it is vital to select and develop people who will help your team excel. To do so, you must operate much the way a winning coach in a highly competitive sport selects and develops players with the right mix of talents and skills. Then, you need to organize the team so that the "players" are in the roles that will allow them to best contribute to the team's success. Learn the secrets of role-based team construction that will allow your group to deliver a consistently high level of performance. Enable your team to increase the scope of problems and challenges that they can tackle-and have fun accomplishing. Find out about the characteristics and dynamics of winning teams and winning team leadership, and take back a model for building and improving your team.
- Goals, strategies, and plans for developing a winning team
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Kevin Bodie, Pitney Bowes Inc
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Quality Interactions: Bulding Effective Working Relationships As software professionals, we all care about quality. We focus our efforts on building quality into the code and testing to assess quality and find errors before our customers do. However, there is an important element of quality that comes before all that and is critical to delivering reliable software: quality working relationships and quality interactions. Esther Derby covers pragmatic strategies for building, strengthening, and maintaining working relationships with all stakeholders-managers, customers, team members, and peers. The first step is to build a foundation of trust and respect. Then, we must focus on interests rather than positions and seek joint solutions to problems. We should use the richest communication channel available for our interactions and make a generous interpretation of others’ actions.
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Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates Inc
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Plans, Processes, and Practices for Successful Test Outsourcing There are many reasons why outsourcing IT activities requires extra attention, especially when it concerns software testing. Examples of complete failures are common, and "backsourcing" is not uncommon today. Outsourcing test activities requires a comprehensive planning roadmap from the initial idea to implementation steps and ongoing processes. Martin Pol discusses creating a service level agreement for test outsourcing, managing the transition, approaches for cultural adjustments, and ways to monitor the outsourced work. An outsourcing relationship can be compared to a marriage, from the initial flirting through matrimonial happiness. Faith, flexibility, and openness based on trust are required for both a happy marriage and a successful outsourcing relationship. The difference is that outsourcing requires arrangements for ending the relationship before the wedding.
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Martin Pol, POLTEQ IT Services BV
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STARWEST 2004: 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 their work is unappreciated by non-technical people. Now, it is 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 hidden and interpersonal skills, including communication, persuasion, problem solving, and teamwork. Find out new ways to work harmoniously with non-technical people while getting your important testing job done efficiently and effectively.
- How to use individual differences and perspectives to your best advantage
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Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.Com Inc
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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.
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Robert Martin, Object Mentor
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I've Looked at Bugs from Both Sides Now Many QA and test professionals are working more closely than ever with their development counterparts, especially those using agile approaches. In doing so, we are learning that some of the attitudes and habits we developed as independent QA groups are no longer effective, especially those that perpetuate an "us vs. them" mentality. Whatever approach your developers are using, it is worth asking, "How should we behave differently if we know our developers really want the same things we want: on time delivery of a software product that everyone loves?" After crossing over into development and back into testing, Elisabeth Hendrickson explores how testing and QA professionals can work more effectively with developers.
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Elisabeth Hendrickson, Quality Tree Software, Inc.
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Navigating the Minefield - Estimating without Complete Requirements Your team is assigned to a new project, and you've had the kickoff meeting. Now, your boss' boss sends an email to you asking for a "guesstimate" of how long and how many people-days the project will take. What do you do? Even though developers and project managers can see the futility of doing premature, fixed cost estimates prior to requirements development, the industry still demands early estimates, often before a project is even named. Based on her experiences with similar projects, Carol Dekkers offers tips and tricks that she and others have used successfully to answer these difficult questions. Find out how to provide traceability when the original estimates turn out to be as inaccurate as the unknown requirements they represent.
- Early resource and time estimates without good requirements
- Organizing and documenting early requirements statements
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Carol Dekkers, Quality Plus Technologies Inc
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When Saying Yes Doesn't Help: Software Development as Codependent Behavior Vague requirements, undocumented design, poor code, and impossible schedules-these are the typical complaints of many developers. Whose fault is it? Of course, it is "their" fault-senior management, customers, users, etc. But, could we be part of the problem? Codependent behavior is defined as "a way of getting needs met that doesn't get needs met. We do all the wrong things for all the right reasons." When we agree to develop systems without understanding user needs, we teach others that participation in the project is not important. When we agree to absurd schedules, we teach others that our legitimate needs do not matter. In this compelling session, learn what codependency is, recognize codependent behavior in yourself and others, evaluate the negative effects of codependent behavior, and ways to respond more appropriately to unreasonable demands.
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Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
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Obtaining Management Buy-In and Support for Your Test Automation Efforts The success of your test automation efforts often depends not only on you and your team, but on your management as well. The number one complaint from test automation teams is that they don't have management support for their test efforts. But what can you do to get through to them? Communicating with management on their terms will go a long way towards making your case. By putting yourself in their frame of mind, you can speak on their terms, thereby increasing the likelihood your message will be understood. This session illustrates how you can objectively show facts and data that support your business case. The instructor also covers business tools and metrics.
- Find out what works and what doesn't when it comes to "getting through" to management
- Learn how to make a business case and use metrics like ROI to show results
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Eric Patel, RapidSQA
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