Just as a spider spins a web to capture her prey, testers weave an intricate net of ambiguity and conflict to catch program bugs. Find out how to use complex tests to expose program weaknesses and errors.

In a test and verification organization, it can be easy to fall into predictable ruts and miss finding important defects. Use the creativity of your test team, developers, users, and managers to find those hidden bugs before the software goes into production. Ted Rivera details how his organization conceived of, administers, evaluates, and benefits from periodic malicious test days. Learn ways to make your days of planned chaos productive, valuable, and, yes, even fun. Give both testers and non-testers an opportunity to find inventive ways to break your products and you'll get some surprising results.

• The danger of too much predictability and the results you can expect from a malicious test day
• Create and administer your own malicious test day
• Maximize the benefits of malicious test days

The phrase "test plan" means different things to different people. There is even more disagreement about what makes one test plan better than another one. Bernie Berger makes the case for using multi-dimensional measurements to evaluate the goodness of test plans. Walk away with a practical technique to systematically evaluate any complex structure such as a test plan. Learn how to qualitatively measure multiple dimensions of test planning and gain a context-neutral framework for ranking each dimension. You'll also find out why measurement of staff technical performance is often worse than no measurement at all and how to use this technique as an alternative approach to traditional practices. [This presentation is based on work at Software Test Managers Roundtable (STMR) #8 held in conjunction with the STAR conference.]

• Qualitatively evaluate complex structures, like test plans
• Ten dimensions of test planning

How good is your testing? Can you demonstrate the detrimental effect on testing if not enough time is allowed? Dorothy Graham discusses a simple measure that has proved very useful in a number of organizations-Defect Detection Percentage or DDP. Learn what DDP is, how to calculate it, and how to use it in your organization to communicate the effectiveness of your testing. From case studies of organizations that are using DPP, you'll find out the problems you may encounter and ways to overcome them.

• Learn what DDP is and how to calculate it using defect data you may already have
• How best to start measuring and using DDP
• Calculate DDP for different stages of testing (integration, system, user acceptance)