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What the US Marine Corp Taught Me About Test Management When we think of teams and teamwork, who epitomizes the team concept more than the US Marine Corps? From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli or to the hallways of your company, success requires teamwork. Are you building, overhauling, or just wanting to improve your test team? Looking for new ideas and approaches to tackle testing obstacles? A crucial part of success in testing is the motivation and effectiveness of the test team. The team of the best testers in the world fails if they are not working together to accomplish their mission. Former USMC Sergeant Sean Buck shares techniques for building motivated and successful teams based on time-tested USMC principles. Analyze what successful teams do right-and apply it to your test teams.
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Sean Buck, The Capital Group Companies Inc
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Aligning Testing Strategies wwith Corporate Goals When developing a testing strategy, test managers normally review the business case for the project, study the new requirements, and consider what they know about the system under test. By also including a review of your organization's mission, values, and corporate goals, you will immediately stand out among your peers and at the same time improve the business value of testing. Stewart Noakes has worked with test managers at both large and small companies to help them align test strategies with corporate goals. Using case examples, Stewart describes how they used this process to guide their testing approach and demonstrates how this approach significantly increases the tangible and intangible ROI on testing. Learn to use your company's corporate goals to help you make the right decisions about what to test, how much to test, and, importantly, when to stop testing.
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Stewart Noakes, Transition Consulting Ltd
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Peanuts and Crackerjacks: What Baseball Taught Me about Metrics Because people can easily relate to a familiar paradigm, analogies are an excellent way to communicate complex data. Rob Sabourin uses baseball as an analogy to set up a series of status reports to manage test projects, share results with stakeholders, and measure test effectiveness. For
test status, different audiences-test engineers, test leads and managers, development managers, customers, and senior management-need different information, different levels of detail, and different ways of looking at data. So, what "stats" would you put on the back of Testing Bubble Gum
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Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc
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Manage Your Testing with SCRUM Used successfully in hundreds of agile and iterative development projects, SCRUM is a software project management approach that employs fixed cycle time "sprints" and daily "scrums." SCRUM emphasizes self-directing teams and the role of a "Scrum Master" to remove obstacles to the
team’s success. Because testing often succumbs to delivery pressures and becomes chaotic, especially during the endgame of projects, SCRUM can be an extremely helpful management framework for test groups. By implementing SCRUM practices, you increase the focus of test efforts on the most important actions, empower the test team, improve morale, and heighten your influence on the overall success of the project. Learn how Robert Galen instituted SCRUM in
a test department, overlaying this new framework on existing processes with a surprisingly
positive impact on both the people and the product.
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Robert Galen, Thomson/Dialog
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Legal Compliance in Quality Assurance In many industries, we must comply with state or federal statutes, government regulations, and other legal standards. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) has brought a new awareness to these issues within testing. So, how do you incorporate legal compliance into your QA and test efforts, and how do you get the information you need to do the job well? Elle Ringham, who deals with these important issues every day at Fidelity National Financial, shares her knowledge and experiences. First, she helps you understand the types of legal compliance bodies that can affect applications and offers research methods for industry specific areas of legal compliance, including internal sources, websites, and search strategies. Then, she discusses the artifacts and metrics needed to be maintained
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Elle Ringham, Fidelity National Financial
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STAREAST 2005: Testing Dialogues - Management Issues As a test manager, are you struggling at work with a BIG test management issue or a personnel issue? If so, this session is for you. "Testing Dialogues-Management Issues" is a unique platform for you to share with and learn from test managers who have come to STAREAST from around the world. Facilitated by Esther Derby and Robert Sabourin, this double-track session takes on management issues-career paths for test managers, hiring, firing, executive buy-in, organization structures, and process improvement. You name it! Share your expertise and experiences, learn from others' challenges and successes, and generate new topics in real-time. Discussions are structured in a framework so that the participants will receive a summary of their work product after the conference.
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Facilitated by Esther Derby and Robert Sabourin
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Structured Testing within the Rational Unified Process Many organizations have adopted, or are in the process of adopting, the Unified Process (UP) and, in particular, the Rational Unified Process (RUP). The test process defined within UP/RUP differs from more traditional, structured testing processes such as TMap (Test Management Approach) in Europe and STEP™ (Systematic Test and Evaluation Process) in the US. Tim Koomen, who has operated within these and other development lifecycle and test processes,
describes testing as defined in UP/RUP, maps the processes to those in TMap, and combines them into a "best of both worlds" approach. Learn about the UP/RUP defined practices such as the risk based test strategy, testability, test design, the role of the tester, independent testing,
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Tim Koomen, Sogeti - Netherlands
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From Waterfall to Unified Process: A QA Department View When Chemical Abstracts Service adopted the Unified Process (UP) for software development at the same time it changed to J2EE technology, the QA Department had to find its way into this new environment. The problem? No one seemed to know how QA should function in the UP world. After much soul searching, a new role for QA has emerged-one of information integrator. QA has learned to produce its own view of the project information, from vision documents and architecture assumptions to use cases and user interface specifications. Michael Buening shares examples of the concise, flexible, and functional test plans they devised to embrace the iterative nature of UP, balance the fuzzy nature of new products, and avoid throw-away work. Find out how the focus on new test plans has armed QA with a proactive tool to stay relevant in uncertain times.
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Michael Buening, Chemical Abstracts Services
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TPI Test Process Improvement Model Facts and Figures Since the publication of the test process improvement (TPI®) model in the 1990s, many organizations have used it to help establish and improve their test processes. By doing so, they have tested the hypothesis that improving test processes results in better insight into system
quality and a more repeatable and efficient test process. Over the past five years, Ruud Teunissen and his consultant colleagues have gathered many facts and figures about the results of test process improvement initiatives. Learn the details of what other companies have achieved from test process improvement using the model, including examples of a 50 percent reduction of live incidents caused by inaccurate testing and a 40 percent reduction of long-term testing costs. Build a case for process improvement, discover what the TPI® model can do for you, and find out how to manage expectations should you embrace the model.
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Ruud Teunissen, POLTEQ IT Services BV
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Test Improvement for Highly Reliable NYSE Trading Systems With billions of dollars changing hands every day, financial trading systems demand extremely high accuracy and reliability. So, how do you improve test process performance in the areas of time to market and efficiency and at the same time reduce failures? Over the last three years, using process and project measurement data as a guide, SIAC has focused on doing exactly that. Steve Boycan highlights the key elements of the process changes that have led to SIAC's current performance: the use of a rigorous requirements engineering process; controlled parallel and iterative work flows; changes to the level of abstraction in test documentation; emphasis on test planning, analysis, and design; causal analysis; and improving the test team's skills.
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Steve Boycan, SIAC
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