Have you experienced those weeks when the new features being added to builds just flat out don't work? Do you strive to have a testable build throughout the full product development cycle? Are you tired of the mountain of bugs crushing you just before time to ship? Experienced test manager Tara Roth discusses how the Microsoft Office team is working to drive the level of test coverage up during the earlier phases of product development to improve build quality later in development. Tara describes two approaches, adopted by Microsoft Office, that improved efficiency and quality-Feature Crews and Big Button. Feature Crews is a tight-knit partnership of the developer, tester, and program manager who work together on a private release of new code prior to checking it in to the main build. Big Button is an approach to having the team kick off an automated suite of tests prior to checking in to the main build.

Our testing is only as good as our thinking—and all too often we are hampered by limiting ideas, poor communication, and pre-set roles and responsibilities. Based on the work of Edward de Bono, the Six Thinking Hats for software testers have helped Julian, and numerous others, work more effectively as testers and managers. The concepts are simple and easy to learn. For instance, we can use these concepts as individuals performing reviews and while testing and in groups during team meetings. Each of the six hats has a color representing a direction of thinking—the blue hat provides the overview and helps to keep us productive, the white hat helps us to collect facts, the red is a way to express intuition and feelings without having to justify them, the yellow hat seeks the best possible outcome, the black hat helps us to discover what might go wrong—not only with the software but also with our tests and our assumptions!

Over the years, Rob Sabourin has discovered testing lessons in the Looney Tunes gang, the Great Detectives, and Dr. Seuss. Now he turns his attention to the Simpsons, a primetime cartoon television show entertaining audiences since 1989. Rob believes that Matt Groening's popular characters can teach us important lessons about software testing. Homer's twisted ideas tell us about test automation--why it works and why it fails. Could your software stand up to Bart's abuse? Lisa Simpson, the brilliant but neglected middle child, provides a calming influence on projects. Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart operator, works 100 hours a week--should you? When is Montgomery Burn’s authoritarian management style effective? And can we bribe stakeholders as easily as Police Chief Wiggum takes a donut? Inside this simple cartoon are lessons on personas, context, organization, ethics, situational leadership, and motivation.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has many security challenges. To address these challenges, it is not enough to set up a secure operational infrastructure. SOA security must be implemented in all key areas of software development-architecture, design, platform, governance, requirements, development, and testing. Jimmy Xu discusses today's SOA security challenges and explains why it is important to address these challenges inside software development. He presents the latest security practices: standards compliance; review of architectural blueprints and SOA platforms; secure SDLC process; threat modeling; secure coding; and security testing. This session not only prepares you to delve into the details of SOA security methodology, process, and techniques, but also gives you the background information you need to plan and scope security assurance activities in your SOA development projects