Thursday, September 25
8:45 am - 9:45 am
Opening Keynote
Redefining the Boundaries of Boundary Testing - James Bach
Boundary testing is too often discussed, taught and practiced as an overly simplistic idea: The designer tells you a boundary, and you test one above and one below that boundary. Sound familiar? To exploratory testing pioneer James Bach, that just sounds like weak testing. Boundary testing, when approached in an exploratory way, becomes much more powerful and more worthy of a skilled tester's best efforts. Listen to Bach explain why testers need to rewrite the boundaries of traditional boundary testing to improve the outcome of this essential testing practice.
Thursday, September 25
10:00 am - 11:00 am
106 Performance Testing, Core Principles - By Scott Barber
Teams developing commercial software rarely have sufficient time, resources and skills to effectively performance-test their systems. In cases where rigorous approaches wouldn't be effective, a flexible, risk-based approach is needed. Any approach to performance testing should focus on collecting the data necessary to assist the development team in identifying, prioritizing and tuning areas of suboptimal performance and to assist stakeholders in making sound business decisions related to performance risks. This session introduces a proven heuristic approach to performance testing. It's based on the book "Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications" PerfTestGuide.2007-08-27.pdf which you can access online for free and begin applying immediately.
11:15 am - 12:15 pm
204 Designing Performance Tests Heuristically and Visually - By Scott Barber
Compared with functional testing, performance tests generally take longer to conduct, must typically be conducted one at a time and are more commonly inconclusive on their own. Additionally, it's nearly impossible to determine which performance tests will provide significant information value until the results from the previous test are analyzed.
This session is designed for the performance testers, analysts, architects and managers who most significantly contribute to performance test design. You'll learn heuristic and visual methods to design and document performance tests that are intended to deliver significant informational value while helping to ensure that performance testing remains focused on achieving business objectives, reducing project risk, and avoiding bad press.
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
302 Building a Software Testing Strategy - By Karen N. Johnson
If you've ever faced strategic planning issues for a software project, this class will help. For a strategy to be effective, you must solicit ideas and build an understanding with your project stakeholders. This class explains how to communicate your strategy with other project leads.
Learn to brainstorm, build, implement and update test strategy, including details of scope, testing types, estimates, resources, plans, milestones, risk and acceptance criteria. You'll learn how to update your strategy throughout the project and to discuss and gain input and acceptance throughout your organization. For beginning and mid-career test managers.
3:45 pm - 4:45 pm
405 Turn Your Test Team Into a High-Performance Organization - By Michael Hackett
Want a road map to quality? Everyone, all development managers, test managers and their organizations are looking for ways to improve quality. Quality improvement can come in many forms: reducing risks by delivering higher and predictable quality product; optimizing time-to-market; increasing productivity; and building a more manageable organization. Some managers look for quality improvement by attempting to implement a more standard or formal process.
This sounds good, but how do you get there? In this class, you'll learn how to evaluate your test process and strategy, create a culture for change, implement change, and use effective methods for measuring improvement.