Wednesday, September 24
9:00 am - 5:00 pm
T-2 Measuring and Improving Your Test Processes - By Robin Goldsmith
Testing effectiveness is determined by your testing process—the way you do things to produce your results. To improve test results, you must improve your testing process, and that requires meaningful, valid and reliable objective measurement. Defect data are the most obvious testing artifact to measure, but they must be put in context and coupled with other key factors. Not only do we tend to miss important measures, but we often overwhelm ourselves with too many measurements.
This interactive tutorial describes a minimum set of metrics that your test and QA teams need to know, ways to make those measures within appropriate contexts, and methods to analyze and report to guide improvement. You'll learn techniques for overcoming resistance when getting started and engage in practical exercises to see how to apply these techniques.
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.
Friday, September 26
8:45 am - 9:45 am
504 Load Testing With OpenSTA - By Dan Downing
OpenSTA is increasingly popular as an open-source alternative to commercial load testing tools. However, performance testers making this choice are confronted by the dual challenges of learning both tool and process, without the formal training support of commercial products.
In this class, Dan Downing demystifies the fundamentals of conducting effective load tests. He will introduce you to his 5-Steps of Load Testing: Discover, Develop, Run/Fix, Report. You'll experience OpenSTA on a real site: modeling load, developing scripts, configuring, launching and monitoring tests, analyzing, interpreting and reporting results. You'll learn workarounds for tool limitations—especially in results analysis—and how to access community resources to support your learning back at work.
10:30 am - 11:30 am
606 Software Process Improvement's Dirty Little Secret - By Robin Goldsmith
Despite investing copious time and money, organizations often fail to realize desired benefits from formal software improvement initiatives, such as Six Sigma and capability maturity model-fitting. Lessons learned analyses continually point to the same set of "usual suspects," but overlook a key implementation shortcoming that actually may account for much of the costly initiatives' underperformance. This is a major reason such process improvement initiatives often do not improve.
Learn about this seldom-recognized flaw that afflicts many high-overhead initiatives, and how organizations often lose sight of key weakest-link exceptions to their seemingly comprehensive practices for improving software processes.
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
705 Metrics: How to Track Things That Matter - By Clyneice Chaney
Metrics programs have often been a dirty word, misused and poorly implemented. This class discusses ways to provide metrics that really matter to organizations and provide visibility into their or their customers' organizations. You'll learn why metrics programs fail and then work on the keys to successful metrics programs, developing quality metrics that matter and ways to implement and maintain these metrics over time.
2:15 pm - 3:15 pm
806 Quality Throughout the Software Life Cycle - By Jeff Feldstein
Quality cannot be tested into the product; it must be emphasized, monitored and measured from the beginning of the project. Each team involved in the project—from management to marketing—plays a key role in ensuring software quality. A carefully planned application development life cycle is a key requirement to successful delivery of on-time, quality software.
This class will explore each broad phase of development—requirements, development, testing and deployment—from a software quality perspective. You'll learn the activities required at each step, the precise role of the tester or QA engineer, common mistakes and how to catch bugs earlier.
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
908 Testing Visibly - By David Kapfhammer
One of the worst things a testing organization can do is to operate in obscurity from the rest of IT. If the testing organization doesn't treat developers, business analysts and users like customers, they'll most certainly lose credibility as the "team that operates behind the curtain," and ultimately become ineffective.
Learn a strategic road map that test organizations can use to operate visibly and transparently. Learn how and why the testing team should issue a user manual that details how to engage testing services, including a specific operational workflow and work breakdown, and maintain an open door policy.