Friday, October 23 - 8:45am
President's Ballroom "SpeedGeeking"
Hosted by Matt Heusser
Listen to some of the best software testers on the planet answer one simple question: If you had just five minutes to teach, motivate, or inspire the audience about software testing, what would you say? SpeedGeeking is the fast, fun, and easy way to gain insight from our conference faculty on the last day of STPCon. You'll rotate between our speakers who will share their best ideas in just a few moments. With no room for fluff, "Agenda" slides, or opening jokes, Speed Geeking is the ultimate big idea, lightbulb moment experience. Testing expert and Software Test & Performance magazine contributing editor MATT HEUSSER will host this lively session.
Friday, October 23, 10:00 - 11:00 am
Resource Monitoring: Bellwether Metrics for Diagnosing Performance Bottlenecks
Dan Downing
The ultimate goal of performance testing is identifying and fixing performance bottlenecks. While a large percentage of bottlenecks are ultimately traced to the application code, they also occur in servers, system software, and network components. Critical to diagnosing their root cause is identifying and monitoring a set of "bellwether metrics." In this class, you'll take away concrete learnings you can apply on your next load test. You'll be energized by Dan's dynamic style, and you'll glean gems of insight distilled from presentations on this subject at the Spring WOPR12 Conference. Dan Downing is VP and general manager of Testing Services at Mentora. He's a subject matter expert in load testing and created the Five Steps of Load Testing methodology.
Link to presentation
Friday, October 23, 11:15am - 12:15 pm
CMMI: Level 0 to Level 4 in Less Than Three Years
Jan Fish
Keep it simple. That's the philosophy of software testers at Phillips Home Monitoring/Lifeline, which develops devices and systems for emergency health care communications. Learn about the templates, approaches, checklists, metrics, QA estimation models and other supporting documents that, once implemented and standardized, helped Phillips elevate its testing organization to CMMI Level 4 in less than three years. Jan Fish is a manager of test and process improvement at Philips Lifeline. She has nearly 35 years of experience in test, software systems, process improvement and change management in financial and software organizations of all sizes.
Link to presentation
Friday, October 23 - 1:00pm
President's Ballroom "Testing Outside the Bachs"
James and Jonathan Bach
James and Jonathan Bach will demonstrate how to conduct exploratory software testing in this interactive general session. One of the Bachs will test a product for 20 minutes and record the process. The other will test the same product for 20 minutes in front of the audience, while his brother narrates the process. (Bring your laptop and join along!) We'll then compare what each found, and compare it with what the audience found. This session will demonstrate how exploratory testing can be a disciplined and manageable process. JAMES BACH is a pioneer in the discipline of exploratory software testing and a founding member of the Context-Driven School of Testing. He's a co-author of Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach and the author of How I Learn Stuff: Secrets of A Buccaneer-Scholar. JON BACH has been testing software and managing testers for 14 years and is most famous for inventing a way to manage and measure exploratory testing in a method known as session-based test management.
Friday, October 23, 2:30 - 3:30 pm
Performance Testing, Don't Overlook the Easy Stuff
Scott Barber
It's a common belief that expensive or complicated tools are required to test performance, but many performance issues can be uncovered with the tools and knowledge your team has access to right now. In fact, much of the performance-related information that stakeholders need to make good decisions and development teams need to dramatically improve system performance is easily obtainable without expensive tools or extensive training. Scott Barber will discuss, demonstrate, and ask you to participate in a variety of quick and easy 30-second performance tests that most teams could start using today. Scott Barber is the CTO of PerfTestPlus, executive director of the AST, co-founder of WOPR, and co-author of Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications.
Link to presentation
Link to a couple cool free tools
Free Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis
WebSitePulse
Friday, October 23, 3:45 - 4:45 pm
Testing the User−centric Web: Patterns, Practices, Paradigms
Matt Heusser
If your organization is competing on the Web, you've probably had to face Web 2.0 challenges: user-created content can be complex, time sensitive, and hard to predict before release. The number of possible configurations seems endless, and yet AJAX and JavaScript can be hard to drive with existing automation tools. Matt Heusser will explore the system issues and discuss his experiences with testing Web 2.0 applications. He will cover a basic strategy for testing Web 2.0 applications, along with what to do tomorrow and what you might want to avoid. Matthew Heusser is a member of the technical staff at Socialtext and has experience in developing, testing, and managing software projects. He is also a contributing editor for Software Test and Performance magazine and an
adjunct instructor of Information Systems at Calvin College.