Conference Presentations

Introduction to the Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI®)

Many organizations have achieved success in using the SEI Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI®) as a framework for their process improvement program. Steven Lett describes the structure and contents of the CMMI®, including the continuous and staged versions of the model. He discusses each of the five maturity levels and their process areas, the specific and generic practices that exist within each process area, and the typical process documentation and work products required for each. Learn an effective approach that companies take in driving change across their software engineering organizations. Find out how the model is meant to be interpreted and take back examples of the successes that companies have experienced in using both CMMI® and the earlier Capability Maturity Model (CMM®). Capability Maturity Model® and CMMI® are registered trademarks of Carnegie Mellon University.

Steven Lett, The David Consulting Group
Don't Settle for Better Software - Make Truly Great Software

Too many teams create very decent products that, for whatever reason, fail to rise above the crowd and truly capture the popular imagination. They are surprised when their products are mostly ignored by the marketplace, which seems to be captivated by some other shiny geegaw that's functionally inferior and more expensive. In many product categories, from software to consumer electronics, the product with the most market share is often more expensive and less functional than the number two product. Joel Spolsky will explore why this happens and suggest some ways to design a "blue chip" product that people will love. After you get great software and products using the usual repertoire of debugging, usability testing, etc., you have to go still further and think about beauty, user happiness, and emotional impact. Let Joel help you figure out what makes truly great software-great.

Joel Spolsky, Fog Creek Software
Agile Productivity Metrics

Enough of the stories ... Where is the quantitative proof that Agile methods like Extreme Programming (XP) deliver higher productivity and quality? Such data has been missing for years, perhaps because agile practitioners and metrics experts have never fully cooperated to crack this difficult problem. Whatever the reason, the wait is now over. Metrics expert Michael Mah will discuss how he successfully applied productivity benchmarking techniques on numerous real-world XP projects and how a company's development approach was transformed using agile methods. He'll give an overview of the projects, explain an approach to gathering "Agile Productivity Metrics," review how the data was interpreted, and show what was revealed in the time-to-market and quality numbers. Michael concludes with a glimpse of the kind of agile management and measurement that is possible-when you collect the right information.

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Retrospectives: Five Years Beyond the Book

Project

Norm Kerth, Elite Systems
There's Always Time for Pragmatic Project Planning

"Plan your work. Work your plan." Or, "Plan? Plan? We don't need no stinkin' plan." Which is the best approach for your software project? According to Robert Galen, neither is the right answer. Because software projects are expensive and challenging, you need a pragmatic project plan-one that is concise, targeted, useful, used, and adaptive. Beginning with a chartering process that leads to a high level project strategy, stakeholders determine the critical success factors and where to focus their planning activities. Robert describes the use of "Sticky Note Planning" workshops to develop and, more importantly, to maintain pragmatic plans as living documents. Learn from Robert what to monitor in your project, what milestones to set, and what the important drivers should be for adjusting the plan. Make planning one of the top contributors to the success of your project.

Robert Galen, RGCG, LLC
There's Always Time for Pragmatic Project Planning

"Plan your work. Work your plan." Or, "Plan? Plan? We don't need no stinkin' plan." Which is the best approach for your software project? According to Robert Galen, neither is the right answer. Because software projects are expensive and challenging, you need a pragmatic project plan-one that is concise, targeted, useful, used, and adaptive. Beginning with a chartering process that leads to a high level project strategy, stakeholders determine the critical success factors and where to focus their planning activities. Robert describes the use of "Sticky Note Planning" workshops to develop and, more importantly, to maintain pragmatic plans as living documents. Learn from Robert what to monitor in your project, what milestones to set, and what the important drivers should be for adjusting the plan. Make planning one of the top contributors to the success of your project.

Robert Galen, RGCG, LLC
Translating Business Risks into a Risk-Based Test Plan

We all know that testing should be based on business risks. In practice, test managers often go from those risks to test coverage in an ad-hoc, intuitive way. Instead, by taking a step-by-step approach, you can improve coverage and better prioritize your tests. After translating business risks into product risks and establishing the required test coverage, you select the appropriate techniques and estimate test effort. Ruud Teunissen explains that the right test design technique is based on the required coverage, type of functionality, test level, quality characteristics to be tested, available documentation, available resources, and resource skill sets. This risk-based test planning approach enables the test manager to report progress and defects found in terms of the business risks so that stakeholders can make informed decisions about releasing the software into production.

Ruud Teunissen, POLTEQ IT Services BV
STAREAST 2006: Session-Based Exploratory Testing: A Large Project Adventure

You know the story: Marketing wants more features, faster release cycles, and release dates that do not slip. Customers want new functions and software that does not break. Testers and developers want to release high quality software with limited resources. Management wants good information to make ship don't ship decisions. What if, facing all of these wants, you could reduce testing time by up to 50% and release better code as evidenced by fewer defects with lower severity after release? George Bliss shows you how a switch from traditional script-based testing to session-based exploratory testing-along with agile development practices and more automation-achieved those results. With session-based exploratory testing, they delivered real-time status updates to management and helped to make the quality of software everyone’s business.

George Bliss, Captaris
Managing Successful Outsourcing Projects

Global teams are increasingly becoming a reality with advancement in networking and internet technologies. You may have part of your team on west coast, east coast, in Europe or Asia. Although global teams seem to be a great way to bring diverse talent and to improve time-to-market, many projects actually fail to deliver on promises. An exception is the MSN Messenger team. After first setting reasonable goals and roadmaps for each team(s) and selecting projects that were amenable to remote work then hired the right talent or vendor resources that could support long-term project requirements. Samir Shah shares the techniques, especially those related to communications, that they employ at each stage of the effort to help them succeed. Samir describes the data they capture and the set of metrics they use to keep them on track. Find out what it takes to scale your team to be a successful global team.

Samir Shah, Microsoft Corporation
STAREAST 2006: All I Need to Know about Testing I Learned from Dr. Seuss

Through the stories and parables of Theodor Geisel, we can learn simple, yet remarkably powerful approaches for solving testing problems. In a tour of common issues we encounter in testing-test planning, staff training, communications, test case design, test execution, status reporting, and more, Robert Sabourin explains how you can apply lessons from the great books of Dr. Seuss to testing. Green Eggs and Ham teaches us combinations; Go, Dog, Go teaches us the value of persistence; Because a Little Bug Went Kachoo teaches us about side effects, chaos, and risk management. Others such as Hop on Pop, Marvin K Mooney, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut, and Inside Outside UpSide Down all have important lessons about how to get things done on software projects. Learn some simple truths and take away some heuristic testing aids to become a more productive and effective tester.

  • Important heuristics to better test planning
Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc

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