Conference Presentations

STARWEST 2005: Testing Dialogues - Technical Issues

Is there an important technical test issue bothering you? Or, as a test engineer, are you looking for some career advice? If so, join experienced facilitators Esther Derby and Elisabeth Hendrickson for "Testing Dialogues-Technical Issues." Practice the power of group problem solving and develop novel approaches to solving your big problem. This double-track session takes on technical issues, such as automation challenges, model-based testing, testing immature technologies, open source test tools, testing web services, and career development. You name it! Share your expertise and experiences, learn from the challenges and successes of others, and generate new topics in real-time. Discussions are structured in a framework so that participants receive a summary of their work product after the conference.

Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates Inc
It's 2005, Why Does Software Still Stink

We've now been writing software for an entire human generation. Yet software is arguably the least reliable product ever produced. People expect software to fail, and our industry has developed a well-deserved and widely accepted reputation for its inability to deliver quality products. James Whittaker explores the history of software development over the last generation to find out why. He uncovers several attempts to solve the problem and exposes their fatal flaws. James then looks forward to a world without software bugs and offers a roadmap-practical techniques that can be implemented today-for how to get there from here. Join James on this journey through the past and into the future-and be sure to bring something to scrape the bugs off your windshield.

James Whittaker, Florida Institute of Technology
Agile Software Development: The Home of 31 Flavors

You've heard of eXtreme Programming (XP) and perhaps Scrum. How about Crystal Clear, Adaptive Software Development, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Rational Unified Process for Agile Development, and Feature Driven Development? These are some of the many variations of Agile development methods. Join Jeff McKenna as he explores the many flavors of Agile development methods and explains the similarities and differences. Find out what aspects of Agile development can help your organization’s development team in its particular environment. If you are considering Agile development and need to decide in which direction to go, this session is for you. Although a one-hour session cannot provide all the information you will need, you can explore what is common-the philosophy, the values, the characteristics-and what is different-the methods, the coverage, the costs-about different Agile approaches.

Jeff McKenna, Agile Action
Rapid Bottleneck Identification for Successful Load Testing

Rapid bottleneck identification is a methodology that allows QA professionals to very quickly uncover Web application limitations and determine what impact those limitations have on the enduser experience. Starting with the premise that every application has a scalability limit, this approach sets out to quickly uncover where those limitations are and to suggest corrective action.
Learn details about the most common application scalability limits-spanning network, application server, database server, and Web server-and how to quickly uncover them by focusing first on throughput and then on concurrency. With a modular, iterative approach to load testing, you focus

Joe Fernandes, Empirix
Controlling Performance Testing in an Uncontrolled World

Think about it ... You are responsible for performance testing a system containing over 5 billion searchable documents to an active user base of 2.6 million users, and you are expected to deliver notification of sub-second changes in release response and certification of extremely high reliability and availability. Your n-tier architecture consists of numerous mainframes and large-scale UNIX
servers as well as Intel processor-based servers. The test environment architecture is distributed across large numbers of servers performing shared functions for a variety of products competing for test time and resources during aggressive release cycles. Because it is impractical and too costly to totally isolate systems at this scale, capacity and performance test engineers produce high quality

Jim Robinson, LexisNexis
A Strategic Approach - "Beta the Business"

Beta testing is an industry standard practice to obtain user feedback prior to general availability of software. Have you ever considered that the Beta release can be used to validate the software's value to customers and application users? Extending the Beta concept will result in higher customer satisfaction (and higher revenue for commercial products). Also, you can employ Beta testing to evaluate not only the software product, but the distribution (and sales) process, training, customer support, and usage within your customers' environments. Far beyond just finding defects in the product, you can focus Beta testing on how well the software is meeting your customers' needs. What does that mean to the Development team and the organization as a whole? What are the risks and challenges that we face? What are the rewards?

Pete Conway, EMC Corporation
Getting Started with Test Driven Development

Test-driven (or test first) development (TDD) is an excellent method for improving the quality of software applications. It forces the programmer to focus on ensuring that the behavior of the objects at the lowest level of the system is appropriate. It also provides a mechanism to ensure that future source code changes do not break existing behaviors. Using C++ as the example language, Robert Walsh presents an overview of test-driven development, available TDD testing frameworks, and a demonstration of a project started from scratch using TDD. You can apply these concepts to other languages, including Java and Visual Basic. Learn how to overcome the initial hurdles many developers experience when starting out with TDD.

  • An introduction to test-driven development using C++ as the example language
  • The testing frameworks available for TDD
  • Programming tasks that are difficult to implement using TDD
Robert Walsh, EnvisionWare, Inc.
Design Testability and Service Level Measurements into Software

Design and architecture decisions made early in the project have a profound influence on the testability of an application. Although testing is a necessary and integral part of application development, architecture and design considerations rarely include the impacts of development design decisions on testability. In addition, build vs. buy, third party controls, open source vs. proprietary, and other similar questions can affect greatly the ability of an organization to carry out automated functional and performance testing-both positively and negatively. If the software or service is delivered to a separate set of end-users who then need to perform testing activities, the problems compound. Join Jay Weiser to find out about the important design and architecture decisions that will ensure more efficient and effective testability of your applications.

Jay Weiser, WorkSoft
Customer Focused Business Metrics throughout the SDLC

Focusing on the customer throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is difficult to do. Teams often can become mired in technical problems, internal resource limitations, or other issues. Following the customer mantra of "Faster! Better! Cheaper!" Steve Wrenn offers measurement and process techniques that he has used to deliver projects on time, on budget, and, most importantly, meeting customers needs. By focusing on the development cycle from the outside in, his organization provides business-based metrics dashboards to monitor and adjust the project plan throughout the development project. Find out how their performance dashboard helps the team and the customer stay on course and drive directly to the targeted results. Discover an approach to determine what customers really want and match product development to customer expectations.

Steve Wrenn, Liberty Mutual Insurance Information Systems
Software Test Automation Spring 2003: Mission Made Possible: A Lightweight Test Automation Experience

Using a challenging client engagement as a case study, Rex Black shows you how he and a team of test engineers created an integrated, automated unit, component, and integration testing harness, and a lightweight process for using it. The test harness supported both static and dynamic testing of a product that ran on multiple platforms. The test process allowed system development teams spread across three continents to test their own units before checking them into the code repository, while the capture of the tests provided automated integration testing and component regression going forward. He'll also explain the tools available to build such a testing harness and why his team chose the ones they did.

  • Examine the benefits-and challenges-of implementing an integrated, automated component and integration testing process in a Java/EJB development environment
Rex Black, Rex Black Consulting Services, Inc.

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