Whether you are building a brand new product or evolving an existing system, understanding the business needs of your customers is the foundation of a marketable product or valuable internal application. Few of us are experts in interviewing techniques, and few customers talk about their tasks, needs, and context in neat, concise statements about requirements. Hone your elicitation skills and learn what it takes to get beneath the surface and understand your customers: their world, how they work, and what really bothers them. With effective interviewing techniques and skills, you will get inside their heads and better understand their needs within their context.

In some contexts, the software development process can be optimized when it is thought of-and run-like a highly automated manufacturing production line. Rather than producing many identical widgets like a manufacturing plant, software organizations produce many programming changes. These changes may not be identical like manufactured widgets, but programming changes can start looking a lot like widgets when you look at the big picture. In this session, Tom Tyler describes how to bring the processes and benefits normally associated with manufacturing to software development-efficiency, reliability, and extensive automation. Manufacturing organizations invest heavily in tooling and infrastructure to automate production lines, and they reap great rewards in efficiency.

In addition to the efficiency improvements you expect from automated testing tools, you can-and should-expect them to provide valuable metrics to help manage your testing effort. By exploiting the programmability of automation tools, you can support the measurement and reporting aspects of your department. Learn how Jack Frank employs these tools with minimal effort to create test execution
status reports, coverage metrics, and other key management reports. Learn what measurement data your automation tool needs to log for later reporting. See examples of the operational reports his automation tools generate, including run/re-run/not run, pass/fail, percent complete, and percent of overall system tested. Take with you examples of senior management reports, including Jack's favorite, "My Bosses' Boss Test Status Report"-names will be changed to hide the guilty. Regardless of the

With billions of dollars changing hands every day, financial trading systems demand extremely high accuracy and reliability. So, how do you improve test process performance in the areas of time to market and efficiency and at the same time reduce failures? Over the last three years, using process and project measurement data as a guide, SIAC has focused on doing exactly that. Steve Boycan highlights the key elements of the process changes that have led to SIAC's current performance: the use of a rigorous requirements engineering process; controlled parallel and iterative work flows; changes to the level of abstraction in test documentation; emphasis on test planning, analysis, and design; causal analysis; and improving the test team's skills.