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Sarbanes and Oxley: Your New Stakeholders Determining whether legal and contractual issues apply to your development efforts isn't always simple. There may be some obvious factors: a well-regulated industry, service level agreements, and state or federal agency oversight. However, other factors may not be so obvious. The new Sarbanes-Oxley Act is largely legally untested, subjecting your company to unknown legal issues. You have an eCommerce site that stores credit card information. Your portal collects personal information. You produce proprietary software . . . and more. Covering legal, compliance, and audit throughout the QA process lifecycle, Elle Ringham discusses the right questions to ask and what to do with those answers. She provides guidelines for working with stakeholders, attorneys, and auditors. Take away audit templates, metrics to help you, and sample reports you may need to produce.
- Legal and compliance issues within QA scope
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Elle Ringham, Fidelity National Financial
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Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance: Burden or Opportunity for QA? Did they have to create more work for IT? There is no doubt that Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and similar compliance regulations have created a significant new workload for IT departments, including many QA/Test groups. Companies that have gone through initial compliance of SOX now must deal with the new challenge of its ongoing maintenance. For QA groups, SOX compliance can be an opportunity to increase their business value in the IT department by leveraging automation tools, new technologies, and improving the processes that support compliance. Rutesh Shah offers observations on how QA/Test teams can help ensure SOX compliance and optimize efforts toward complex compliance procedures. Come and review sample test reports, audit trails, and quality metrics for SOX compliance.
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Rutesh Shah, InfoStretch Corporation
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Quality Assurance and Testing in an FDA Regulated Environment How can we reduce costs associated with FDA imposed computer systems validation (CSV) guidelines and improve test coverage at the same time? Experienced in the use of automated testing tools in FDA regulated environments, Eric Toburen shares the challenges of complying with FDA validation guidelines. For many companies, manual CSV is a like a heavy boat anchor that slows projects and increases costs while adding no value other than the perception that the practice avoids an auditor's attention. Find out how automated testing and test management practices can be used to shorten the CSV lifecycle and improve test coverage. After deployment use the automated tests for regression testing to enable the deployment of bug fixes and upgrades minimizing the need for re-evaluation.
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Eric Toburen, Genilogix
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Testing Windows Registry Entries Warning: Registry keys may be hazardous to your program's health! Registry key entries in Windows applications-visible or hidden-are often neglected by testers. A registry key entry is a program feature just like any other application function and as such needs to be validated. Michael Stahl describes why registry keys should be accorded special attention during testing and proposes a strategy for mitigating risks posed by incorrect registry key entries. He suggests a test strategy, as well as coding standards for input value and type validation, default values, regeneration, and naming rules. Michael demonstrates the use of correct and incorrect registry keys in common commercial applications.
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Michael Stahl, Intel Corporation
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A Spoon Full of Sugar Helps the Test Process Improvement Go Down Test process improvement is the medicine many software organizations need to heal wounds caused by today's fast-paced software development lifecycles. But project and test managers are often like stubborn children who refuse to take their medicine even when it is for their own good. How do we get them to take it so the health of the project will improve? Just add a spoonful of sugar! Dion Johnson reveals approaches he has used to gain management buy-in for improvements and the implementation steps that have worked for him. Learn about the test process improvement models that are available and some practical ways to implement them. Take away specific improvement ideas to improve the health of your test organization.
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Dion Johnson, DiJohn IC, Inc
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The Value-added Manager: Five Pragmatic Practices What do great managers do that others don't? Great managers focus their efforts, increase their productivity, and develop their people. In this session, Esther Derby describes five pragmatic practices that managers can apply to improve both work results and worker satisfaction-give both positive and corrective feedback weekly, consciously decide what not to do, limit multitasking, develop people, and meet with staff individually and as a group every week. Esther says these ideas are not rocket science. If you apply these five practices consistently you will improve the value of your team to the organization-and keep your sanity, too.
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Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates Inc
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STARWEST 2005: Testing Outside the Bachs: A Hands-On Exploratory Testing Workshop Simply put, exploratory testing means designing your tests as you perform them. When it's done well, it's a fantastically productive and rewarding approach to testing. However, to do it well requires training, practice, and discipline. Lecture presentations about exploratory testing are a poor substitute for seeing it and doing it. So ... plan to bring your laptop to this session and test along with James Bach and Jon Bach as they demonstrate exploratory testing in a live testing workshop. Participate or just observe as exploratory testing is performed in real time with play-by-play and color commentary. Learn how to bring structure to this apparently unstructured testing method. See if you can find bugs that they do not find as you test "outside the Bachs"!
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Jon Bach, Quardev Laboratories
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Agile Testing of Embedded, Real-Time Systems Until now, Agile development and testing concepts have been aimed largely at Web sites, interactive applications, and software packages where short production cycles are a must. With care, many of these same testing practices can work on embedded systems, in which long development cycles, no user interface, and regulatory requirements are the norm. Jon Hagar examines Agile testing practices you can implement within both hardware and software product domains. Learn to define the "user" for an embedded application, determine how much documentation is enough, and identify ways to perform early testing while the hardware remains in flux. Find out how to move from a more traditional embedded testing structure to embrace Agile concepts in your test practices.
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Jon Hagar, Lockheed Martin
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Test Driven Development - It's Not Just for Unit Testing Test-driven development (TDD) is a new approach for software construction in which developers write automated unit tests before writing the code. These automated tests are always rerun after any codes changes. Proponents assert that TDD delivers software that is easier to maintain and of higher quality than using traditional development approaches. Based on experiences gained from real-world projects employing TDD, Peter Zimmerer shares his view of TDD's advantages and disadvantages and how the TDD concept can be extended to all levels of testing. Learn how to use TDD practices that support preventive testing throughout development and result in new levels of cooperation between developers and testers. Take away practical approaches and hints for introducing and practicing test-driven development in your organization.
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Peter Zimmerer, Siemens
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Let's End the Defect Report-Fix-Check-Rework-Cycle Find out how teams transitioning to Agile practices must re-think their workflows and project metrics originally designed to handle many hundreds of defect reports that occur in typical testlast development cycles. Richard Leavitt discusses how a real-world implementation of key practices like early testing and continual integration-though not without bumps and bruises-lowered the number of open defect reports by an order of magnitude. These practices also can improve how the team communicates, reduce delays, and provide more direct measures of project status, feature progress, and release readiness.
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Richard Leavitt, Rally Software Development
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