Conference Presentations

Driving Down Requirements Defects: A Tester’s Dream Come True

The industry knows that a majority of software defects have their root cause in poor requirements. So how can testers help improve requirements? Richard Bender asserts that requirements quality significantly improves when testers systematically validate the requirements as they are developed.

Richard Bender, BenderRBT
STARCANADA 2013 Keynote: Testing Lessons from Hockey (The World’s Greatest Sport)
Video

Over the years, Rob Sabourin has drawn important testing lessons from diverse sources including the great detectives, the Simpsons, Hollywood movies, comic book superheroes, and the hospital delivery room. Now Rob scores big with breakaway testing ideas from hockey, Canada’s national sport.

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Simplicity and Precision: Test Planning in Agile Projects

Test planning is often thought unnecessary in an agile project. However, if our mindset is on "planning" rather than "plans," we see that test-planning activities happen throughout the project, taking advantage of levels of precision, i.e., what is absolutely necessary at each level.

Janet Gregory's picture Janet Gregory
The Next Level of Agile: DevOps and Continuous Delivery
Slideshow

Mature agile organizations are introducing continuous delivery as a crucial step to realize their goal of delivering business value rapidly. Andrew Phillips highlights implementation issues about how agile development can fit with enterprise release management policies and governance needs. Andrew outlines proven practices and selection criteria for tools to help you address these issues. Then, he presents a DevOps case study demonstrating the continuous delivery process for building, packaging, deploying, and testing a complex application. Find out about deployment support for server and resource configurations, application binaries, database upgrades and rollbacks, messaging, and enterprise service buses. With the right tools and processes you can develop an open, extensible framework that supports additional services and platforms.

Andrew Phillips, XebiaLabs Inc.
The Right Question for the Right Requirements
Slideshow

How often have you gone down the road of developing software almost to completion only to discover new requirements that require significant design and coding changes at the last minute? Requirements analysis is not just writing down what customers say they want. It's about digging down and discovering what they need. Without real analysis, our requirements often end up as poorly defined lists, anemic mock-ups, and incomplete or inconsistent models. Jack Jones spotlights one simple technique to discover these needs: Ask "why?" When the customer states a requirement, ask "why?" to delve down a level to discover their real problem, need, or opportunity. You may find you need to repeat "why?" a number of times. Join Jack to explore the very real consequences of not comprehending customer needs early in the process, and practice better communications techniques to avoid unnecessary requirements and scope changes.

Jack Jones, KMI
Better Software Conference East 2012: Data Collection and Analysis for Better Requirements
Slideshow

According to the Standish group, 64 percent of features in systems are rarely-or never-used. How does this happen? Today, the work of eliciting the customers' true needs, which remains elusive, can be enhanced using data-driven requirements techniques. Brandon Carlson introduces data collection approaches and analysis techniques you can employ on your projects right away. Find out how to instrument existing applications and develop new requirements based on operational profiles of the current system. Learn to use A/B testing-a technique for trying out and analyzing alternative implementations-on your current system to determine which new features will deliver the most business value. With these tools at hand, you can help users and business stakeholders decide the best approaches and best new features to meet their real needs. Now is the time to take the guesswork out of requirements and get "Just the facts, Ma'am."

Brandon Carlson, Lean TECHniques, Inc.
Collaborative Web-based Testing for Product and Software Development
Video

How to establish instantaneous traceability with Requirements and Development Artifacts. How to automatically process and identify unit test methods and promote as "First Class Citizens". How to perform any test. Test any product. Test on any device. Anywhere.

David Merrill, Polarion
STAREAST 2012 Keynote: What Managers Think They Know about Test Automation—But Don’t
Video

Managers play a critical role in the success or failure of test automation. Although most testers and some test managers have a realistic view of what automation can and cannot do, many senior managers have firm ideas about automation that are misguided—or downright wrong.

Dorothy Graham, Independent Test Consultant
Why Do Requirements Matter?

A series of dining mishaps leads Lee to reflect on why mistakes happen in spite of well-defined requirements.

Lee Copeland's picture Lee Copeland
working together Harvesting Stakeholder Perspectives to Organize Your Backlog

When Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiener facilitated a game called The Backlog Is in the Eye of the Beholder for the Boston chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis, both the players and the facilitators learned some important lessons in organizing a project requirements backlog. In this article, they describe the game and what it revealed, including the value of truly knowing your stakeholders.

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