deployment

Conference Presentations

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
Model Driven Architecture (MDA) - What's in it for Developers and Testers?

According to the Object Management Group (OMG), the benefits of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) are significant to businesses and developers alike: reduced overall product life costs, faster development, better application quality, rapid deployment of new technology, and a higher ROI on new technology. In short, the hype is that MDA enables system integration strategies that are better, faster, and cheaper. However, the MDA approach represents a fundamental change in the way software is developed, and it revolutionizes how you allocate test resources and how you create system tests. Timothy Korson outlines the MDA process and then suggests ways to change quality assurance activities to mesh with the MDA development style. Take away a realistic view of the current state of MDA practices compared to the MDA promise and vision, offered by the OMG.

Timothy Korson, QualSys Solutions
Test Driven Development (TDD) for Secure Applications

Test Driven Development (TDD) has emerged as a successful productivity technique for development teams. As a unit testing methodology, TDD prescribes a simple three-step process of (1) develop test, (2) write code, and (3) re-factor the code. In a question-and-answer tag-team

James Whittaker, Florida Institute of Technology
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
TPI Test Process Improvement Model Facts and Figures

Since the publication of the test process improvement (TPI®) model in the 1990s, many organizations have used it to help establish and improve their test processes. By doing so, they have tested the hypothesis that improving test processes results in better insight into system
quality and a more repeatable and efficient test process. Over the past five years, Ruud Teunissen and his consultant colleagues have gathered many facts and figures about the results of test process improvement initiatives. Learn the details of what other companies have achieved from test process improvement using the model, including examples of a 50 percent reduction of live incidents caused by inaccurate testing and a 40 percent reduction of long-term testing costs. Build a case for process improvement, discover what the TPI® model can do for you, and find out how to manage expectations should you embrace the model.

Ruud Teunissen, POLTEQ IT Services BV
Making Test Data More Agile

Flexible, reusable, and restorable test data for both the unit and system level is an absolute necessity for testers working on Agile development projects. For teams following a more traditional development process, Agile approaches for handling test data can enhance testing efforts as well. Discussing Agile testing approaches, such the ObjectMother pattern, Peter Schuh explains how testers design tests and test frameworks to survive the ever-changing data structures found in Agile projects. Learn how an Agile process allows testers to get much more mileage out of test data sets during and after the initial development project. Leave with a set of practices and techniques to apply directly to Agile development projects or modify for their current development environment.

  • The many dimensions of application test data
  • Produce and maintain better tests and test data with Agile approaches
Peter Schuh, Peter Schuh
It's Too Darn Big: Test Techniques for Gigantic Systems

Structuring test designs and prioritizing your test effort for large and complex software systems are daunting tasks, ones that have beaten many, very good test engineers. If you add concurrency issues and a distributed system architecture to the mix, some would simply throw up their hands. At Microsoft, where Keith Stobie plies his trade, that is not an option. Keith and others have reengineered their testing, employing dependency analysis for test design, model property static checking, "all pairs" configuration testing, robust unit testing, and more. They employ coverage to successfully help select and prioritize tests and make effective use of random testing including fuzz testing security. Finally, models of their systems help them generate good stochastic tests and act as test oracles for automation.

  • Test checklists for large, complex, distributed systems
Keith Stobie, Microsoft Corporation
Evaluating Requirements for Testability

For a test engineer, perhaps the most important measure of requirements quality is testability. By improving testability during requirements development, you not only will make test design easier, but you also will have gone a long way toward building better software for less cost. Learn methods to identify the requirements problems that reduce or improve testability: ambiguity, incompleteness, inconsistency, incorrectness, and "compoundness." This method first was used successfully in a very large payroll system development project and has since been practiced in both large and small development projects. From this session take away a spreadsheet-based method for tracking requirements testability throughout the project, and see examples from an Access database that can be used for further requirements analysis.

  • How to analyze requirements for attributes that increase testability
Rodger Drabick, Lockheed Martin Transportation & Security Solutions
Automate Acceptance Testing using Open Source FitNesse

FitNesse is an open source testing tool based on the Wiki Wiki Web and FIT (Framework for Integrated Tests). The Wiki Wiki Web is a collaboration tool in which anyone can create or change new pages to document or share any information. FIT is a framework and tool for creating automated acceptance tests. Joined together, FitNesse is a Web server-based tool for teams to easily and collaboratively create documents, specify tests, and run them. Micah Martin, co-creator of FitNesse, demonstrates how FitNesse can be used to create high-level feature tests that will drive development. Walk away with an understanding of how to automate acceptance testing in agile development and how it fits in with test-driven development.

  • What a Wiki is and how to use it
  • An introduction to the free FIT acceptance testing tool
  • Acceptance testing as part of the test-driven development practice
Micah Martin, Object Mentor, Inc.
Free Test Tools are Like a Box of Chocolates

You never know what you are going to get! Until you explore, it can be hard to tell whether a free, shareware, or open source tool is an abandoned and poorly documented research project or a robust powerhouse of a tool. In this information-filled presentation, Danny Faught shows you where open source and freeware tools fit within the overall test tool landscape. During this double session, Danny installs and tries out several tools right on the spot and shares tips on how to evaluate tools you find on the Web. Find out about licensing, maintenance, documentation, Web forums, bugs, and more. Discover the many different types of testing tools that are available for free and where to find them. Danny demonstrates examples of tools that you can put to use as soon as you get back to the office.

Danny Faught, Tejas Software Consulting

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