Conference Presentations

Application Lifecycle Management Imperatives

Ever growing software development needs and faster delivery cycles coupled with flat or shrinking IT budgets have brought many organizations to new agile and lean practices. Together, these disruptions are causing a sea of change in the application lifecycle management (ALM) landscape. Although management tools aren’t an explicit focus for most development teams, choosing the right tools for enterprise development is an important factor in keeping everyone productive. Monica Luke discusses the five key imperatives for ALM implementations: in-context collaboration, accelerating time to delivery with real-time planning, improving quality with lifecycle traceability, refining predictability with development intelligence, and reducing costs through continuous improvement. For each imperative, Monica offers concrete examples and lessons learned from real-world implementations. Don’t get lost in the weeds with an ALM tool.

Monica Luke, IBM Rational Software
Selecting the Right Mobile Testing Solution: Practical Considerations and Proven Practices

Because the mobile market is extremely dynamic, maintaining consistent application quality is always difficult. Managing the risk exposures with mobile apps and embedded software requires comprehensive testing of a wide variety of platforms operating on multiple networks. Testers have to contend with short development cycles that require continuous QA efforts. Three key building blocks are required to overcome these obstacles: device-agnostic automation, access to a large selection of handsets and tablets, and ways to seamlessly apply your existing testing tools, skills, and knowledge to mobile. From his experience working with enterprises going mobile, Eran Yaniv shares the do's and don'ts for selecting an enterprise-grade mobile testing and automation platform, and offers his analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches.

Eran Yaniv, Perfecto Mobile
Total Quality Assurance: Stepping Out of the Testing Box

In the QA/testing world we tend to focus on improving quality by altering or creating new software development models and process, and implementing tools to better manage them. In this way, we often put ourselves into a testing box where quality becomes quantified by "Were the requirements met?" and “Does the solution work as expected?" No matter what model is used-waterfall, agile, spiral, or iterative-the box still exists. Bryan Sebring examines four specific areas-your business, your staff, your customers, and, ultimately, yourself-to focus on to help you get out of the testing box and increase total quality in software. Learn to identify relationships among these areas and how they can positively or negatively impact quality. Explore how a decision in one area impacts the other three as you discover opportunities for improving in all four areas to increase your product's total quality.

Bryan Sebring, Georgia Department of Transportation
Test Process Improvement with the TMMi® Model

The Test Maturity Model integration® (TMMi®) model, developed to complement the CMMI® framework, is rapidly becoming the test process improvement model of choice in Europe, Asia, and the US. Erik van Veenendaal, one of the developers of TMMi, describes the model’s five maturity levels-Initial, Managed, Defined, Management and Measurement, and Optimization-and the key testing practices required at each level. The model’s definition of maturity levels provides the basis for standardized TMMi assessments and certification, enabling companies to consistently deploy testing practices and collect industry metrics. The benefits of using the TMMi model include an improvement of testing methods, reduction in costs, and improved product quality.

Erik Veenendaal, Improve Quality Services BV
STAREAST 2012: Session-based Exploratory Testing on Agile Projects

One of the challenges associated with testing in agile projects is selecting test techniques that “fit” the dynamic nature of agile practices. How much functional and non-functional testing should you do? What is the appropriate mix of unit, integration, regression, and system testing? And how do you balance these decisions in an environment that fosters continuous change and shifting priorities? Bob Galen has discovered that session-based exploratory testing (SBET) thrives in agile projects and supports risk-based testing throughout the development project. SBET excels at handling dynamic change while also finding the more significant technical- and business value-impacting defects. Join in and learn how to leverage SBET for test design and as a general purpose agile testing technique.

Bob Galen, iContact Corp
STAREAST 2012: The Tester's Role in Agile Planning

If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be missed or glossed over. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while helping the team implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers contribute to the estimation, task definition, clarification, and the scoping work required to implement user stories. Testers apply their elicitation skills to understand what users need, collecting great examples that explore typical, alternate, and error scenarios. Rob shares many examples of how agile stories can be broken into a variety of test-related tasks for implementing infrastructure, data, non-functional attributes, privacy, security, robustness, exploration, regression, and business rules.

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
You Can't Spell Agile Testing without "ET"

Do you ever get that creeping feeling there is more to agile testing than automating it? Have you wondered how you should test quality considerations beyond the story cards? Have you tried to use exploratory testing to bridge this gap, yet struggled with how to do it systematically in an agile context? If so, then what you need is a refreshing aromatic blend of exploratory and agile approaches. Lanette Creamer and Matt Barcomb share their ideas, experiences, and approaches on how agile teams can visualize and achieve quality at and beyond the story level. Learn what exploratory charters are and how to turn them into adaptive test ideas. Discover how agile teams can integrate exploratory testing techniques in an iterative incremental way, dynamically syncing with changes in the product.

Lanette Creamer, Spark Quality, LLC
Agile Testing Practices

On agile teams, testing is an ongoing activity-not a phase or a role. Even today many agile development teams struggle with this concept. Janet Gregory explains how testing activities are included throughout the agile process and the highest value activities a tester can add to the team. Sharing her extensive work experience, Janet describes the importance of collaboration and simplicity in activities such as automation, acceptance test-driven development, and exploratory testing. Janet uses the agile testing quadrants model to provide a framework for identifying testing needs at all levels-user story, product feature, and project. As Janet presents this overview of agile testing practices, you’ll have an opportunity through discussions and exercises to understand how agile practices fit together.

Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
Using Agile Principles to Run Your Organization

As agile methods have become increasingly popular for managing projects and portfolios of projects, it's natural to wonder what other management challenges agile can tackle. Forward thinking organizations have begun applying agile principles to their business operations as a way of increasing agility, speed, and customer satisfaction. Jeff Payne describes those agile practices that have been successfully applied to business operations and the impact they’ve have on the bottom line. Learn how to apply aspects of SCRUM, Kanban, and even eXtreme Programming to your business operations. Examine a real world case study of a company built around agile methods. Take home tips and ideas on how to move your organization toward Agile.

Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
No Silver Bullet? Silver Buckshot May Work

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Gregory Pope, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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