Conference Presentations

Three New Technologies that Will Disrupt Your Test Organization

Which forces are shaping the future of your test organization-processes, tools, technologies? It is a simple-and misleading-question. The test organization is not the center of the universe. The test organization serves the IT department and the business. If they change, the test organization must change. Three new technologies-the cloud, service-oriented architectures, and multi-tenant systems-are revolutionizing IT departments. Test organizations must adapt their methodologies, tools, and processes to these technologies. The combination of these three is a catalyst for advanced sourcing models. Join Klaus Haller to learn how the rise of application or business service provisioning changes the task portfolio and staffing needs of testing organizations. Discuss with Klaus how to move from a classic testing organization to a continuous and holistic quality assurance organization.

Klaus Haller, Swisscom IT Services
Moneyball and the Science of Building Great Testing Teams

Moneyball is an analytical, metrics-based approach to assembling a competitive baseball team. It is based on breaking down accepted preconceptions and finding new ways to look at individual skills and how they mesh as a team. Sometimes the characteristics that we believe the team needs aren’t that important in improving quality. In fact, some accepted practices may have less impact on quality than we might have predicted. Peter Varhol examines how to use data about applications and quality to tell the right story about our state of quality and our success in shipping high quality applications. Looking at some of our preconceptions about testing and individual skills, Peter identifies characteristics for building and running a high-performance testing team.

Peter Varhol, Seapine Software Inc
SoLoMo Is Shaking Up The Testing Landscape: How QA Organizations Can Adapt, Keep Up, and Thrive

The collision of social, local, and mobile media (a.k.a. SoLoMo) is impacting and disrupting software development and testing organizations worldwide. With so much sensitive and critical data flowing to and from SoLoMo technologies, there is immense pressure to ensure that apps are reliable, scalable, and secure across a multitude of environments-handsets, tablets, operating systems, browsers, carriers, languages, and locations. Using real-world success stories from Google, Microsoft, and others, Matt Johnston identifies how SoLoMo has transformed the software industry and reveals the secrets to overcoming the challenges that SoLoMo technologies present today. For example, companies that communicate with customers and partners via Facebook or Twitter must protect sensitive data. GPS apps present location-testing challenges.

Matt Johnston, uTest Inc.
Becoming a Kick-*** Test Manager

Want to be a great test manager for your team? A leader your company values highly? Too many test managers do what their organization asks-rather than what their organization needs-and hope for good things to happen. Great test managers are leaders who don’t accept the status quo. They continuously seek ways to improve testing processes and practices. Instead of whining about needing more resources, they set priorities and get things done. They know who or what they need, why and when they need it, and persevere to obtain that person, lab, or tool. They say, “No” when that’s the right answer. So, are these people mythical creatures, or do they really exist? They exist, all right! Johanna Rothman shares stories from her test manager past and tales from the great test managers she knows.

Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
Test-driven Development: An On-stage Demonstration

Test-driven development (TDD) is a skill that takes patience to master-you can’t learn it reading a book. As with learning any new language, to gain fluency you need to practice TDD with competent coaching and lots of hard work. Many well-intentioned programmers try and finally give up on TDD because they never develop the fluency it requires. On stage, Llewellyn Falco leads a live TDD demonstration, talking through the process and microsteps of: (1) studying a feature, (2) creating an initial test, and (3) iteratively developing the related test code and feature code until the feature is completely programmed. Watch how to iteratively write a test, see it fail, and then write the feature code to make it pass. After explaining the theory behind the particular TDD technique used, Llewellyn leads participants in testing progressively more complex objects and scenarios.

Llewellyn Falco, DevelopMentor
Agile Development & Better Software West 2012: Agile Testing: Challenges Beyond the Easy Contexts

Don’t let anyone tell you differently: agile testing is hard! First, we have to get over the misconception that you don’t need testers within agile teams. Then, we have to integrate testers with the developers and engender a holistic quality approach. And those are only the challenges when the going is easy! In more difficult contexts, testing in agile environments is-well, even more difficult. Bob Galen explores how to handle testing in difficult contexts-lack of test automation capabilities, agile in highly regulated environments, testing when your team is spread globally and real-time interactions are nearly impossible, and more. He describes contexts and approaches for blending existing, traditional testing techniques with their agile counterparts. With real-world examples, Bob describes how teams have achieved a good working balance between the two-for example, in test planning and quality metrics reporting.

Bob Galen, Deutsche Bank
STARWEST 2012 Keynote: Becoming a Kick-*** Test Manager
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Want to be a great test manager for your team? A leader your company values highly? Too many test managers do what their organization asks—rather than what their organization needs—and hope for good things to happen. Great test managers are leaders who don’t accept the status quo.

Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group Inc.
Moving to the Next Level: From Tester to Visionary Manager

Would you like to chart a better course for your test team but don’t know where to begin? Before you can plan for a better future and take your team to the next level, you first must know where you are. George Viegas has developed a quick and easy checklist you can use to evaluate the testing function in your organization. The checklist identifies more than thirty items in major areas such as test automation, team maturity, and process. For example, the team maturity area identifies whether a team is in regression test mode only or actually has the capacity to perform performance and load testing. This checklist is a powerful tool not only to analyze your team but also to establish forward looking goals and the plans for achieving them. Take back tools to help you move beyond just managing test-start managing the plan for your team’s future.

George Viegas, Thomson Reuters
Test Management for Cloud Applications

The "cloud" can deliver services over the Internet in three flavors-software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Testing cloud services requires test managers to focus on more than classical functional testing to address additional risks-new Internet dependencies, different security challenges, and performance concerns-brought by the cloud. Ruud Teunissen shares the still-growing list of new concerns and risks with cloud services and explores ways to mitigate them with test-related actions. When selecting a cloud service provider and architecture, services must be tested against business and technical requirements. Prior to production, you can employ end-to-end regression tests to confirm that the cloud service operates as expected. Join Ruud and learn to identify specific requirements, risks, and test strategies for your company to migrate application to the cloud.

Ruud Teunissen, Polteq Test Services B.V.
STAREAST 2012: Testing in the DevOps World of Continuous Delivery

DevOps is an increasingly popular approach to ensure that the delivered code is stable, capable of working as advertised, and available in production immediately. In a continuous delivery environment, the team members must be multi-skilled and able to handle all delivery activities-development, testing, and sysadmin tasks. Manoj Narayanan describes how testing is implemented through DevOps tenets and how it compares to the more familiar agile methodology. To leverage DevOps, it is critical that QA organizations and individual testers adapt to new responsibilities and skill sets. Learn how functional and regression test automation play a critical role in enabling testing organizations to play their part in the world of continuous delivery.

Manoj Narayanan, Cognizant Technology Solutions

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