Conference Presentations

Tester Skills for Moving Your Automation to the Next Level

Job interviews for test automation engineers are often limited to, "How proficient are you with the tool vendor XYZ's scripting language?" This approach does little to help the hiring manager choose those individuals who are or will become highly skilled automation professionals. As a test engineer, you will need to acquire specialized knowledge and tool independent capabilities to become a test automation expert. Join Dion Johnson as he identifies the core set of tool-independent competencies required of a successful automated software test engineer: automation framework design, programming and debugging skills, object model concepts, and automation methods based on the required quality attributes. Learn how you, as a hiring manager, can identify these skills, or find out how you personally can improve your skills to become a true test automation expert.

Dion Johnson, DiJohn Innovative Consulting, Inc.
STAREAST 2006: Testing Dialogues - Management Issues

As a test manager, are you struggling at work with a BIG test management issue or a personnel issue? If so, this session is for you. "Testing Dialogues--Management Issues" is a unique platform for you to share with and learn from test managers who have come to STAREAST from around the world. Facilitated by Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman, this double-track session takes on management issues--career paths for test managers, hiring, firing, executive buy-in, organization structures, and process improvement. You name it! Share your expertise and experiences, learn from others’ challenges and successes, and generate new topics in real time. Discussions are structured in a framework so that participants will receive a summary of their work product after the conference.

Facilitated by Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman
Credibility: Your Key to Success as a Test Manager

For test managers and testers, credibility is everything. Without credibility, people won't take you seriously or believe your findings. There are very specific and achievable things every test manager can and should do to make sure the information conveyed to stakeholders is accurate and reliable. Randall Rice talks about the credibility factors you need to exhibit for success: knowledge, attitude, objectivity, accuracy, trust, and attention to detail. With real-world examples, Randall teaches you to build long-term trust with creative ways to document test findings and present to your stakeholders the information they want-when they need to know it. Take away a list of eight credibility killers, and learn how to rebuild you team's credibility once it is lost.

  • A template for assessing your team’s present credibility rating
  • Ways to deliver accurate and timely information to all project stakeholders
Randy Rice, Rice Consulting Services Inc
Your Development and Testing Processes Are Defective

Verification at the end of a software development cycle is a very good thing. However, if verification routinely finds important defects, then something is wrong with your process. A process that allows defects to build up-only to be found and corrected later-is a process filled with waste. Processes which create long list of defects are . . . defective processes. A quality process builds quality into the software at every step of development, so that defect tracking systems become obsolete and verification becomes a formality. Impossible? Not at all. Lean companies have learned how wasteful defects and queues can be and attack them with a zero tolerance policy that creates outstanding levels of quality, speed, and low cost-all at the same time. Join Mary Poppendieck to learn how your organization can become leaner.

Mary Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC
What Hollywood Taught Me About Software Testing

Powerful lessons can be learned from some of the great epic movies of our day: "Star Wars" and bug triage, "Indiana Jones" and requirements, "Monty Python" and configuration management, "Jurassic Park" and unit testing, "The Usual Suspects" and teamwork, and "Star Trek" and SLAs. There are important metaphors within these movie stories that you can apply to real test management problems. Robert Sabourin's entertaining talk ties practical real-world experiences to lessons learned from the movies, offers tips to manage your team, and provides his unique insight into how to get things done!

Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc
Let's Make Bugs Miserable

Preventing and eliminating bugs is what quality is all about. Help! Call the virtual exterminator! From the moment a bug is created until it is killed or morphs into another bug, it goes through many stages in its "life." Anibal Sousa discusses what can be done to shorten a bug's life and offers a manageable bug-handling process, which can be used to track, prioritize, inspect, catalog, and fix bugs safely. A test manager at Microsoft, Anibal discloses best practices and recommendations for preventing simple bugs with check-in test and auto-daily builds with test automation, creating a bug database system, prioritizing and evaluating bugs correctly, killing the bugs and their siblings for good, and more. Let's make a bug's life miserable!

Anibal Sousa, Microsoft Corporation
STARWEST 2005: Testing Dialogues - Management Issues

As a test manager, are you struggling at work with a BIG test management issue or a personnel issue? If so, this session is for you. "Testing Dialogues--Management Issues" is a unique platform for you to share with and learn from test managers who have come to STARWEST from around the world. Facilitated by Esther Derby and Elisabeth Hendrickson, this double-track session takes on management issues-career paths for test managers, hiring, firing, executive buy-in, organization structures, and process improvement. You name it! Share your expertise and experiences, learn from others’ challenges and successes, and generate new topics in real time. Discussions are structured in a framework so that participants will receive a summary of their work product after the conference.

Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates Inc
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.

Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates Inc
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"!

Jon Bach, Quardev Laboratories
STARWEST 2005: Apprenticeships: A Forgotten Concept in Testing Training

The system of apprenticeship was first developed in the late Middle Ages. The uneducated and inexperienced were employed by a master craftsman in exchange for formal training in a particular craft. So why does apprenticeship seldom happen within software testing? Do we subconsciously believe that just about anyone can test software? Join Lloyd Roden and discover what apprenticeship training is and-even more importantly-what it is not. Learn how this practice can be easily adapted to suit software testing. Find out about the advantages and disadvantages of several apprenticeship models: Chief Tester, Hierarchical, Buddy, and Coterie. With personal experiences to share, Lloyd shows how projects will benefit immediately with the rebirth of the apprenticeship system in your test team.

Lloyd Roden, Grove Consultants

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