development

Conference Presentations

Get Real! Creating Realistic, Actionable Project Schedules

The preparation of a realistic, practical project schedule is an essential management function for obtaining stakeholder commitment, setting expectations, and communicating within the team and organization what is achievable. Doing this preparation well is another challenge-one that must be conquered. Rex Black helps participants see the bigger project scheduling picture by focusing on issues such as constituent tasks, the underlying dependencies between them, and the risks attached to the completion of those tasks.

Rex Black, Rex Black Consulting Services, Inc.
Did Your Tests Pass or Fail? Answering with Automation

Automated tests using self-verifying data (SVD) can help determine if your query-type tests have the right information or if they are showing you the expected views. In this presentation, Noel Nyman provides a brief overview of an SVD testing method followed by a demonstration of automation techniques that allow you to run random tests on SVDs with millions of records or entries. Using applications such as Microsoft Office, learn how to adapt the techniques taught in this presentation to many different types of applications using most of the common automation tools.

Noel Nyman, Microsoft
Applying Development Best Practices to Automated Testing

Test automation is a specialized form of software development where executable code is produced for the validation and testing process. Many best practices have been identified to allow developers to code more quickly, efficiently, and correctly, but few test automators have adopted these practices. Learn about several of these "best practices"-including code reviews and coding standards-that can be applied to automated test development. Discover how you, as an automated test developer, can capitalize on the benefits provided by these practices.

Andy Tinkham, Spherion Technology Architects
Scripts on My Tool Belt

The aims of this presentation are to: convince you that "test automation" is more than automating test execution; show some examples of the kinds of things that can be accomplished with scripting languages, using simplified code samples; and make you aware of three different scripting languages (shells, perl, and expect).

Danny Faught, Tejas Software Consulting
Establishing Best Testing Practices in Your Organization

The path to best testing practices begins with communication. By building relationships with a product's key players-developers, analysts, and end users-your test team can achieve a higher level of both quality and customer satisfaction. Discover the link between effective communication and implementing critical step-by-step test processes such as test conditions, test case design, test data construction, and reporting.

Michelle Lynn Baldwin, Booz, Allen & Hamilton
Test Progress Reporting Using Functional Readiness

Are you looking for a way to effectively set the expectations of senior management? The Functional Readiness Matrix (FRM) is a decision-making tool that offers a simple way to represent test progress based on the functional areas or features of an application. By enabling the test team to track actual test progress against the implementation goals established early on, the FRM allows for the presentation of valid test metrics to management in a way they can understand.

Robyn Brilliant, Fannie Mae
Testing in the Extreme Programming World

Much attention has been given to the topic of lightweight development processes-especially eXtreme Programming (XP). Robert Martin explains the concept and significance of a paradigm that believes acceptance tests should be defined by customers, and requires developers to write the unit tests before they write the code. He then separates the difficulties from the benefits inherent in this relatively new discipline. By cutting through the controversy, he's able to address the essential issues such as environmental possibilities and the need for XP. But most importantly, he addresses the question: What is the relevance of software testing and testing professionals within XP?

Robert Martin, Object Mentor, Inc.
Bottlenecks Exposed: The Most Frequently Found Performance Problems

Dan Downing's experience with stress testing projects has revealed a handful of common denominators present in most Web site performance problems. These include memory starvation; a CPU-gobbling database access; improperly sized heaps, caches, and pools; poor application design; and load balancing that doesn't balance. This presentation uses actual B2C and B2B project examples to show you a symptom-measurement-diagnostic approach to understanding, exposing, and documenting these common problems.

Dan Downing, Mentora
The Simplest Automated Unit Test Framework That Could Possibly Work

Everyone pays lip service to the importance of unit testing, but rarely do developers actually integrate unit testing into their daily routine. In the spirit of eXtreme Programming, this presentation offers a simple two-class framework for automating unit tests in three popular languages: C++, Java, and C. No GUI, no templates, just a fast and productive way of organizing and running suites of unit tests. You'll walk away wondering how you have done without this simple technique for so long.

Chuck Allison, Utah Valley State College
Managing the Test Effort Using Requirements-Based Testing Metrics

It's difficult to quantify the true state of a test effort. Often, it's measured by quantity of work combined with deadline compliance. But if this is the case, then the true level of quality remains unknown. The Requirements-Based Testing (RBT) process offers a set of metrics that can be utilized throughout the development cycle. These metrics can provide an accurate picture of the test effort at any given time.

Gary Mogyorodi, Bit Inc.

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