Release Management

Conference Presentations

Let's End the Defect Report-Fix-Check-Rework-Cycle

Find out how teams transitioning to Agile practices must re-think their workflows and project metrics originally designed to handle many hundreds of defect reports that occur in typical testlast development cycles. Richard Leavitt discusses how a real-world implementation of key practices like early testing and continual integration-though not without bumps and bruises-lowered the number of open defect reports by an order of magnitude. These practices also can improve how the team communicates, reduce delays, and provide more direct measures of project status, feature progress, and release readiness.

Richard Leavitt, Rally Software Development
The Next Stop in Test Automation: Test Environment Setup

To achieve the most effective test automation, you need to go beyond automated test case creation and implement automated environment setup. In tracking the testing time spent over several projects, the Clustering group Amit Mathur worked with found that more staff time was being spent on setup than on actual testing. He discusses and demonstrates the Environment Configuration System (ECS) his group developed to automatically set up test environments and trigger automated test execution. Find out how ECS has dramatically improved the ability to automate many more manual tests. ECS employs a scripting language (Perl) and libraries for environment setup and test cases. Based on interface specifications and dependency rules, ECS bundles environment setups and test cases for complex test scenarios. Learn how you can adapt the ECS approach for your applications and environment.

Amit Mathur, VERITAS Software Corporation
How Much Quality is Enough?

Are you striving for more quality than you really need? How would you know? "Good enough" quality does not mean "substandard" or "mediocre" but is actually an optimal and responsible economic principle we use everyday. Managing test lead for Quardev Laboratories, Jon Bach says because quality is expensive, the "good enough" framework provides the criteria to enhance decision-making about when to ship. He discusses the perils of quality-at-all-cost techniques and shares examples of software that features sufficient quality. Find out how testers and test managers can help project stakeholders know whether they are releasing software with too little quality or are unnecessarily striving for too much quality.

Jon Bach, Quardev Laboratories
Transitioning to Agile Development

The Agile development movement has started to transform the software landscape. Since February 2001 when the Agile Manifesto was published, Agile development has gone past the early adopter phase and now is regularly in use by such mainstream organizations as CapitalOne, the Federal Reserve Bank, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and major development departments in other organizations. For Agile practices to take hold-and more importantly to be sustained-all of the dysfunctional behaviors that organizations have acquired over the past twenty years or more must be discarded-and that is not easy or fun. However, the overwhelming benefits and value of Agile development are there, and for organizations in which software is their lifeblood, the effort will be made.

Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development
Lipstick on a Pig - How Illusion Leads to Crisis in Real World Projects

Change, ambiguity, and risk are key issues whether you are running a software project, managing a development team, or leading an entire organization. We learn it over and over again. It's not a matter of "if" change will happen-it's a matter of "when." When a crisis inevitably arrives, how do you respond? As Jerry Weinberg observed in The Secrets of Consulting, "It may look like a crisis, but it's only the end of an illusion." Andy Kaufman looks at key project illusions that threaten success as we lead projects and people in the realm of software development. Whether you're a project team member or a senior executive, Andy provides practical tips you can immediately apply in your organization.

Andy Kaufman, Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development
Describing Software Requirements with User Stories

All projects start with needs or requirements. How those requirements are documented and expressed has a tremendous affect on the rest of the project. The technique of expressing requirements as "user stories" is one of the most broadly applicable techniques introduced by eXtreme Programming (XP). However, user stories are a valuable approach on all time-constrained projects, not just those using XP. Although user stories originated in the Agile processes, they are useful even if you are not planning to employ Agile development. In this session, Mike Cohn will help you identify and write good user stories and understand the six attributes of all good stories. Explore how user role modeling can help when gathering the initial stories for a project.

Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software
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

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