Keynote Presentations

Productivity Games Improve Software Quality

Have you ever wondered how to get your team more passionate about software testing?  Ross Smith creatively employs the use of competitive games to increase employee engagement, participation, and productivity.  Utilizing games will get your testers and developers working more enthusiastically together to improve software quality and to address testing problems that cannot be solved cost-effectively using traditional business processes.

Through a simple step by step approach, Ross will explain how to deliver testing projects on time and within budget by employing gaming techniques. By knowing what behavior you should reward, to setting up healthy competitive environments, you will walk away with a new “game” plan for motivating your team.  This session will give an understanding of the concept and importance of creating “leader boards” and will give you the direction you will need to design a game, create a game design checklist, and the key factors to successfully implementing the use of games as a defect prevention technique to improve quality.

Ross Smith
Director of Test, Microsoft Corporation

Ross Smith, Director of Test at Microsoft Corporation, has been in the software industry for over 20 years, developing and testing software on everything from mainframe systems to handheld devices and PC's.  In 1991, he began his Microsoft career in Product Support and has held several roles including Test Lead, Test Manager and Test Architect.  He has been a long-time member of the Test Architect's Group and has worked on almost every version of Windows and Office since 1995.

Mr. Smith has held many accomplishments.  He is one of the authors of The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention.  He holds five software patents and has served as a guest poster on Google’s Testing Blog.  Over the last couple years, he has nurtured a management innovation initiative called 42projects, aspiring to inject cultural change and “bring back the buzz to the hallways” at Microsoft.  The London School of Business and the Management Innovation Lab published a case study of Ross Smith’s 42projects entitled, “Game On: Theory Y meets Generation Y.”

Mr. Smith is experimenting with how gaming can improve productivity among next-generation workers, and the impact of games and social networking tools on management education and requisite skills for new managers.

Marc McDonald
Senior Software Development Engineer, Microsoft Corporation

Marc McDonald’s career spans the 30-year personal computer industry-from Microsoft Basic on the MITS Altair to Windows Vista-and he holds six software patents.  He is the first salaried employee of Microsoft, joining Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, where he designed the FAT file system used in MS-DOS and Windows.  He continues to work at Microsoft as a Senior Software Development Engineer.  He was also the first employee at Asymetrix and Design Intelligence. 

Mr. McDonald pioneered the standard “for free sodas and casual dress” in the software industry.  With over three decades in the industry from the beginning, spending half of his time outside of Microsoft, and performing different roles gives him a sense of perspective and passion for what we could do with all the computing power and storage that is now available.

Top Ten Leadership Skills: Surviving & Thriving in the 21st Century

Our leadership mission is to adapt and adopt better and more efficient habits to help our people reach their optimal best. This rollicking, outside-the-box program will inspire your managers, supervisors, and team leaders with creative ideas for motivating employees to increased productivity and improved performance, while showing them the way to stay resilient in the process. 

Kelli Vrla’s festive delivery of meaty content helps you stay laser-focused is on people, priorities and productivity. 

Learn how to:
 • Master a Rapid-Fire Productivity Mind-Set
 • Get More Job Ownership from Yourself and your Peers
 • Know What Makes 'Em Tick and What Ticks 'Em Off
 • Roll with Challenges
 • Practice the Platinum Rule
 • Stay Laser Focused, even in Chaos
 • Gain Instant Rapport by Listening More
 • Surround Yourself with Experts
 • Embrace, Practice & Convey Lifelong Learning
 • Keep Your Cool Amidst the Chaos
 • Find Your Job Passion Connection and Help Others Find Theirs
 • Effectively Distinguish Between "Knowing" vs. "Doing What You Know"
 • Embrace and Postitively Use Your Sense of Humor

Kelli Vrla
Leadership Consultant, The Good Humor Lady

Kelli Vrla, Texas-based corporate communications consultant, has enlightened and "entertained" thousands in the U.S., Europe, and Central America with her dynamic programs.  She shares over 30 years of lessons and experience with sixteen years as a broadcast sales executive in radio and 14 years as CEO of her own people development firm.

Ms. Vrla’s in-the-trenches scope of learning comes from first-hand experiences in handling change, effective marketing, bottom-line communications, difficult and demanding people, and motivating the tough-to-motivate people.  All of this prepared her for the variety of ways she now helps people stay less stressed and laser focused on full-throttle productivity. 

Ms. Vrla is an active member of the National Speakers Association as well as the American Society of Training and Development.  Her current publications include co-authored works in the Pathway Series: The Top Ten Packing List for 21st Century Leader and Glee = MC2, A Guide to Exceptional Customer Service.

Kelli Vrla brings you relevant, memorable and immediately-transferable skills to help you have more fun as you get more done! 

G Forces in the Organization

Success in business today is often dependent on the quality of software applications that support the ability of the business to manage the backend functions like accounting and employee management, and the programs that  enable seamless engagement between the business and its customers. The role of software development, quality processes, and software testing have become increasingly critical. Organizations dependent on software as part of their business model often deploy software dozens of times an hour! The speed and necessity for this increased schedule and dependence is placing ever increasing G Forces on many organizations. 

While the "tidal" forces of these shifts profoundly reshape software development, the changes required of the organization are even greater. G Forces are created as organization’s software development goes from deploying annually to quarterly to monthly to weekly to daily to hourly. Kent will introduce the G Forces model and the impact these changes have on the organization and specifically software testing.

Kent Beck
Founder, Three Rivers Institute

Kent Beck’s career has combined the practice of software development with reflection, innovation, and communication.  His contributions to software development include patterns for software, the rediscovery of test-first programming, the xUnit family of developer testing tools, and Extreme Programming. He currently divides his time between writing, programming, and coaching. Beck is the author/co-author of Implementation Patterns, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2nd Edition, Contributing to Eclipse, Test-Driven Development: By Example, Planning Extreme Programming, The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and the JUnit Pocket Guide.

His other business activities include contract programming using Java/Eclipse, writing, consulting (mostly remote), and presenting workshops.

NICE BIKE: Fueling Performance with Passion

Software testing can be a thankless job. When recognition is provided it is usually in a way that is not motivational or inspirational. Often we are held responsible for the delay of critical projects even when we are left out of the process until the last minute. With limited time and resources we are expected to perform miracles. Wouldn’t it be nice to get noticed for the right reasons?

Mark Scharenbroich is an expert that understands the value of being noticed for the RIGHT reasons. Mark will inspire you, motivate you, and validate the importance of recognizing people to improve employee and team performance.

Whether you are a team of one, or a team of one hundred, you will walk away from this keynote with a reinvigorated spirit for what you do as well as an appreciation of what the other team members around you do. He will have you laughing, but more importantly thinking about the simple ways you can motivate others to be better team players at your organization.

Mark Scharenbroich
Motivational Humorist, NiceBike.com

Mark Scharenbroich has built his speaking career by working in both business and education, discovering how some of the best organizations and leaders create a culture that encourages people to perform at a higher level.  His messages improve employee engagement, help people to embrace change, enhance team collaboration, fuel the passion to serve others and create meaningful connections.  

Currently, Mark Scharenbroich is writing his first book based on his Nice Bike principle, which is titled, Nice Bike: Making Connections that Move People.

2010's Top 25 Most Dangerous Application Security Weaknesses

Have you ever spent sleepless nights wondering if the tests you have completed are sufficient to provide the necessary information to make a good business decision on whether or not software should be launched?  Whether you manage testing for internal development activities, perform third party development validation or are testing a commercial application for external use, your mandate is clear - safeguard your applications and make sure your team has avoided the CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Application Errors.

Learn the 25 Most Dangerous Programming Application Errors and what you can do as a tester to determine and identify these potential vulnerabilities. Join Robert Martin, CWE Project Leader, who coordinated the 2009 and 2010 efforts in combination with over 40 contributing software security specialists from around the world, as he discusses:
    • The prevalence and impact of attacks using the weaknesses listed in the CWE Top 25
    • How attack patterns allow you to think like an attacker when designing your test cases
    • The variety of methods to identify and address these potential vulnerabilities
    • How software security weaknesses in your applications put your organization at risk
    • Where the Top 25 fits in the secure development lifecycle

Attend this session to learn valuable insight that will help you create the test cases at your organization that can help you and your software team rest easier; at least until next year’s list is released!

Robert Martin
Principal Engineer, Information Technologies, MITRE

Robert A. Martin is a Principal Engineer in MITRE’s Information Technologies Directorate where he focuses on the interplay of cyber security and Internet technologies.  Martin has helped hundreds of MITRE’s Department of Defense and Federal Aviation Administration customers improve the quality, cost, and timeliness of their software products.

Martin received a BS and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a MBA from Babson College.  He is a member of the ACM, AFCEA, NDIA, and the IEEE.