Friday, September 26, 8:45 am - 9:45 am
501 Agile Testing Within Scrum
By Bob Galen

Many testing efforts succumb to management and project pressures. In the end-game phase of software development, where anything goes for the delivery of a product, quality is usually the first to go. Scrum is one of the agile methodologies, and focuses on project management in iterative development efforts. It can be successfully applied to testing to renew focus and improve overall results. In this class, you’ll learn the Scrum methodology and how to apply it to your testing cycles to dramatically improve results.

Friday, September 26, 8:45 am - 9:45 am
502 The Most Effective Ways to Improve Software Quality
By Chris Sims

What are the best ways to improve the quality of your software? More testers! Better specs! More time for testing! All true. But are they under your control? For most of us the answer is “Not so much.” So what can you do as an “in the trenches” QA professional? More interestingly, what have you done? Share your most effective tips, tactics and practices, and tap into the collective wisdom that will be present through the Nominal Group Technique (NGT). Walk out ready to make a bigger impact with the resources already at your disposal.

Friday, September 26, 8:45 am - 9:45 am
503 The Magic Bullet of Test Automation Is Not ‘Record and Playback’
By Aaron Cook

Many software QA automation solutions are marketed as an “easy” way to increase test coverage, perform regression tests and increase the number of defects found--all with record-and-playback capabilities. Experience shows this approach is a guaranteed way to develop test automation “shelfware” and to continue to propagate the myth that test automation costs more than it’s worth.

In this class, you’ll learn an approach to high-quality test automation that will allow your team to develop sound strategic automation frameworks for use and reuse by the quality assurance and test automation teams.

Friday, September 26, 8:45 am - 9:45 am
504 Load Testing With OpenSTA
By Dan Downing

OpenSTA is increasingly popular as an open-source alternative to commercial load testing tools. However, performance testers making this choice are confronted by the dual challenges of learning both tool and process, without the formal training support of commercial products.

In this class, Dan Downing demystifies the fundamentals of conducting effective load tests. He will introduce you to his 5-Steps of Load Testing: Discover, Develop, Run/Fix, Report. You’ll experience OpenSTA on a real site: modeling load, developing scripts, configuring, launching and monitoring tests, analyzing, interpreting and reporting results. You’ll learn workarounds for tool limitations—especially in results analysis—and how to access community resources to support your learning back at work.

Friday, September 26, 8:45 am - 9:45 am
505 I Went to This Conference and All they Talked About Was Requirements
By Robin Goldsmith

Why are so many testing conference classes about requirements? Testers need to know what the requirements are to confirm that systems meet them. Yet too often, testers receive inadequate requirements too late. Getting testable requirements is increasingly becoming the tester’s job. How can you get them on time?

Learn the issues that often impact requirements efforts and hear appropriate ways testers can contribute effectively to getting the clear and accurate requirements they need. Learn why testers gravitate toward—but may not succeed as—being requirements definers and how to avoid the “testability trap” that keeps testers out of the requirements loop.

nces using Six Sigma techniques at Microsoft to improve the performance of Outlook and Windows Live Services.

Friday, September 26, 8:45 am - 9:45 am
506 Model-Based Testing for Java and Web-Based GUI Applications
By Jeff Feldstein

Classic automation repeats the same tests until it stops failing or the application ships. But customers rarely traverse the application in the same sequence as the automation, and they’re likely to find bugs that the automation missed. Model-based testing is a form of automated testing that brings random and flexible behavior to your automated test cases.

Learn how to implement model-based testing specifically as applied to Java and Web applications. See a demonstration of model-based testing—the XDE Tester—download the source code containing the data structures, concepts and program flow for implementing a large-scale, industrial-strength, model-based test system.

Friday, September 26, 8:45 am - 9:45 am
507 The How-To Guide for Test Management
By Brian Massey

Test management should allow organizations to manage testing efforts—from test case documentation through execution to status reporting. From a quality perspective, it should allow you to take a product from plan to production.

Learn how to manage the testing effort, from resources, to assets, data, labs, etc.—and report status. What processes are in place in your organization for quality and testing, how are these processes realized by the test practitioners, and what needs to be reported back to management? Understand how proper test management can drive testing centers and allow for organizational-level quality perspectives.

Friday, September 26, 8:45 am - 9:45 am
508 End-to-End Performance Process: From Requirements to Production Monitoring
By Alfred Wong

Performance test engineers are often engaged in a project only during planning and execution of performance tests. But there are many more ways they can contribute, such as by helping fix performance bugs or avoiding them in the first place.

This class walks through an end-to-end performance process from requirements to production monitoring, and focuses on how performance engineers can contribute each step of the way. This class will help performance engineers and managers enhance their current process toward increasing their contribution, forewarn them of possible challenges, and explain how tools and techniques can overcome them.

Friday, September 26, 10:30 am - 11:30 am
601 Testing in the Enterprise Using Scrum
By Bob Galen

Scrum has become one of the foremost agile methodologies, but the approach is not without its challenges. One of the most critical is guiding the testing effort as project size and complexity increase.

In this class you’ll learn how to handle legacy and non-greenfield projects, distributed testing, integration testing of large-scale systems, coordinating with multiple product owners, and marrying traditional testing expectations and techniques with those of the agile teams. You’ll also explore strategies for traditional testers to successfully transform their skills and experience into their agile teams to make a high-quality impact.

Friday, September 26, 10:30 am - 11:30 am
602 The Makings of a QA Leader
By Chris Sims

One of the best ways to increase your impact on the quality of your product, team, company and career is to step beyond the role of contributor and into leadership. There are many managers who are not leaders, and many leaders who are not managers. If you feel the call to leadership, but aren’t sure how to begin, this workshop is for you.

We’ll use the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) to gather the group’s experiences and ideas, identify the factors that have had the biggest impact and efficiently harness the collective wisdom of the group.

Friday, September 26, 10:30 am - 11:30 am
603 To Infinity and Beyond: Extreme Boundary Testing
By Robert Sabourin

If you think you’ve explored the boundaries as part of your testing, this dynamic interactive presentation will open your eyes to some wonderful boundaries and great techniques to expose and explore them. The adventure begins with traditional boundaries, input fields and equivalence classes, and then dives into the rich universe of boundaries related to systems behavior, environments, system limits, design limitations and even eccentric user behaviors. This presentation opens your eyes to exploring the final frontier and understanding that beyond the confines of our knowledge there be dragons!

Friday, September 26, 10:30 am - 11:30 am
604 Models for Security Testing in the Software Development Life Cycle
By Ryan Berg

Often there’s a lack of security expertise among development teams or a lack of development expertise among security teams. There’s also a misconception that security reviews extend development schedules. Organizations need a central, concrete model for security evaluation and a comprehensive task list detailing the roles and responsibilities for each group involved. And that’s what this class is all about. You’ll learn practical models that give testing responsibility to developers, QA staff or security teams, explaining the specific requirements for each approach as well as expected outcomes.

Friday, September 26, 10:30 am - 11:30 am
605 Balancing Test to Break, Test to Validate and Metrics
By Jeff Feldstein

We test software to answer two questions: Does it work? Will it break? The tester’s job is to balance investments in each question. Learn how to generate a feedback loop among three major areas: test-to-validate, test-to-break and test metrics. You’ll learn guidelines to ensure you’re optimizing the investment in these areas competing for your limited resources. Specific types of test-to-validate and test-to-break methods will be presented. In addition, example metrics will be explored, along with suggested actions to take based on the results. You’ll also come away with suggestions for communicating these concepts to your test team.

Friday, September 26, 10:30 am - 11:30 am
606 Software Process Improvement’s Dirty Little Secret
By Robin Goldsmith

Despite investing copious time and money, organizations often fail to realize desired benefits from formal software improvement initiatives, such as Six Sigma and capability maturity model-fitting. Lessons learned analyses continually point to the same set of “usual suspects,” but overlook a key implementation shortcoming that actually may account for much of the costly initiatives’ underperformance. This is a major reason such process improvement initiatives often do not improve.

Learn about this seldom-recognized flaw that afflicts many high-overhead initiatives, and how organizations often lose sight of key weakest-link exceptions to their seemingly comprehensive practices for improving software processes.

Friday, September 26, 10:30 am - 11:30 am
607 Designing JUnit Test Cases for Effective Functional Testing
By Matt Love

JUnit is the standard for creating Java unit test cases. Would you benefit from a deeper understanding of how to develop a functional test suite that effectively verifies whether code works as designed?

This presentation introduces and demonstrates a strategy for building an effective JUnit functional test suite that identifies use cases that cover all actions that your program should be able to perform, identify the code’s entry points and pairs entry points with the use cases that they implement, create test cases by applying the initialize-work-check procedure, and develop runtime event diagrams and use them to facilitate testing.

Friday, September 26, 10:30 am - 11:30 am
608 Performance Bugs and Investigation Strategies
By Alfred Wong

Performance bugs appear in many shapes and forms, and each requires its own investigation strategy. This class first discusses briefly some different types of performance testing, then focuses on performance bugs commonly found in Web applications and their corresponding investigation strategies. The class will teach performance engineers and managers about the different types of performance bugs and the corresponding types of performance tests that expose them, how to participate actively in performance bug investigation, and how to apply these strategies to projects.

Note: This class builds on the End-to-End Performance Process class, #508, but also may be taken separately.