Agile development approaches present unique challenges for testers and test teams. Working in short iterations, often with limited written requirements, agile development teams can leave traditional testers behind. Common testing-related activities, such as user acceptance testing, testing inter-product relationships, and installation testing, need different approaches to fit into agile projects.  Lisa Crispin explains seven key factors for testing success within agile projects that you can also apply to more traditional methodologies. Using a whole team approach and adopting an agile testing mindset are among the important components of a successful agile testing strategy. Learn how to overcome cultural and organizational obstacles and barriers to success in areas such as test automation. Discover the seven critical factors that provide a foundation for building your team's focus on quality and that deliver maximum value to your business.

Are you a frustrated tester or test manager? Are you questioning whether or not a career in testing is for you? Do you wonder why others in your organization seem unenthusiastic about quality? If the answer is “yes” to any of these questions, this session is for you. Julie Gardiner explores five directives to help testers make a positive impact within their organization and increase professionalism in testing. Remember quality—it’s not just effort, it’s effort and quality; it’s date and quality; it’s functionality and quality. Learn to enjoy testing and have fun—the closest job to yours is blowing up things in the movies. Relish your testing challenges—it’s you against the software and sometimes, it seems, the world. Choose your battles—take a stand on issues that are vital and let the small things go. And most importantly, remember that the only real power we have springs from our integrity—don’t sell that at any price.

One problem with iterative software development is that teams are forced to write and test software incrementally—and repeatedly.  Testers know that any change could break features in both obvious and hidden ways.  Developers know that a change to their stable design is just around the corner.  So, should we go back to designing software all up front and testing the whole product just before delivery?  Of course not!  So how do we solve this “Agilist’s Dilemma?” Rob Myers describes the two popular practices that can solve this dilemma:  unit level test-driven development (TDD) and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). Join Rob to explore the similarities and differences of these agile practices and learn how they support each other.  Find out why ATDD is much more than traditional test-automation and how its practice drastically alters the role of the agile tester.

Many test training courses include the topic of “soft skills for testers,” specifically their attitudes and social behaviors. Testers are told that to be effective they need a negative mindset and a negative approach. Krishna Iyer and Mukesh Mulchandani challenge this belief. Having trained more than 5,000 testers in testing skills and more than 500 testers in essential thinking skills, Krishna and Mukesh demonstrate that testers must be creative rather than critical, positive rather than destructive, and empathetic rather than negative. Join them as they lead exercises in creative thinking, critical writing, and collaborative speaking to improve your eye for detail, nose for sniffing out defects, and ear for bias. Eliminate the old beliefs that hinder testers and find out how to deconstruct them and inculcate new, more powerful ones into your test organization.

As world trade becomes global, goods are  produced and are services performed everywhere.  Software development services are no exception to this trend. Indeed, they are leading these changes because the cost of developing or testing software in one place may be substantially lower than in another. Yet cost isn't all there is to the equation—you must also consider value. What do you need to know to outsource successfully?  While testers offshore might cost less than they cost locally, why might it be more valuable to insource testing?  In this interactive and experiential session, Michael Bolton relates his experience with outsourcing and insourcing software testing models and leads exercises to explore the advantages and disadvantages of each. Join Michael and your peers to learn how understanding organizational context is vital to the insourcing versus outsourcing decision for testing.

All too often, surprises occur late in development when independent projects—agile or not—at varying stages of completion must merge into a cohesive deliverable. These surprises often result in schedule slips and unfulfilled customer needs. At Intuit, Billie Bell found the root causes of these problems and developed an end-to-end testing model to address them. Billie discovered that test progress reports did not contain the right information to help decision makers anticipate issues early, resulting in design defects being discovered late in development. Join Billie to find ways to prevent end-of-project surprises by identifying dependencies early with use case analysis, mapping functional touch points to test cases, empowering test teams through knowledge sharing across projects, and rethinking standard project milestones. Discover the test metrics you can implement to highlight overall functional business risks that will allow stakeholders to make changes in scope, resources, or schedule earlier in development.

As testers, our job is to report the current state of software quality on our projects. But in the high-stakes, high-risk business of software development, some may pressure us to distort the message. When projects are late or quality is poor, software managers’ reputations—even their jobs—may be on the line. Our testing progress report could be the biggest obstacle to a “green light” project status report or an on-time delivery. When testers see project disconnects—rosy status reports and repeatedly late delivery; managers shutting down open discussions of project risks; managers trying to close down testing that is exposing major bugs; or suggestions to “get creative” with the metrics—we need to beware. Fiona Charles discusses the reasons testers must refuse to compromise reality, how to secure detailed records of project progress and status, and the possibility of having to “blow the whistle”—regardless of the consequences.

USG is a Fortune 500 building products manufacturer with over fifty North American locations.  USG has effectively managed to integrate their offshore and local test teams to provide support for a major ERP implementation and subsequent software releases.  Brook Klawitter describes how they established a strategy for selecting work to be completed locally versus offshore; developed management capabilities locally and offshore; enhanced the technical and functional testing capabilities of the offshore team; and leveraged the strengths of each team to establish a culture of continuous improvement that encourages team member growth. Learn practical techniques to integrate an offshore team with your local test team, developers, and users. Find out how to select onshore and offshore team members who will be a good technical and cultural fit and learn ways to develop offshore team members for leadership roles.