Test Management

Tutorials

MB Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps

Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations.

ME Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing SOLD OUT

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep pace with development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins.

MF What Do Agile Managers Do? NEW

Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

The Agile Manifesto makes no mention of management. So does that mean that we don’t need managers? No. We need managers, but what they do changes in an agile organization.

MO Essential Test-Driven Development

Rob Myers, Agile Institute

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 1:00pm

Test-driven development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles. The developer first writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete and fully tested.

MP Agile Test Automation: Do It Early and Often SOLD OUT

Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 1:00pm

Agile teams deliver “potentially” shippable software at the end of every iteration—typically, one to four weeks but possibly as often as daily. This goal can't be achieved without comprehensive automated tests, a place where many teams struggle. The challenge of automating functional regression tests even frightens many experienced and competent testers. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

TA Requirements Engineering: A Hands-On Practicum

Erik van Veenendaal, Improve Quality IT Services BV

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

Identifying, documenting, and communicating requirements are key to all successful IT projects. Common problems in requirements engineering are How do we discover the real requirements?, How do we document requirements?, and How do user stories, use cases, and epics fit into requirements? Erik van Veenendaal answers these questions and more while helping you improve your skills in requirements engineering for both traditional and agile projects. With practical case studies and hands-on exercises, Erik illustrates requirements issues and solutions.

TD Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers

Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics is complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them.

TE A Test Leader’s Guide to Agile

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

Much of the work of moving traditional test teams toward agile methods is focused on the individual tester. Often, the roles of test director, test manager, test team leader, and test-centric project manager are marginalized―but not in this session where we’ll focus on agile testing from the test leader’s perspective.

TF Software Design for Testability

Keith Stobie, Salesforce.com

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

Testability is the degree to which a system can be effectively and efficiently tested. This key software attribute indicates whether testing (and subsequent maintenance) will be easy and cheap—or difficult and expensive. In the worst case, a lack of testability means that some components of the system cannot be tested at all.

Keynotes

K2 For Maximum Awesome

Joe Justice, Scrum, Inc

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 10:15am

An agile hardware and engineering company of 500 collaborators in twenty countries, Team WIKISPEED uses test-first development practices, is run by Scrum teams, and produces road legal cars, micro-houses, and social-good projects. Joe Justice shares how their 100-MPG road car was created in just three months through object-oriented design, iterative development, and agile project management.

K3 An Agile Throwdown: Munich Takes on the Columbus Agile Benchmark Study

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 8:30am

Agile has not only gone mainstream, it’s gone global. Data on agile team performance, time-to-market, and quality have emerged in the past decade. In 2012, a group of Columbus, Ohio, companies—business, IT, and financial services firms—participated in the first ever “Columbus Agile vs. the World” study. They collected velocity, schedule, effort, staffing, and quality data which were compared against QSM’s Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) database. Analysis revealed delivery was 31 percent faster with 75 percent fewer defects than industry norms. Enter Munich, Germany.

K4 Producing Product Developers

David Hussman, DevJam

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 3:45pm

Many teams and organizations have found agile methods help them produce more. Where critical thinking is alive, a more important question arises: Are we producing the right thing? Even though agile tools and processes have helped produce more, they often fail to help us produce the right product, change our focus to product over process, or improve product learning.

Concurrent Sessions

AT4 Risk-Based Testing in Agile Projects

Erik van Veenendaal, Improve Quality IT Services BV

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 10:15am

Many projects implicitly use some kind of risk-based approach for prioritizing testing activities. However, critical testing decisions should be based on a product risk assessment process using key business drivers as its foundation. For agile projects, this assessment should be both thorough and lightweight. Erik van Veenendaal discusses PRISMA (PRoduct RISk MAnagement), a highly practical method for performing systematic product risk assessments. Learn how to employ PRISMA techniques in agile projects using Risk Poker.