Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference East 2011

You are probably familiar with maturity models for software development such as CMMI. In this thought-provoking session, Default.aspx Pope and Ellen Hill describe a corresponding five-stage maturity model for software quality engineering-not just testing-which addresses the challenges organizations face when attempting to improve the their software’s quality.

Twenty years of traditional processes produced valuable applications at Integrated Research (IR). However, making changes to software was slow and often introduced quality problems that took months to resolve. When one of their customers offered a great new opportunity, IR had to move with speed they did not possess and achieve a quality level that their old ways would not permit.

Mature agile teams work together to ensure sufficient requirement information is ready when an iteration starts. However, on many teams, developers lack this support and may receive overly detailed-and often ambiguous-requirements that are “thrown over the wall.” Drawing on recent industry research and successes of companies with which he’s worked, Chris Duro shares stories from three companies that evolved an agile adoption requirements readiness assessment framework.

Do you find your organization not achieving the test automation benefits and ROI you expected? Are you spending too much effort rewriting scripts that don't hold up over time? Does your test plan look more like "random acts of automation?" Ayal Cohen describes test automation maturity levels and shares key points on how to determine your test organization's current maturity. Ayal identifies key ideas on how and when to move to the next level.