Innovation is a word tossed around frequently in organizations today. The standard clichés are "Do more with less" and "Be creative." Companies want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, implement, prioritize, and track their innovation efforts. Using the Innovation to Types- model, Jennifer Bonine will help you transform your thinking regarding innovation and understand if your team and company goals match their innovation efforts. Learn how to classify your activities as "core" (to the business) or "context" (essential, but non-revenue generating). Once you understand how your innovation activities are related to revenue generating activities, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core or context activities.

When do you ship an application and expose it to your customers and users? The answer seems simple-you ship it when it's ready. However, there are many possible definitions of "ready." According to Peter Varhol, customers, users, and development teams must all agree on what this term means-before work begins on the project. Otherwise, you may be tempted to deploy an application before its product goals are met. Peter Varhol presents different approaches to determining when an application has the required quality to be ready to ship. He describes how to determine and track quality measures, so that the team actively works toward getting the application ready to deploy and knows what needs to be done to ensure fitness for deployment. Learn what factors on which to base your ready-to-ship decision so that the project team and the business will know whether to continue working or declare, "Ready."

Many test leaders believe that development, business, and management don't understand, support, or properly value our contributions. You know what-these test leaders are probably right! So, why do they feel that way? Bob Galen believes it’s our inability and ineffectiveness in communicating-selling-ourselves, our abilities, our contributions, and our value to the organization. As testers, we believe that the work speaks for itself. Wrong! We must work harder to create the crucial conversations that communicate our value and impact. Bob shares specific techniques for holding context-based conversations, producing informative status reports, conducting attention-getting quality assessments, and delivering solid defect reports. Learn how to improve your communication skills so that key partners understand your role, value, and contributions.

The basic problem in software testing is choosing a subset from the near infinite number of possible test cases. Testers must select test cases to design, create, and then execute. Often, test resources are limited-but you still want to select the best possible set of tests. Peter M. Kruse and Magdalena Luniak share their experiences designing test cases with the Classification-Tree Editor (CTE XL), the most popular tool for systematic black-box test case design of classification tree-based tests. Peter and Magdalena show how to integrate weighting factors into classification trees and automatically obtain prioritized test suites. In addition to “classical” approaches such as minimal combination and pair-wise, they share new generation rules and demonstrate the upcoming version of CTE XL that supports prioritization by occurrence probability, error probability, or risk.