Focusing on the customer throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is difficult to do. Teams often can become mired in technical problems, internal resource limitations, or other issues. Following the customer mantra of "Faster! Better! Cheaper!" Steve Wrenn offers measurement and process techniques that he has used to deliver projects on time, on budget, and, most importantly, meeting customers needs. By focusing on the development cycle from the outside in, his organization provides business-based metrics dashboards to monitor and adjust the project plan throughout the development project. Find out how their performance dashboard helps the team and the customer stay on course and drive directly to the targeted results. Discover an approach to determine what customers really want and match product development to customer expectations.

Today's business world relies heavily on transactions conducted through the web. Because of this, brand image and how a web site is rendered to customers has become increasingly important. A poorly functioning web site poses significant risk for web-based companies. This presentation discusses the challenges involved when testing to ensure the quality of your company's web site and to ensure that the components of the site function properly. With the ever-increasing web complexity, specific tools and processes are required to manage these challenges.

• Discover ways to ensure that your web site reflects your privacy policy
• Learn how to manage your web sites's links to ensure that they remain current and unbroken, and ensure that web content is accessible to users
• Learn about specific tools and processes to test and manage your web site

Many businesses are looking for the right project measures as they relate to project planning, scheduling, and performance. Mark Blackburn gives guidance on defining, collecting, and analyzing measures derived from a model-based testing method. These measures and their use are described in terms of an information model adapted from the ISO/IEC 15939, Software Engineering-Software Measurement Process. The model-based method associated with these measures involves modeling requirements and mapping modeled requirement variables, referred to as object mappings, to interfaces of the target test system.

• Fundamental units of measure derived from model-based artifacts
• Graphical representations of measures and how to use them to estimate project duration
• Real-time project data used to predict the completion of an ongoing project

Today's complex software systems access heterogeneous data from a variety of back-end databases. The intricate mix of client-server and Web-enabled database applications are extremely difficult to test productively. Testing at the data access layer is the point at which your application
communicates with the database. Tests at this level are vital to improve not only your overall test strategy, but also your product's quality. Mary Sweeney explains what you need to know to test the SQL database engine, stored procedures, and data views. Find out how to design effective automated tests that exercise the complete database layer of your applications. You'll learn about the most common and vexing defects related to SQL databases and the best tools available to support your testing efforts.