people management

Conference Presentations

Building a Learning QA Organization

As managers, we're stewards of our company's assets. Each team's capacity to learn-and rate of learning-should be treated as something to be developed, just like coding skills and other intangible corporate assets. Like many software teams, the QA team needs to be able to ramp up fast. However, due to the diversity of projects and customers, they need to know and grow even faster than most. Bill Goleman shares tricks of the learning trade and shows managers how to enhance team learning skills at little or no cost to the company.

Bill Goleman, Mangosoft, Inc.
The Change Agent: Leveraging the Testing Role

How can you help change your corporate culture to appropriately regard the role of testing? In this presentation, David Capocci shows you how to position testing as a valued part of the project team. Since testers provide the expertise in such critical areas as defect detection and prevention, their merit can be leveraged simply by making their function understood by other roles, e.g. developers, business analysts, and project managers.

David Capocci, SAFECO Insurance
Internationalizing Your QA Process

The main topics of this presentation are: Understanding G11N, I18N and L10N; Planning for a Global QA Process; Overcoming Language-Specific Testing; and Selecting the Proper Tools.

Benson Margulies and Tom Lee, Basis Technology
The Global Challenge: Quality Assurance for Worldwide Markets

Many software applications are hosted in worldwide data centers, simultaneously launched with multiple language user interfaces, and continuously upgraded in rolling release cycles. Yet few software development organizations have a clear strategy for testing internationalized (I18N) products. Join presenter Steve Nemzer for an insider's view into the fascinating cultural, technical, and linguistic challenges faced by today's internationalization engineers.

Steve Nemzer, VeriTest
Baby Steps-Testing Therapy for Developers

Learn from a "developer-in-recovery" the strategies for overcoming testing phobia and testing animosity among developers. Now a "convert" to disciplined, quality-oriented software development, Susan Joslyn provides you with approaches that are helpful in educating developers, most of whom actually want to make a better contribution to quality practices. The testers who must beg, cajole, and trick their developers into using them will benefit greatly from attending this session.

Susan Joslyn, SJ+ Systems Associates, Inc
Critical Skills and Effective Attitudes for Testers

What distinguishes good testers? Some characteristics explained in this presentation:

  • the right attitudes
  • the appropriate skills
  • continuous skills growth
Rex Black, Rex Black Consulting Services, Inc.
Virtual Test Management: Rapid Testing Over Multiple Time Zones

With the ever-changing challenges of testing, here comes the latest one: managing multiple test locations. More and more companies are spreading testing organizations throughout the country and the world. Based on real-life experiences of the speakers, learn the mistakes to avoid and the lessons learned in managing multiple sites. Discover how the Virtual Test Manager can manage a dispersed test organization without having to always be physically present.

Jim Bampos, VeriTest and Eric Patel, Nokia
A Short Course in Managing Expectations

Have you ever delivered exactly what your customers said they wanted, and still they were dissatisfied? This session uses a case study of one such experience as the basis for introducing information, tools, and guidelines to help you better manage expectations. Naomi Karten addresses issues such as how to build a strong foundation, avoid conflicting interpretations, implement effective feedback-gathering processes, and understand the other party's perspective.

Naomi Karten, Karten Associates
Teams, Governance, and the Evolution of Social Systems

While there are good reasons to use teams for software projects, there are also many well-documented challenges and pitfalls. One of the most important decisions for any team is the governance model they choose to abide by. By examining how social systems evolve and the different types of decision-making models they use, we can successfully modify our team approach, especially when work-like software development-is technical and creative in nature. This presentation shows you how to use this context to apply these social structure principles to extract maximal benefits from your team.

Russell Roundtree, Landmark Graphics
Speaking to Your Management: What Do You Do When They Do Not Listen

This presentation explains some of the language barriers and experience barriers between management and quality assurance professionals.

Ed Weller, Software Technology Transition

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