Many application performance failures are episodic, leading to frustrated users calling help desks, frantic troubleshooting of production systems, and re-booting systems. Often these failures are a result of subtle interactions between code and the configuration of multiple servers. On the other hand, well-designed applications should demonstrate gradual performance degradation and advanced warning of the need to add hardware capacity. Join Ron Bodkin as he discusses the patterns of application failure, some common examples, and testing techniques to help reduce the likelihood of episodic failures in production. Learn about the tools and techniques needed to instrument the application, monitor the infrastructure, collect systems data, analyze it, and offer insight for corrective actions.

Is there an important technical test issue bothering you? Or, as a test engineer, are you looking for some career advice? If so, join experienced facilitators Esther Derby and Elisabeth Hendrickson for "Testing Dialogues-Technical Issues." Practice the power of group problem solving and develop novel approaches to solving your big problem. This double-track session takes on technical issues, such as automation challenges, model-based testing, testing immature technologies, open source test tools, testing web services, and career development. You name it! Share your expertise and experiences, learn from the challenges and successes of others, and generate new topics in real-time. Discussions are structured in a framework so that participants receive a summary of their work product after the conference.

You've heard of eXtreme Programming (XP) and perhaps Scrum. How about Crystal Clear, Adaptive Software Development, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Rational Unified Process for Agile Development, and Feature Driven Development? These are some of the many variations of Agile development methods. Join Jeff McKenna as he explores the many flavors of Agile development methods and explains the similarities and differences. Find out what aspects of Agile development can help your organization’s development team in its particular environment. If you are considering Agile development and need to decide in which direction to go, this session is for you. Although a one-hour session cannot provide all the information you will need, you can explore what is common-the philosophy, the values, the characteristics-and what is different-the methods, the coverage, the costs-about different Agile approaches.

Think about it ... You are responsible for performance testing a system containing over 5 billion searchable documents to an active user base of 2.6 million users, and you are expected to deliver notification of sub-second changes in release response and certification of extremely high reliability and availability. Your n-tier architecture consists of numerous mainframes and large-scale UNIX
servers as well as Intel processor-based servers. The test environment architecture is distributed across large numbers of servers performing shared functions for a variety of products competing for test time and resources during aggressive release cycles. Because it is impractical and too costly to totally isolate systems at this scale, capacity and performance test engineers produce high quality