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Getting to the Promised Land with CMMI® and CMM® Processess In hopes of delivering better software, cheaper and faster, many organizations have implemented the Capability Maturity Model (CMM®) or the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI®) for Software. Thinking that such a successful model must work, other organizations have instituted many of these practices. Although some organizations have achieved their maturity level and improvement goals, most have seen little or no financial benefits. Find out if the underlying principles of the CMMI® and CMM® can help deliver higher productivity, predictability, and speed into your development. Get a truthful answer to the classic CMM® paradox: If you're doing more work, how can it cost less and take less time? You will take away practical tips and techniques for realizing the qualitative and quantitative benefits promised by CMMI® and CMM®.
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Rick Hefner, Northrop Grumman Corporation
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How Testers Can Fill the Requirements Gap Testers frequently are frustrated by having to test a system without an adequate understanding of the expected results of the tests, often because the requirements are not well-documented. Therefore, good testers learn how to discover the requirements they and developers need to do their jobs. Robin Goldsmith identifies approaches that testers can use to reverse engineer requirements and also highlights the need to differentiate and focus on user (functional) and system (non-functional) requirements. Learn to infer requirements from designs and understand the power of using approximations for corroboration. Find out how to back into more testable requirements by asking the right questions of the right people at the right time. Gain access to and cooperation from the business side while at the same time winning developers' appreciation.
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Robin Goldsmith, Go Pro Management, Inc.
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Better Software Conference 2005: Software Production Line Automation with Concurrent Development In some contexts, the software development process can be optimized when it is thought of-and run-like a highly automated manufacturing production line. Rather than producing many identical widgets like a manufacturing plant, software organizations produce many programming changes. These changes may not be identical like manufactured widgets, but programming changes can start looking a lot like widgets when you look at the big picture. In this session, Tom Tyler describes how to bring the processes and benefits normally associated with manufacturing to software development-efficiency, reliability, and extensive automation. Manufacturing organizations invest heavily in tooling and infrastructure to automate production lines, and they reap great rewards in efficiency.
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C Thomas Tyler, The Go To Group Inc
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Cut the Cards When You Play for Money: Overcoming Resistance to Risk Management In most organizations, the project game is not going particularly well-we continue high stakes wagers on business projects, but lose more often than we win. Sometimes the losses are staggering. Risk management practices have received increasing attention recently as a way to improve the odds, but there are limits to what risk management can do for an organization in the absence of committed executive sponsors. This session explores strategies for overcoming resistance to risk management and encourages thoughtful engagement between project managers and sponsoring executives as they consider hedging their bets with more effective approaches to risk.
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Payson Hall, Catalysis Group Inc
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A Manager's View -- Evolving from Traditional to Agile Development Go inside a high risk, high reliability application environment with a combination of legacy and newer systems. These highly complex embedded and real-time systems support huge businesses and are expected to operate almost flawlessly every time. Most of the systems were originally developed with traditional waterfall and iterative processes and require extensive development documentation. So, how have they adopted leading edge Agile concepts with the full support of management while continuing to deliver products with the reliability demanded by their customers? Jon Hagar tells a fascinating story with many lessons for those of us living with hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code that run our businesses. To avoid becoming antiquated and ending up losing not only market share but also your best people, you can make a commitment to improvement and evolution into the Agile world.
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Jon Hagar, Jon Hagar Educational Services
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Develop and Deliver Secure Web-based Systems Gartner Group estimates that three-fourths of today's successful Web attacks do not happen via network security flaws but rather by entering directly through defects in application code. To thwart these attacks, you need to institute security procedures and technologies throughout the development lifecycle. Through a review of recent Web application breaches, Dennis Hurst exposes the methods hackers use to execute break-ins via the Web using security defects in the underlying code. In addition to revealing hacker exploits, Dennis outlines coding practices for developing secure Web applications and describes available automated security code testing tools that can help you protect your systems. After completing this session, you will be well versed in the underlying protocols that allow hackers to exploit Web-based applications and, more importantly, understand how to better protect critical applications throughout development.
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Dennis Hurst, SPI Dynamics Inc
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Agile QA - An Oxymoron? Your software development group is adopting Agile practices. Documentation and processes now are lightweight. There are more unit tests, and all are automated. The software changes quickly with new releases every one to two weeks. What's happening with QA? Quality Assurance groups are typically accustomed to more heavyweight processes in which they spend a third or more of their time documenting tests and tracking results. QA groups that automate user interface tests have difficulty keeping up with the rapid changes inherent in an Agile environment. So, is there a need for Agile QA? Based on her experiences on Agile projects and the experiences others have shared with her, Elisabeth Hendrickson shows how QA teams can respond by becoming more Agile themselves and learning new ways to support the team and the users when the development team moves to an Agile process.
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Elisabeth Hendrickson, Quality Tree Software, Inc.
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The Return on Investment for Finding Defects in Test For testers, finding defects is a way of life. However, we usually don't reflect on what an undiscovered defect can cost a business or how much it costs to find defects late in development. Geoff Horne seeks to put real costs on both of these situations and looks at practical ways to reduce the costs of not finding defects. With real-life case studies that you can use to justify the need for more testing, Geoff provides simple measures and statistics to calculate whether your allocation of testing dollars is too high, too low, or just right. Learn to show how testing can actually save money and how to get the best return for your testing dollar. After all, stock market investors assess their options based on risk and potential return. Why should testing be any different?
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Geoff Horne, iSQA
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Classic Mistakes in Testing: Revisited Some common testing practices seem appealing ... but rarely seem to actually work. Yet software development organizations choose them again and again. Project behind schedule? Just shorten the testing phase! Testers pointing out too many problems with the requirements? Kick the testers out of the room! Many of the software testing gurus suggest adding new "best practices" to the test process. Matt Heusser suggests that test process improvement should start by eliminating worst practices instead of adding extra work through new practices. Matt recounts the existing body of classic mistakes offered by Brian Marick and Steve McConnell. Then he offers a new wrinkle: Mistakes often come from a specific root cause such as short-term thinking. Instead of battling over the specific mistake, teams are better off correcting that root cause.
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Matthew Heusser, Priority Health
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Tips for Performing A Test Process Assessment Looking for a systematic model to help improve testing practices within your team, department, or enterprise? Recently, Lee Copeland has led several, major test process assessment projects for both small and large test organizations. Whether you are chosen to lead an assessment project within your organization or just want to get better at testing, join Lee as he shares insights he has learned-beginning with the importance of using a proven assessment model. Lee discusses the pre-assessment preparation required, including reviewing documentation and choosing interview candidates, tips for interviewing using a questionnaire, analyzing the data you gather, writing an assessment report, and delivering your findings in a way that will be understood and acted upon.
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Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
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