Conference Presentations
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STAREAST 2009: What Price Truth? When a Tester is Asked to Lie As testers, our job is to report the current state of software quality on our projects. But in the high-stakes, high-risk business of software development, some may pressure us to distort the message. When projects are late or quality is poor, software managers' reputations-even their jobs-may be on the line. Our testing progress report could be the biggest obstacle to a "green light" project status report or an on-time delivery. When testers see project disconnects-rosy status reports and repeatedly late delivery; managers shutting down open discussions of project risks; managers trying to close down testing that is exposing major bugs; or suggestions to "get creative" with the metrics-we need to beware. Fiona Charles discusses the reasons testers must refuse to compromise reality, how to secure detailed records of project progress and status, and the possibility of having to "blow the whistle"-regardless of the consequences. |
Fiona Charles
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STAREAST 2009: Improving the Skills of Software Testers Many test training courses include the topic of "soft skills for testers," specifically their attitudes and social behaviors. Testers are told that to be effective they need a negative mindset and a negative approach. Krishna Iyer and Mukesh Mulchandani challenge this belief. Having trained more than 5,000 testers in testing skills and more than 500 testers in essential thinking skills, Krishna and Mukesh demonstrate that testers must be creative rather than critical, positive rather than destructive, and empathetic rather than negative. Join them as they lead exercises in creative thinking, critical writing, and collaborative speaking to improve your eye for detail, nose for sniffing out defects, and ear for bias. Eliminate the old beliefs that hinder testers and find out how to deconstruct them and inculcate new, more powerful ones into your test organization. |
Krishna Iyer, ZenTEST Labs
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STAREAST 2009: Five Things Every Tester Must Do Are you a frustrated tester or test manager? Are you questioning whether or not a career in testing is for you? Do you wonder why others in your organization seem unenthusiastic about quality? If the answer is "yes" to any of these questions, this session is for you. Julie Gardiner explores five directives to help testers make a positive impact within their organization and increase professionalism in testing. Remember quality-it's not just effort, it's effort and quality; it’s date and quality; it's functionality and quality. Learn to enjoy testing and have fun-the closest job to yours is blowing up things in the movies. Relish your testing challenges-it;s you against the software and sometimes, it seems, the world. Choose your battles-take a stand on issues that are vital and let the small things go. And most importantly, remember that the only real power we have springs from our integrity-don't sell that at any price. |
Julie Gardiner, Grove Consultants
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No: Such a Difficult Word When people begin to get overworked, it's common to fall back on blaming the old chestnut "time management." But the problem may have less to do with how you allocate time to projects than your inability to say no to some of those projects in the first place. In this article, Johanna Rothman takes a look at the difficulty of saying no and offers some suggestions for overcoming it. |
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Adapting Inspections to the Twenty-first Century How do you adapt inspections to a twenty-first century distributed workforce? A key part of the inspection process is the team meeting, which provides peer pressure to participate and consensus on defects. Teams working in multiple time zones have limited opportunities for the team meeting. A list of requirements and the functions needed to solve this problem based on real-world experiences should help anyone faced with this problem. |
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Predicting the Past Developing an accurate prediction process is complex, time consuming, and difficult. But, basing predictions on causality rather than correlation and learning how to "predict the past" can help us gain confidence in the validity of our work. |
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Avoiding Half-baked Discovery It can be difficult to explain to your customer why cutting half of the features doesn't cut half of the time and cost. Every software project has fixed costs that often get overlooked in project planning—setting up development environments, ramp-up, building frameworks, and setting up configuration management to name a few. Read on for some ideas on how you can position this with your customer. |
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Principles for managing a Scrum-based Agile Program Agile project management philosophy, though not very different from the traditional management practices and framework, needs to be rationalized to suit the demands of the agile methodologies. The project management practice remains the same for requirements, planning, initiating and tracking the progress of the project in line with the business vision. However, the focus is more on adaptability towards changing requirements, team work, collaboration and the ability to plan and deliver small chunks of useable software in short intervals of time |
Anonymous
July 7, 2009 |
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Timing Matters in Managing Change Implementing change can be a colossal challenge. People tend to prefer what's familiar, safe, and predictable to that which is new, unfamiliar, uncertain, confusing, or potentially risky. But the timing of a change effort can influence how readily people accept the change and adjust to it. |
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Independent Testers? Or Independent Thinkers? In this article, Lisa Crispin recalls a time when testers alone were solely responsible for software quality, and compares that to more modern thinking where collaboration between developers and testers is king. Software quality is everyone's job, sometimes it takes independence to get there. |
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