Testing dialogues are a unique platform for you to share your ideas and learn from experienced testers from around the world. In this double session, test managers engage in in-depth, small group discussions with their peers. You'll share your expertise and experiences, learn from others’ challenges and successes, and generate new topics in real-time. Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby facilitate this session, focusing on management issues such as: release criteria; determining ROI of test; coaching and feedback; managing new employees; estimating test time and resources. Bring your BIG issue and start a new dialog with your management peers. Discussions are structured in a framework so that participants will receive a summary or their work product after the conference.

With the introduction of the new J2EE (1.4) and .NET platforms, the middleware tier of software applications just became more complex. How do you test an application that uses up to 20 major APIs? Using case study of such an application, Frank Cohen describes how to test functionality, scalability, and performance. In this environment, testers and developers must work together, beginning with automated unit testing and continuing through integration and into system testing. Take away the test agent code, documentation, and installation instructions you’ll need to run the same tests in your own environments under a free, open-source license.

How can your test organization help drive improvement in the overall software lifecycle? During the past several years, Capital One Financial has developed a Testing Center of Excellence (COE) that brought together disparate testing organizations to align their test processes and technical discipline. In addition to the measurable results of the COE, this initiative has supported and encouraged similar improvements in requirements development, project management, systems architecture, and software development methods. Learn how to significantly increase the business awareness of testing’s value and establish testing at the critical element to quality delivery in your organization.

Reliable and consistent performance must be an integral part of your software's release criteria and specifically tested during quality assurance. Learn the key elements of building a performance benchmark for your application. Steve Rabin describes a roles-based approach for performance testing benchmark and shares the methodology he has used numerous times. With this process, you define metrics, workload characteristics, transactional definitions, and utilization assumptions.