There are times in a test manager's career when the work situation becomes surreal. If you've been in situations where you think you must be dreaming, sometimes it helps to look at things from the other person's perspective. As we mature in our jobs, we can examine these situations and see how to better answer the questions we have about unexpected communications. In this session we'll look at some typical conversations and discuss alternative ways to help everyone find the true reality, then better deal with the situation. From her years of experience as a consultant and her personal encounters, Johanna Rothman shares her insights and gets you involved in discovering what's really being said in these strange conversations.

It's time to put a new spin on the technique of keyword testing using a data-driven engine. Brian Qualters shows you how to effectively place your focus not on the action or process to be completed, but rather on the object type that's to be manipulated. This redirected focus lets you avoid the pitfalls and resource requirements encountered when you move to test another application. He gives a demonstration of how this modified approach can be integrated into the manual test case creation as a way to tremendously improve efficiency.

The emergence of the handheld platform is an exciting opportunity to reapply quality and usability paradigms. It gives us the chance to establish new, industrywide quality benchmarks for handheld applications that may propel society beyond the traditional human-machine interface. Handheld-based computing has its potential-and its limits. When moving from desktop-centered quality assurance to handheld-centered applications, there will be changes that affect software testing techniques. We must be prepared. This session covers the basics of handheld automation, details what's needed before designing test automation, and demonstrates a repository for tests designed for the PocketPC.

Developing real-time, automated testing for mission-critical programmable logic controller (PLC)-based control systems has been a challenge for many scientists and engineers. Some have elected to use customized software and hardware as a solution, but that can be expensive and time consuming to develop. Reginald Howard shows you a way to integrate a suite of commercially available, off-the-shelf tools and hardware to develop a scalable, Windows-based testing platform that's capable of performing an array of different tests including, but not limited to, black box, destructive, regression, and system security testing. He describes the use of the Jelinski-Morana statistical model for determining expected results from automated tests.