Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. Lightning Talks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking and offer the chance to try conference speaking without the heavy commitment. Lightning Talks are an opportunity to present your single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea quickly. Use this as an opportunity to give a first time talk or to present a new topic for the first time. Maybe you just want to ask a question, invite people to help you with your project, boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up a full track presentation. For more information on how to submit your Lightning Talk, visit www.sqe.com/lightningtalks.asp. Hurry! The
deadline for submissions is October 1, 2005.

Open source software has come a long way in the past few years. However, for automated testing there still are not many ready-made solutions. Testers often must spend their time working on test cases rather than working on a test automation framework. Allen Hutchison describes the elements of an automated test framework and demonstrates a framework that you can quickly assemble from several open source software tools. He then explains how to put the pieces together with a scripting language such as Perl. Once you build the framework, you can improve and reuse it in future test projects. At the end of the presentation, Google will release the described framework as a new open source project that you can begin using immediately.

Globalization testing encompasses both internationalization testing and localization testing. Localization testing focuses on system details that must be modified for a particular location, region, or culture. These include language, appropriate idioms, currency formats, alphabetic sort order, left/right vs. right/left language display, date/time formats, and clip art and photograph appropriateness. The necessity of testing these is generally well understood. Terry Shidner points out that before localization testing is performed, the system must first undergo internationalization testing. This type of testing is important to verify the readiness of the system for the localization work. For example, has the system been implemented without embedded text strings? Has all text input, processing, and display been implemented with Unicode?

You have the automation tool. You have the right technical skills. You have the application experts at your disposal. It's time to jump in and start coding! Or is it? Many well-intentioned test automation efforts fail due to a lack of planning. Steve Walters describes his practical approach for developing an overall test automation strategy. Learn how to plan for automation success, select the right tests to automate, and prioritize them for a faster return on investment. By quickly eliminating poor automation candidates and using Steve's scorecard to assess the value of automating a test, you will be on the right track to achieving your automation goals. Take away a quantitative approach for deciding what to automate-and what not to automate-and the steps to develop a realistic plan and timeline for getting the job done.