Conference Presentations

Bottlenecks Exposed: The Most Frequently Found Performance Problems

Dan Downing's experience with stress testing projects has revealed a handful of common denominators present in most Web site performance problems. These include memory starvation; a CPU-gobbling database access; improperly sized heaps, caches, and pools; poor application design; and load balancing that doesn't balance. This presentation uses actual B2C and B2B project examples to show you a symptom-measurement-diagnostic approach to understanding, exposing, and documenting these common problems.

Dan Downing, Mentora
Learning to Test Wirelessly

Wireless testing is closely related to Web testing, but they are not twins. While wired Web access has settled on a handful of platforms with a few dominant operating systems, the wireless world is still a riot of platforms with a small number of operating systems and a myriad of browsers. There's also no way to test a wireless tool directly the way you can a Web site, because the tools rely primarily on emulators. Geraldine Conley talks about these and other surprising experiences in the wireless testing arena. She also covers the testing processes most affected by wireless technology: document reviews, the change control board, and configuration management.

Geraldine Conley, Golden-Gate Technologies, Inc.
Flight Recorders: Analyze and Fix Defects Quickly

Users find 25 percent of your defects after your software goes live, according to a recent study. In addition to being expensive to fix, these post-ship defects often prove impossible to find due to the many potential user environments out there. Flight recorders are new tools, named after those already present on aircraft, that trace the execution of an application in or before production. Their job is to collect information while the system runs. Then, if a problem or failure occurs, you can examine the trace file and discover what operations led to the problem without actually having to recreate the problem.

Oliver Cole, OC Systems, Inc.
DAST: The Diagnostic Approach to Software Testing

Every test manager knows the pain of testing in a chaotic environment. The DAST (Diagnostic Approach to Software Testing) process allows you to cut through the chaos by implementing a strategic way to test products and releases, even when you don't have good product requirements or documentation. Founded on the premise of asking systematic questions to build test cases, Hung Nguyen takes participants through the process, which ultimately leads to valid requirements, specifications, and test cases.

Hung Nguyen, LogiGear Corporation
Enjoying the Perks of Model-Based Testing

Software testing demands the use of some model to guide such test tasks as selecting test inputs, validating
the adequacy of tests, and gaining insight into test effectiveness. Most testers gradually build a mental
model of the system under test, which would enable them to further understand and better test its many
functions. Explicit models, being formal and precise representations of a tester’s perception of a program,
are excellent shareable, reusable vehicles of communication between and among testers and other teams
and of automation for many tasks that are normally tedious and labor-intensive.

Ibrahim K. El-Far, Florida Institute of Technology
Testing an eCommerce Shopping Cart Site

Karen Johnson takes attendees through a shopping session that recreates a number of possible scenarios-and highlights what can go wrong. She'll also explain how to prevent defects from going live on your production Web site. From securing transactions to managing cart contents, this talk is a must for anyone involved in the eCommerce arena.

Karen N. Johnson, Peapod, Inc.
The Simplest Automated Unit Test Framework That Could Possibly Work

Everyone pays lip service to the importance of unit testing, but rarely do developers actually integrate unit testing into their daily routine. In the spirit of eXtreme Programming, this presentation offers a simple two-class framework for automating unit tests in three popular languages: C++, Java, and C. No GUI, no templates, just a fast and productive way of organizing and running suites of unit tests. You'll walk away wondering how you have done without this simple technique for so long.

Chuck Allison, Utah Valley State College
Software Code Inspection for Defect Prevention

Thousands of hours are spent testing, but most software professionals find that traditional testing simply isn't enough to ensure code quality. This presentation gives software professionals a complementary approach: software inspection. Learn how software inspection differs from traditional testing, and gain an understanding of principal inspection techniques.

Jasper Kamperman, Reasoning
How to Break Out of the Same Old Routine with Retrospectives

How many times have you finished testing on a release and said "Boy, I never want to go through one like that again." Or have you ever had a project canceled and said "If only I would have known at the beginning, what I know now, I would have done things a lot differently." Or when you finished testing on release one, said “next time I want to do it differently,” then said the same thing on releases two, three, and four? If any of these thoughts resonate with you, then I think you will be interested in the Lessons Learned process. Lessons Learned is a powerful post-mortem process that can be used at the end of a project, phase, or deliverable to evaluate how things went, and what could be improved.

Randy Slade, Kaiser Permanente Information Technology
Is Quality Negotiable? Experiences of an eXtreme Programming Tester

If you want a higher quality product in an eXtreme Programming (XP) project, you must be prepared to pay a higher price. We make decisions and compromises based on quality versus cost every day. Extreme programming teams are driven to do their best work, but customers have the right to specify and pay for only the level of quality they require. This presentation explores ways to resolve these two potentially conflicting points of view.

Lisa Crispin, BoldTech Systems

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