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Selling Quality: Using Marketing Models Track 1: 2:30 - 4:00 Quality is often an idea that is difficult to sell. Many business leaders have interesting, false, or incomplete perceptions regarding quality and the associated costs. Quality managers have been told that to get the “ear” of senior management they need to present information using terminology that senior management relates to such as “bottom line” or “strategic impact.” Since marketing has a significant presence in business today, a question should be posed. Are there marketing models and approaches that could help quality managers sell quality more effectively? This presentation provides an overview of marketing and selling techniques including actual presentation examples geared toward selling quality. Use of these methods can help management see the alignment and criticality of quality to their business.
About the workshop leader... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dealing With Defects on an Agile Team Track 2: 2:30 - 4:00 Software defects are annoyances for everyone. If your organization is like most and you have a large queue of defects waiting to be fixed, this session is for you. It's probably not realistic to think we'll get around to fixing all of these bugs, so we need to consider other approaches. Janet will facilitate this workshop to help you develop a strategy for how your team can address defects in an agile manner. The group will discuss alternatives to traditional bug reporting and how a shift in your team's mindset toward preventing bugs in the first place is critical.
About the workshop leader... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Achieving Developer and Tester Collaboration Track 3: 2:30 - 4:00 Despite outfitting both your development and test teams with the best tools available, are they still unable to work together in a reasonable manner? Are reported defects dismissed by the development team due to a lack of detailed, technical information? Has one of your developers ever told one of your testers, “Well, it works on my machine?” Are you unable to trace from a requirement down to both development and test? Have you struggled to build out and maintain a test environment, perhaps using virtualization, which serves the needs of both development and test? Attend this workshop and learn how the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 family of tools can save you from this level of dysfunction and enable highly leveraged, collaborative developer and test teams across a wide range of platforms and technologies.
About the workshop leader... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Deception Dangers of the Numbers Game Track 4: 2:30 - 4:00 Many of us have crafted numbers and proudly reported them as valuable insight on product quality. The drive to quantify and justify our projects through metrics is pervasive. Many stakeholders crave metrics in the hopes of simplifying their decision making process. Many testers are quick to respond with extensive graphs and charts. However, there is a serious problem in attempting to articulate the state of the testing solely through metrics. How do you identify the “right” metrics? How do you ensure those metrics are sufficient, accurate and conclusive? This session will review the importance of moving beyond the numbers game, placing less emphasis on providing the “right” metrics and more emphasis on the contextual conversation metrics should be generating. You will leave this session understanding the importance of educating stakeholders to question the numbers and instead engage in a discussion to better understand what is known and unknown about the product.
About the workshop leader... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Risk-Based Testing on Steroids Track 5: 2:30 - 4:00 As organizations strive to hurry up software development in order to reduce time-to-market, there is significant probability that the software development processes will be compromised to “make the date.” These compromises always seem to have a negative effect on the test team who has the difficult, if not impossible, task of helping ensure a quality release before shipping. Todd will discuss ways test managers can implement risk-based testing and describe fundamental quality and risk management techniques that can be leveraged throughout the development life cycle. Join Todd and learn the essentials of managing risk: identification, analysis, prioritization, response planning, resolution, and monitoring. Additionally, you’ll learn the basics of risk-based testing, what it is, why it’s relevant to testing, how to implement it in your organization, and how to apply it throughout the software development lifecycle.
About the workshop leader... Finding a Fit for Agile in Your Corporate Culture Track 1: 2:30 - 4:00 Agile has a quick, brilliant, but far too often, brief impact on organizations, a shooting star effect. Why? It boils down to how well agile fits within your organizational culture. Long-term success applying agile principles and practices requires compatibility with corporate culture. Finding a fit can be challenging, but the payoff can be significant. This workshop looks at the impact of organizational culture on the sustainability of agile principles and practices and offers insights on how to improve your organization's chances of long term success with agile.
About the workshop leader... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Requirements Exploration with Tester Collaboration Track 2: 2:30 - 4:00 Collaboratively exploring requirements using analysis techniques enables product stakeholders, including testers, to build a shared understanding of needs. Defining acceptance criteria in tandem with requirements analysis verifies and specifies requirements early. Identifying acceptance criteria during requirements exploration acts as a form of low-fidelity requirements testing, exposes requirements misunderstandings, and increases the quality of team interactions. In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn the essentials of requirements concepts, practices, and elicitation techniques and you’ll explore a subset of analysis models useful for analyzing and testing requirements. You’ll participate in a simulation using analysis models to explore requirements while defining acceptance tests. Join us to learn how tester participation in requirements exploration adds value early, seeds development of tests, and delivers high-quality requirements specifications.
About the workshop leader... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ten Tips for Tackling Test Automation Track 3: 2:30 - 4:00 Organizations take on the challenge of test automation for a variety of reasons, but the overriding factor is always to realize a return on investment and, it is a significant investment. If the organization cannot save or earn more money using automation tools, then they should not be using the tools. After all, why make the investment? Objectives toward the goal of realizing an R.O.I. often include a faster testing process, better software though more validation, fewer resources required, and reduction in human error. Why then do so many organizations fall victim to the same common pitfalls? Why is it that so many automation solutions become "shelf-ware?" Is it the automation software or the resources? Or is it, perhaps, the lack of a planned automation methodology and approach? Bob will address all of these challenges and explain how organizations can tackle them head-on!
About the workshop leader... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Exploratory on Purpose Track 5: 2:30 - 4:00 Ever use the term "playing around" to describe your testing? Ever cringe after saying it, wishing there was a better way of describing what you did than to give the impression it was all accidental and random? If so, this workshop may help you understand and explain exploratory testing as a thoughtful, strategic approach that can stand up under scrutiny. Jon will talk about general and specific skills and tactics that comprise exploration, such as modeling, branching, threading, and conjecturing, to name a few. Join Jon and learn how to focus on bug isolation and investigation, and to expose risks and vulnerabilities. Discover frameworks and heuristics of exploration to use when you feel stuck, or feel that the product has not been tested as well as it should be and you need to dig deeper.
About the workshop leader... Converting QUEST Ideas into Real Testing Improvements Track 3: 1:00 - 3:00 So, where do you go from here? QUEST 2011 is drawing to a close. You've spent the week attending tutorials, workshops, and presentations where you've been inundated with exciting and motivating ideas. You can hardly wait to start applying these ideas back in the real world. Yet, far too often, conference attendees return to work with great intentions that fade away under the pressure of their day-to-day commitments. What you need now is a game plan that will help you put what you've learned to work for you. By combining a thought-provoking presentation with collaborative hands-on activities, this workshop will give you the opportunity to assess the current level of testing maturity within your organization in terms of people, process and technology, determine your target level, and set up a plan that will put you on the road to getting from where you are today to where you need to be.
About the workshop leader... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peak Performance: The Connection between Productivity and Stress Track 2: 1:00 - 3:00 Are you expected to do more with less? It’s hard to hear and hard to do. It doesn’t just happen because someone says that’s what is needed. This highly interactive session looks at how to boost productivity in uncomplicated ways by using stress to one’s advantage. Not all stress is bad stress. While our initial reaction is often that stress is the cause for us to underperform, stress is often necessary to help us reach our peak performance and the highest level of productivity. Dealing effectively with stress, both the good and the bad, can lead to increased productivity. This session uses experiential activities to ground the concepts that are discussed, allowing participants to understand and explore how to increase the positive effects of stress while decreasing the negative ones. Participants will gain practical information and techniques that can immediately be used to increase productivity in stressful work environments.
About the workshop leaders... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Improving Productivity Through Automation Best Practices Track 3: 1:00 - 3:00 In this workshop, Arthur will explain how software development teams, including QA testers, can improve their productivity by introducing automated best practices into their process and monitoring them closely. Arthur will begin by discussing how these best practices can reduce development costs and help teams deliver better code in less time. He will introduce various techniques such as automated builds, automated static analysis, code reviews and inspections, and automated testing that have been shown to help teams achieve substantial benefits. Then, Arthur will demonstrate how to leverage automation to ensure that it is applied consistently, objectively, and non-intrusively. Finally, the workshop will conclude by exploring ways to use these practices to measure, control, and improve the team’s overall process.
About the workshop leader... --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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