Quality Assurance, Testing, Configuration Management for 2008

10:00 AM

Using Offshore Resources for Efficient Quality Assurance

Holly Barsamian
Senior Software Quality Analyst – Steelcase, Inc

Outsourcing is “in”. The majority of companies are using resources outside of their company to help them accomplish their work. You will see a working example of how a specific type of outsourcing – offshoring – can be successfully used to augment a Quality Assurance team. You will leave with an understanding of how the need in our organization for staff augmentation was realized, based on the structure of our QA group and corresponding QA process. Only briefly touching on selecting a vendor, the focus of this presentation will be on what it took to set up a successful process to work with the offshore team. You will get specific examples of processes put into place that will work in any outsourcing relationship, not necessarily just offshoring. You will learn some of the benefits we realized, and probably more importantly, some of the things that we would do differently if we could do it all over again!

10:50 AM

Taking the ‘Pro’ Out of ‘Process’: Test Process Improvement for Everyone

Jess Lancaster
QA/Testing Advisor – Accident Fund Insurance Company of America

You’ve wrestled for years with how to improve your test process – a template here and a procedure there. After all the pain and no gain you just wish that there was a guide, a roadmap so to speak, with an assessment that you can complete yourself and even practical step-by-step recommendations on how to improve! Well, there is. Find out how you can apply the Test Process Improvement (TPI) model to your organization and get real payback.

In this presentation you will:

  • Learn ways to increase awareness for test process improvement in your organization
  • Gain an understanding of the Test Process Improvement model framework
  • Understand how to carry out an assessment, prioritize improvements, and implement them
  • Examine a real assessment using the scoring tool

12:40 PM

Requirements Driven Quality Management

Steven Dykstra
Director, Field Technical Sales – Compuware

In many organizations that develop software systems, quality practices are still more of an art than a science. One common problem is that too many organizations base their tests and test plans off of the system after it is built. This practice hurts quality practices (and outcomes) in two fundamental ways. First, it puts the quality team at the back end of the life cycle with little time to plan or test. Secondly, as opposed to validating the system meets customer requirements, the quality team ends up validating the system works as the developers intended. This presentation will discuss the virtues of a requirements-driven quality assurance method that embodies a philosophy that superior quality starts with and is driven by great requirements. It will compare and contrast the current state of quality management practices and a requirements-driven approach and show the positive effects of a requirements-driven method. Conference attendees will gain new insights into the latest techniques for quality management and an understanding of how a requirements-driven approach can drive more efficiency, agility, and better outcomes into their software life cycles.

1:30 PM

Service Level Agreements for Quality Assurance

Holly Barsamian
Senior Software Quality Analyst – Steelcase, Inc

IT as a service organization is becoming a popular trend. Long established areas of IT organizations, such as infrastructure and application development, are developing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to allocate their services and resources to projects and groups throughout an organization. This is a newer concept with Quality Assurance groups. This presentation will propose the idea of Quality Assurance groups establishing SLAs for the use of their service. You will get background information on how our Quality Assurance group realized the need for defined SLAs, how we are defining our services, and how those services can be combined into different types of SLAs to be used by those groups who want our services. This presentation should spark some ideas around Quality Assurance as a service, encourage a dialogue around the topic, and allow you to bring ideas back to your organization.

2:50 PM

Automation using Virtualization

Mona Shah
Software/QA Engineer – Interactive Data Real-Time Services

Virtualization environments have been a boon to computing, enabling testers to easily set up, store and maintain legacy operating system platforms and applications, and enable different production phases to be produced in a staged testing environment.

In this session, you will learn how to use automation software to save resources effectively. You will also find the role of automation in agile testing, traditional test automation tools and the challenges and the advantages of test automation. When you leave this session, you will be familiar with the techniques to effectively automate virtual testing with fewer resources and use event-based testing. Attendees will learn:

  • Leveraging automation testing
  • Choosing proper testing tools
  • Automation and Virtualization techniques
  • Optimize test/development infrastructure
  • Automation framework

3:40 PM

Testing for the Web

Jeff McWherter
Director of Software Development – A.J. Boggs and Company

Your small web application has grown into a monster. Manual testing is not cutting it anymore, and you are looking for ideas on how to apply automated testing to an existing application. You would like to put concepts you have heard about such as Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development into practice, but are unsure of where to start.

This session will start with the basic concepts of testing applications, such as what to test and what not to test and then move into testing patterns. After the testing basics are covered we will cover how to implement these practices on web applications. The remainder of the session will be spent explaining how to use tools such as Waitr, Selenium, nUnit and Visual Studio Team Test Suite to create automated unit, functional and performance tests. Concepts and some tools in this session are technology agnostic, but all tools will be run in Windows.