7th ANNUAL STANZ

“An enjoyable mix of speakers. Great topics.”

Erik van Veenendaal
(Netherlands)
Vice President ISTQB

Elisabeth Hendrickson
(USA)
Quality Tree Software

Ray Arell
(USA)
Intel Corporation

Julie Gardiner
(UK)
Grove Consultants

John Eklund
(Australia)
UXResearch

Brett Rogers
(Australia)
Test Manager, Macquarie Bank

Michael Weiner
(Australia)
Associate Director, accuteque

Michael Bolton
(Canada)
DevelopSense

John Lockhart
(New Zealand)
WebTest

Sharon Robson
(Australia)
ANZTB

KEYNOTE:

The TMMi Model

WORKSHOP:

Risk Based Testing In Practice

Erik van Veenendaal

Vice President ISTQB (Netherlands)

Erik is currently the vice-president of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) and the vice-chair of the TMMi Foundation. He is the author of numerous papers and a number of books on software quality and testing, including the best-sellers “Testing According to TMap” and "The Testing Practitioner”.

He is a regular speaker both at national and international testing conferences and at EuroStar’99 and EuroStar’02 conferences he received the best tutorial award for a tutorials on usability testing and test planning and strategies. After a career in software development, he transfered to the area of software quality. As a test manager and test consultant he has been involved in a great number and variety of projects, has implemented structured testing and carried out test process improvements activities in a large number of organisations.

Erik is the founder and Managing Director of Improve Quality Services. and a leading international (ISEB accredited) trainer in the field of software testing.

The TMMi Model

Keynote: Erik van Veenendaal
9:00-10:10 Wellington 11 August and Sydney 14 August

This keynote brings the TMMi Foundation to STANZ and is your chance to learn about the latest initiative in test process improvement.

The Test Maturity Model, developed by the Illinois Institute of Technology, is growing in use across Europe and the USA. It has been developed to compliment the existing CMMi framework. Its growing popularity is based upon it being the only independent test process measurement method, and the simple presentation of maturity levels that it provides

The independent TMMi Foundation initiative has been established with the sole intent of elaborating the TMMi standard and developing a standard TMMi assessment and certification method, with the aim of enabling the standards consistent deployment and the collection of industry metrics.

Erik has much practical experience in implementing the model and helping organisations improve the way they test, and the benefits this can generate. The keynote will present these experiences and benefits with the aim of providing the attendees with the information required to justify a test process improvement project.

Key Points:

• Understanding the objectives and (intermediate) results achieved by using the TMMi
• Understanding of the TMM model and its practical implementation

Risk Based Testing in Practice

Workshop: Erik van Veenendaal
1:00-4:30 Wellington 11 August and Sydney 14 August

Key Points

• Learn from practical experiences at companies such as Philips and Siemens
• Making risk-based testing a tangible topic
• How to perform risk-based testing, e.g. a risk assessment, in practice including the role of the various stakeholders
• How to define a differentiated test approach
• How to implement the risk based test process in a project, e.g. some critical success factors

The testing community has been talking about risk-based testing for quite a while now. Most projects apply some kind of implicit risk-based testing. We all have to balance between product quality and tight deadlines. In fact risk-based testing should be based on business drivers. Testing is not the risk owner, but the products’ stakeholders are. It is our job to inform the stakeholders about risk-based decision and provide visibility on product risk status.

This workshop will discuss a real-life method for applying structured risk-based testing in projects. It should be more than just brainstorming within the test team, which is often the case. It will present how risk identification and analysis can be carried out in close co-operation with stakeholders. It will also address ways on how the outcome of the risk analysis can/should be used in test projects in term of differentiated test approaches. The method is developed in practice, and by now tuned in many test projects, e.g. in the medical, automotive and banking industry. Practical experiences will be discussed, problems encountered and results achieved.

This is your chance to learn how to optimize your test effort and how to apply risk based testing in practice!

Keynote:

Open Source Testing Tools – The Next Generation

Workshop:

Acceptance Test Driven Development

Elisabeth Hendrickson

Quality Tree Software (USA)

Elisabeth is an independent software testing consultant and the founder and president of Quality Tree Software, Inc. For almost two decades, Elisabeth has worked with a wide variety of software development teams and organisations ranging from tiny startups to members of the Fortune 500.

Prior to founding her company, Elisabeth held positions with leading software vendors as a tester, test automator, technical writer, programmer, and manager (sometimes simultaneously). Most recently, she’s been working with Agile teams to bridge the gap between developer and customer testing.

Open Source Testing Tools - The Next Generation

Keynote: Elisabeth Hendrickson
2:10-3:10 Wellington 12 August and Sydney 15 August

Development tools have become orders of magnitudes more powerful in the last several years with intellisense; keyword coloring; automated refactoring across entire code bases; tight integration with xUnit-style unit testing frameworks; and tight integration with source control repositories. While we’ve seen huge leaps in development tools, tools to support functional testing haven’t kept pace.

The biggest steps forward in test automation include the idea of Domain Specific Languages, and frameworks like FIT and Fitnesse that break down barriers between developers and testers or subject matter experts. And yet there is still a long way to go, and we’re overdue for a major step forward in functional testing tools.

In October 2007, the Agile Alliance hosted a Functional Testing Tools visioning workshop in Portland, Oregon, US. People who have been creating the next generation of tools came from around the globe to share their stories, their ideas, and the tools they've been creating. The result was an inside view of what's next for functional testing tools.

In this talk, Elisabeth Hendrickson explains what's missing in the current generation of main stream test automation solutions while providing an inside look at what's next based on the results of the workshop in Portland.

Acceptance Test Driven Development

Workshop: Elisabeth Hendrickson
1:00-4:30 Wellington 11 August and Sydney 14 August

Extreme Programmers practice Test Driven Development (TDD) in which they begin work by writing a failing executable unit test. Once they have a failing unit test, they then write the production code to make the test pass. Despite its name, TDD is a programming practice, not a testing methodology.

Like TDD, Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) also involves creating tests before code. In ATDD, the team creates one or more acceptance-level tests for a feature before beginning work on it. When captured in a format supported by a test automation framework like FIT or FITnesse, the developers can automate the tests by writing the supporting code ("fixtures") as they implement the feature. Also like TDD, this practice is less about testing and more about capturing expectations and design decisions early. ATDD results in executable requirements. The fact that it also results in automated regression tests is a handy side effect.

In this workshop, Elisabeth Hendrickson will demonstrate the whole ATDD cycle, showing how the tests drive the design for a realistic example. Along the way we'll discuss the benefits of ATDD and what it takes to make this practice work in the real world.

Keynote:

Moving to an Agile Environment: What Went Right, What Went Wrong

Workshop:

Building a SCRUM Based Testing Strategy

Ray Arell

Intel Corporation (USA)

Ray is a Senior Engineering Manager for the software engineering department within Intel's Digital Office Platform Group. He has over 20 years of development, validation, and management experience. During that time, he has worked on a variety of teams focused on CPU, chipsets, and graphics system-level testing including the i386™, i486™, and Pentium® processors.

Ray is also co-author of Change-Based Test Management: Improving the Software Validation Process (ISBN: 0971786127).

Moving to an Agile Environment: What Went Right, What Went Wrong

Keynote: Ray Arell
10:30-11:30 Wellington 11 August and Sydney 14 August

About a year ago I went into my software staff and declared “Hey! we are going Agile!” Yep, I read a Agile project management book on a long flight to India, and like all good reactionary development managers I was sold!

Today, our adaptation of the SCRUM framework is starting to take shape, but it was not without strain on both our development and our Q/A processes.

This keynote focuses on a retrospective of what went right and more importantly what went wrong as we evolved to our new development process. Perhaps it will convince you that the shift to Agile is the way to go, and hopefully give you just a little more info on what you may be in for.

Building a SCRUM Based Testing Strategy

Workshop: Ray Arell
9:00-12:20 Wellington 12 August and Sydney 15 August

In this tutorial, Ray Arell will give you an overview of effective test strategies when using a SCRUM development process.

He will illustrate methods of finding high important defects sooner, how you can make more effective use of resources, and how to drive a more effective and informed decision making progress.

Keynote:

Test Estimation: A Pain or Painless

Workshop:

Branch Out Using Classification Trees for Test Case Design

Julie Gardiner

Grove Consultants (UK)

Julie provides consultancy and training in all aspects of testing with an emphasis on test management and people issues. In 2005 she was given the best presentation award at STAREast conference and received the award for the best tutorial at EuroSTAR 2006 conference.

Julie also works with the ISEB examination panel and as a committee member for the British Computer Society’s Specialist Group in Software Testing. She worked as an analyst programmer, an Oracle data base administrator and as a Project Manager. This work gave Julie first hand experience of the roles of test analyst, test team leader, test consultant and test manager. Her experience has been gained across a broad range of industries including financial, utilities, retail, insurance, construction and the public sector.

Test Estimation: A Pain or Painless

Keynote: Julie Gardiner
1:10-2:10 Wellington 12 August and Sydney 15 August

Test Estimation is one of the hardest activities to do well in testing, the main reason is that testing is not an independent activity and often has destabilising dependencies. During this session we shall uncover some of the common problems in test estimation, how to overcome them together with 6 ways we can estimate test effort.

• Uncover the common problems/destabilising dependencies in test estimation and how to overcome these
• How to communicate test estimation with senior management and how to appreciate their perspective making us even more effective when it comes to estimating our test effort
• Discover 6 powerful ways to estimate test effort; some relatively easy methods and some more detailed and complex methods
• Learn how appropriate each method is to the various lifecycles (traditional, iterative and agile)
• This session will also discuss various issues that arise in the initial phases of test estimation and how the test manager/tester can negate these issues

Having been a test manager for quite a number of years, test estimation was one of the hardest things to do well. This talk is based upon experience (usually painful) and research. It uncovers some of the common destabilising dependencies we encounter during test estimation such as quality of the code or quantity of the code being delivered. We shall look at how different methods of estimating are appropriate to the various lifecycles we find ourselves in (Sequential, Incremental and Iterative).

We shall look at 7 powerful ways to estimate test effort, some being easy and quick but prone to abuse. And others being more detailed and complex but taking longer to administer.

Various Estimation Methods

• FIA (Finger in the Air)
• Formula or Percentage
• Historical
• Parkinson’s Law versus Pricing to Win Estimates
• Work Breakdown Structures
• Estimation Models
• Assessment Estimation

We shall also look at how we can approach the “authorised deadlines” that are often presented to us. Spreadsheets and utilities will be given out during this session to help the tester and the test manager. It is hoped that by the end of this session people will feel that the painful experience of test estimation could in fact become a pleasurable experience.

Branch Out Using Classification Trees for Test Case Design

Workshop: Julie Gardiner
9:00-12:20 Wellington 12 August and Sydney 15 August

Classification trees are a structured, visual approach to identify and categorize equivalence partitions for test objects to document test requirements so that anyone can understand them and quickly build test cases. The technique helps with the constant struggle we have when maintaining and assessing impact of change. Join Julie to look at the fundamentals of classification trees and how they can be applied in both traditional and agile test and development environments.

Using examples, Julie shows you how to use the classification tree technique, how it complements other testing techniques, and its value at every stage of testing. She demonstrates a classification tree editor that is one of the free and commercial tools now available to aid in building, maintaining, and displaying classification trees.

• How to develop classification trees for test objects
• The benefits and rewards of using classification trees
• When and when not to use classification trees

Keynote:

Numbers and Narratives

Workshop

Two Plus Two and Other Testing Exercises: Setting Context and Identifying Oracles

One Day Workshop (Optional Wellington Only)

Critical Thinking Skills for Software Testers
(Wednesday 13 August)

One Day Workshop Fee (Wellington):
NZ$950 excl GST
NZ$725 excl GST
when you also
attend the full
conference

Michael Bolton

DevelopSense (Canada)

Michael is a world leader in the context driven school of software testing. Along with James Bach, he co-authors, teaches and practices Rapid Software Testing. He writes a regular column for Better Software Magazine and was the top rated speaker at STANZ 2005.

During 2005 he also co-founded (with Fiona Charles) the Toronto Workshop on Software Testing and also tested almost full-time for a large Canadian financial services organisation.

He is the Program Chair of TASSQ, The Toronto Association of System and Software Quality and founded DevelopSense (in 1988) to provide services in program management, testing, configuration management, and professional and personal coaching.

Numbers and Narratives

Keynote: Michael Bolton
3:30-4:30 Wellington 12 August and Sydney 15 August

On Monday, the testers ran 30 test cases, and found six bugs. On Tuesday, the testers ran 25 test cases, and found five bugs. On Wednesday, they ran 30 test cases, and found three bugs. On Thursday, they ran 50 test cases, and found two bugs. On Friday, they ran 100 test cases, and found no bugs. What inferences or decisions would you make about the project based on this information?

Most expert test managers would ask questions, rather than drawing conclusions. The problem, of course, is that the numbers alone don’t tell the story; they don’t tell whether Monday’s tests were significant, whether Thursday’s bugs were trivial, or whether Friday’s tests were relevant. Despite all this, the software business seems to emphasize numbers over narratives.

In this presentation, Michael argues that the project team’s stories - with numbers or without them - are the things that make good decisions possible. If we wish to get better at producing software - produced by humans, for humans - we need to get better at thinking critically about numbers, what they appear to measure, and how they can be distorted. More importantly, we need to refocus our priorities on stories, getting better at telling them and listening to them.

Two Plus Two and Other Testing Exercises: Setting Context and Identifying Oracles

Workshop: Michael Bolton
9:00-12:20 Wellington 12 August and Sydney 15 August

Good testing depends on setting the context in which it's happening. It also depends on heuristics - fallible methods for solving problems - and oracles - principles or mechanisms by which we recognize problems. All oracles are heuristic; no principle or mechanism can guarantee that something is perfect - only that it may satisfy certain requirements for certain people in certain circumstances.

In this session, Michael will pose some apparently simple puzzles and problems that exercise critical thinking, systems thinking, and context-driven thinking skills, and will show how those skills can dramatically expand our notions of quality and risk. He'll argue that all testing is heuristic, and that to do better thinking and better testing, we need to broaden our concept of coverage beyond mere code coverage and into test coverage.

Critical Thinking Skills for Software Testers

One Day Workshop (optional post conference), Wellington Only
9:00-5:00 Wednesday 13 August with Michael Bolton

If you’re a tester or a test manager, you’ve probably heard statements like these touted as universal, unquestionable truths about testing. At best, these bits of mythology and folklore are heuristics - fallible methods for solving a problem or making a decision. At worst, they’re potentially dangerous simplifications or outright fallacies that can threaten a tester’s credibility, a product’s value, or an organisation’s business.

Testers live in a world of enormous complexity, scarce information, and extraordinary time pressure. This one-day workshop, presented by Michael Bolton, is designed to teach strategies and skills - questioning skills, critical thinking, context-driven thinking, general systems thinking - that can help testers deal confidently and thoughtfully with difficult testing situations

In the workshop, we’ll question the myths of software testing; examine common cognitive biases, and the critical thinking tools that can help to manage them; learn modeling and general systems approaches to manage complexity and observational challenges; and work through exercises that model difficult testing problems - and suggest approaches to solving them.

Key Points:

• Heuristic approaches are the foundation of human decision-making, in disciplines from education to engineering
• While technical skills are undoubtedly important, applying them successfully requires higher-order skills
• Good testing is less about confirming, verifying, and validating, and more about thinking, questioning, exploring, investigating, and discovering
• As the principles of the Context-Driven School of Software Testing assert, while there are good practices in context, there are no practices that are universally best

Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop computer to the workshop (but sufficient will be available)

STREAM SESSION (Wellington Only):

The Introduction of Independent Test Teams into Established Development Environments

Brett Rogers

Macquarie Bank (Australia)

In 2006 Brett joined Macquarie Bank, where he is currently responsible for the introduction of an independent testing team into an established development environment.

In 2004 he was the Test Manager for Barclays Capital in Singapore responsible for the introduction of an independent test team. The testing team was created in both Singapore and London, which allowed for faster delivery and turn around times. The application was a real time trade execution and automated trading system, with volumes of over USD$30 billion per day.

Brett has over 15 years experience in testing and development roles, with 11 of them in test management, covering investment banking, government, education and financial sectors.

The Introduction of Independent Test Teams into Established Development Environments

Stream Session: Brett Rogers
3:30-4:30 Wellington 11 August

The introduction of testing teams into any environment is both tough and highly visible. Introducing a testing team into an environment that already has established methods and processes can mean changing habits and perceptions about testing.

Get it right and your product and productivity will improve dramatically. Get it wrong and you risk not only putting testing back years but the long term success of your team and product.

We'll look at 10 important areas to consider when introduction testing teams into established development environments:

• Where do you start?
• Don’t sell testing; sell your implementation of testing
• Find an easy and high profile target
• Changing developer habits by giving them easy wins
• Becoming part of the process
• The importance of independence
• The Big Bang and why it rarely works in the long run
• The appearance of structure
• Hiring different team members – The X factor versus the Robot
• Where to now?

STREAM SESSION (Wellington Only):

Successfully Automating Functional and Regression Testing with Open Source Tools

John Lockhart

WebTest (NZ)

John is co-founder of WebTest NZ who provide expertise and resources for manual and automated software testing, focussing on web application functionality.

His current engagements are to improve quality for projects and teams focusing on test and release management and automation. He has worked for companies including Vero Insurance, Air New Zealand, Westminister Council and World.net as well as others in Australia, the UK and NZ.

John spent 15 years as a developer and development manager for small software development companies, before contracting as a BA, a PMP qualified project manager, and a Test Manager. His particular focus is on managing, training and mentoring technical staff especially in test automation and bridging the technical/commercial divide.

Successfully Automating Functional and Regression Testing with Open Source Tools

Stream Session: John Lockhart
2:10-3:10 Wellington 11 August

The tools and techniques described in this session have been used to successfully test transactional web sites handling over one billion dollars of transactions a year!

Testing lags behind most other disciplines in software development, well behind project management and programming and also behind business and systems analysis and architecture. We can apply most of the principles of these more mature areas to testing, learning from their mistakes as well. We particularly look at the agile revolution and find that there are direct and very practical equivalents in testing.

Testers themselves are often perceived as the least important of the professional groups, if considered one at all. We will deal with the emotional and practical aspects of moving beyond this. Practical examples will cover:

• A corporate move from "roping in people" for testing to a team of professional testers and a low risk but high return automation program in under two years. How this changed the roles and outcomes.
• Experiences in much smaller teams – how they differ.
• Traditional and modern approaches.
• What worked and what didn't in these different contexts.

We will map out a path to success and happiness in testing for managers and analysts by:

• Being clear on what it means to succeed as a test team – not just getting through each release.
• Getting a clear vision and the knowledge and distinctions that will enable you to lead from above or below and reframe testing from a resented overhead to a valued and essential asset.
• Developing the drive to follow through by getting rid of some fears, developing others, and understanding the necessity of growth, contribution and fun.
• Understanding and being able to use the tools of the trade.
• Creating change personally and within a team.

Perhaps surprisingly, a key tool in all of this will turn out to be functional automation using open source tools in an agile manner. This turns out to be a key symbol that can drive the diverse changes discussed at a personal and corporate level. We will map this to each of the 5 steps above.

STREAM SESSION (Sydney Only):

Successful Co-ordination of Integration Testing of a Global Retail Program Across 6 Countries

Michael Weiner

accuteque testing management services (Australia)

Michael is an Associate Director of accuteque. He is an IT executive with a proven track record spanning over 24 years delivering leading edge, complex, mission critical business solutions to clients. He has been involved in several large IT Programs with budgets up to $50m.

Michael has worked across much of the SDLC including: Test Management (System Test, Performance Test, Automated Testing, User Acceptance Test, Systems Integration Test); Project, Program and Team Management; Requirements definition and solution design; Software development, deployment/implementation, training and production support.

Most recently he has been managing the system integration testing for a global oil company. The following case study is based on this work.

Successful Co-ordination of Integration Testing of a Global Retail Program Across 6 Countries

Stream Session: Michael Weiner
2:10-3:10 Sydney 14 August

accuteque managed the System Integration Testing (SIT) in Australia and New Zealand for a Global oil company deploying a standardized Point of Sale system for all company owned service stations with a common ERP system initially for Finance, merchandising and a Business Warehouse. The company has over 24,000 service stations around the globe operating in 26 countries. In Australia, the company has 1400 service stations and another 298 in New Zealand.

Whilst the SIT Team was located in Australia, other major functions were located in:

• Australia (ANZ Program Director, Project Manager, ANZ ERP Business Team, EFTPOS software vendor, parallel deployment of solution)
• New Zealand (business deployment team, project manager, loyalty software vendor)
• UK (Global Program Management and some ERP development, parallel deployment of solution
• Israel - POS software vendor
• India – ERP development, Testing and Support teams
• Slovakia – POS System and Performance Testing and deployment infrastructure
• USA – Parallel deployment of solution

The presentation will focus on the challenges and mitigating actions for this complex program of work such as:

• Defect Management
• Effective use of tools
• Communications (timezones, language)
• Configuration and Release Management
• Test Environment(s)
• Requirements across software platforms
• Regression Testing

One Day Workshop (Optional Sydney Only)

SOLD OUT call 1800 145 152 to waitlist

Practical Application of Tools for Software Testers

One Day Workshop Fee (Sydney):
AU$935 incl GST
AU$715 incl GST
when you also
attend the full
conference

Jared Quinert

Jared has been a tester for some 13 years, starting in the video game industry, before moving to the corporate world to work for larger companies such as TABCorp, Telstra, ANZ and Sensis.

Over the last few years, most of his roles have been in Agile teams, where his earlier product experience managing teams of exploratory testers and delivering high quality products with just-enough documentation have been sought after. As a consultant, he has coached test teams in agile environments and delivered custom test automation using proprietary and open source tools. He maintains his software testing blog at www.software-testing.com.au/blog/.

Paul Szymkowiak

Paul Szymkowiak works primarily as an educator, coach and mentor, helping companies make improvements to their software development activities.His primary interest is in the adoption of practices that offer software teams more agility by replacing inflexible, high-ceremony, onerous practices.

Paul has been based in Melbourne since 2006, having worked internationally in Canada, New Zealand and Asia. In 2006, he co-founded agilicon pty ltd, a consulting company focused on the application of suitable agile practices appropriate to the given project context. During his two decade career, Paul spent 3 years working as one the authors of the Rational Unified Process. He is also one of the original members of the context-driven testing community.

Practical Application of Tools for Software Testers

One Day Workshop (optional pre conference): Jared Quinert and Paul Szymkowiak
9:00 - 5:00 Sydney (only) Wednesday August 13

When thinking about test automation, we usually think of only a few things - Record-playback (and modify), automation frameworks built on top of proprietary testing tools such as Winrunner and Quicktest Pro or unit testing in modern xUnit frameworks.

Our models of test automation can be limited by many things, including our technical skills, our prior experience and our language

Our language limits our test automation strategies by bundling up all of the different activities that comprise ‘testing’ into a single, overloaded term. Mostly, 'automated tests' consist of procedural scripts, often derived from manual test scripts, and some limited evaluation and reporting of test results. However, the conversion of a script from a human executed test to a computer-executed test puts only a few properties of the human activity under computer control. The rest are often left unattended to as holes in our test strategy, waiting for bugs to bite.

By expanding our vocabulary and learning to say what we mean by 'testing', a whole host of ideas present themselves. Some of these are opportunities to change the cost-benefit equation of test automation and to deliver value incrementally using traditional toolsets. Others are opportunities to use a whole new suite of tools to make the invisible visible, manipulate the previously unwieldy, or leverage the power of our innate human abilities with tool assistance.

This single day workshop will introduce a variety of tools, then relate these to both real world test tool implementations and a test property taxonomy. The day includes tool demonstrations and practical sessions, providing time for hands-on use and instruction as you apply a selection of these tools in the testing of a real application.

Although strong programming skills aren't a pre-requisite, attendees will gain the most benefit from the hands on sessions if they have some technical skill, such as: software installation and configuration, testing of protocols behind the GUI layer, and the ability to read or write source code.

Included in the day will be:

• Properties of tests relevant to test strategy.
• How test properties relate to real-word automation approaches and techniques.
• How being aware of test properties allows test frameworks to add value incrementally.
• Demonstrations of a range of free tools that can be used to support testing in non-traditional ways.
• Facilitated hands-on experience learning to use a selection of tools for real testing.

Please note that while a number of the tools are applicable for most testing environments, the sample application being tested will be web-based.

STREAM SESSION

Challenges for Usability in Agile Development

John Eklund

UXResearch (Australia)

John is founder and Senior Analyst of UX Research (http://www.uxresearch.com.au). He has conducted a multitude of usability studies for a wide range of government and corporate clients, and has over 50 publications relating to e-learning and HCI (Human/Computer Interaction) in refereed journals and conference proceedings.

Formerly the Head of The Usability Division at a software testing company for over 8 years, John has a doctorate in Education from The University of Sydney in the area of interface design of instructional systems, in collaboration with researchers at the HCI Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

Challenges for Usability in Agile Development

Stream Session: John Eklund
3:30-4:30 Sydney 14 August

The talk will focus on practical methods in a step-by-step guide covering the place of usability in a project lifecycle, how it is implemented and executed and what to expect in usability from an external supplier.

Agile methods of development prescribe rapid prototyping and minimal documentation, and are particularly suitable for creating web interfaces for businesses, encouraging throw-away prototypes and allowing designers the freedom to be more creative. Integrating measures for assuring Quality in Use is challenging due to compressed timeframes and the ad-hoc nature of development over multiple iterations. The traditional role of the independent usability analyst in formally delivering a single large evaluation at a pre-defined point in the software development lifecycle is no longer relevant in this context.

This session discusses ways that project managers can meet the challenges of rapid development with user centred methods that will assure the usability of their systems and ultimately customer satisfaction. Techniques that combine an evaluation of partial designs with requirements gathering, discount usability testing that focuses on speed of execution and design recommendations are some of the emerging methods adapted to meet this need.

STREAM SESSION

Advanced Test Certification

Sharon Robson

ANZTB (Australia New Zealand Testing Board)

Sharon has worked in the IT industry in Australia and New Zealand for over 15 years mostly as a Business Analyst and Software Tester. In 2001 she joined HP New Zealand as a software tester. Since then she has worked on a wide variety of projects, large and small, internal and external and has had experience as a team member, Senior Tester, Test Manager and consultant.

Her last role at HP was Test Team Manager (Practice Lead) for the Christchurch Test Team. In that role, she was responsible for establishing the team structure, putting together processes and procedures within the team, training graduates, and spreading the word on Software Testing.

Sharon is a founding board member of Australia New Zealand Testing Board (ANZTB www.anztb.org) and sits currently on the examination panel. Sharon has spoken publicly about software testing and certification at many events, including STANZ 2007 in Wellington and various Christchurch Test Professional Network (TPN) meetings.

Advanced Test Certification

Stream Session: Sharon Robson
1:00-2:00 Wellington 11 August and Sydney 14 August

This topic will outline the fundamental components of the new ISTQB Advanced Certifications. Then the discussion will cover the details of what the certification is and means, and focus clearly on each of the three modules; Advanced Test Analyst, Advanced Test Manager and Advanced Technical Test Analyst.

The target Test Professionals will be covered for each module, detailing who should be doing this certification, and why. A detailed review of potential career streams for testers will be outlined, and then aligned with the ISTQB Certification approach, indicating when and why to consider the advanced certifications. The topic will also cover Advanced Certification from a manager’s view point.

Note: Steve Toms of the ANZTB will present this session in Wellington.