January, 2010

Collaboration among software testers effectively brings another perspective to early software evaluation and helps create an environment ideal for testing multi-user scenarios, permissions, security, custom configurations, integration, and cross-platform and cross-product workflows. In addition to providing additional opportunities to uncover bugs, it provides a chance to share product knowledge and testing techniques.

Given these advantages, why isn’t more collaborative testing being done? Because most testers don’t fully understand the value of collaboration, and most companies don’t know how to entice them to participate. Only by spelling out the benefits for testers and clarifying the value you place on their time and talent can you draw them in. This presentation will cover nine ways to make it happen, with real-world examples based largely on the presenters experiences at Adobe.

Slides for this presentation are available here.

February, 2010

If you had an opportunity to build an application from the ground up, with testability a key design goal, what would you do?

In this presentation, we will look at just such a situation - a major, two year rewrite of a suite of core business systems. We will discuss how a system looks when testability is as important as functionality - and what it looks like when quality concerns are part of the initial design. We will look at the role of test automation and manual test in a modern project, and look at the tools and processes. The session will conclude with a demo of the latest visual test automation tool from MIT and a Q&A.

Slides are available here.

March, 2010

This presentation is a guided discussion of why, in some places and at some times, quality of results are assured (Quality Assurance), and insight into why sometimes it seems that it just does (can)not happen.

Slides are available here.

April, 2010

What features of your software do customers use the most? What parts of the software do they find frustrating or completely useless? Wouldn’t you like to target these critical areas in your testing? Most organizations get feedback—much later than anyone would like—from customer complaints, product reviews, and online discussion forums. Microsoft employs proactive approaches to gather detailed customer usage data from both beta tests and released products, achieving greater understanding of the experience of its millions of users. Product teams analyze this data to guide improvement efforts, including test planning, throughout the product cycle. Alan Page shares the inner workings of Microsoft’s methods for gathering customer data, including how to know what features are used, when they are used, where crashes are occurring, and when customers are feeling pain. Learn how your organization can employ similar strategies to make better decisions throughout your development life cycle. Alan shares approaches for gathering customer data that can work for any software team —and improve the customer experience for everyone.

Slides are here.

May 20, 2010

Emotionally, it can be a touch and go situation in a test group.  The stress of schedules, budget crunches, pressure to "get the numbers up!", and constant talking about "problems" is always a part of the landscape.  A tester needs to know how to communicate effectively within this environment.  A team of managers, developers, and testers need to know how to collaborate well to resolve issues efficiently.  What are the fundamentals of a successful collaborative environment?  What are the factors that impact effective communication?  This session will answer these questions and show you how to prioritize and deal with disruptive elements.  Several case studies will be presented giving you tangible examples of how to manage communications and collaboration within a project team environment.

Slides are here.

June 17, 2010

LC is a dynamic meta model for designing systems and ultimately designing any complete high quality system. The model emphasizes the importance of Quality being built into the processes and into the products. It assures a strong emphasis on testing, verification and validation against stringent standards. Poor quality, missed schedules, overrun budgets and missing requirements are not an option.

We would say new, but LC has been around and has proved itself many times over.

Don’t just take our word for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvuzPQ44kME

LC’s Dynamic Action Plans (DAPs) ensure that models and reality merge integrity, ability and honesty.

Slides are here.

July 15, 2010

Despite dedicated and repeated efforts by software teams to ensure that automated tests are easy to write, run, and read, system tests are often brittle, tedious, and slow. They continue to be the biggest drain on both human and computer resources and impede the software production lifecycle.   Anders Wallgren describes how the world's most innovative development organizations have come to understand how automated system test harnesses evolve and identifies three universal challenges to improving test harnesses:

1. Provisioning and configuring the target environment
2. Efficiently automating the invocation of complex test suites
3. Transforming volumes of test result data into actionable metrics

Slides are here.

August 19, 2010

This presentation describes ways to look at your agile process in improve quality and productivity. Key areas discussed include tooling, metrics, collaboration, getting to DONE – DONE – DONE, and generally tightening your process.

Slides are here.

September 16, 2010

Mobile software usage is growing quickly, and an expanding number of consumers are expecting a consistent experience when moving from the PC to mobile devices and back again. One of the key factors enabling wide deployment and adoption of mobile applications is careful usage of system resources. High quality mobile applications must consume fewer system resources such as CPU, Memory, and most importantly the Battery life. It is crucial that design for mobile applications considers frugal and optimal resource usage as an essential aspect of application design (direct porting of desktop applications to mobile platforms is most often a recipe for failure). Knowing and understanding the factors that influence performance on mobile devices is extremely beneficial in order to plan a successful testing approach. Equally challenging is the task of measuring application performance and reporting the performance data in a useful and actionable manner.
 
We are going to present a case study on performance testing of the Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile application for Windows Mobile 6.x phones. We will discuss our approach to performance testing and the challenges involved in measuring various metrics. We will also provide details on the performance metrics, tools used to gather and present this data, and how we’ve used this data to make important decisions throughout the product cycle. Some architectural improvements have contributed to improved application performance and better resource usage. For example, the battery life has been improved by more than 300% in 2007 R2 version of the Communicator Mobile.

Slides are here

October 21, 2010

Teams that succeed with Agile methods reliably deliver releasable software at frequent intervals and at a sustainable pace. At the same time, they can readily adapt to the changing needs and requirements of the business. Unfortunately, not all teams are successful in their attempt to transition to Agile and, instead, end up with a “frAgile” process. The difference between an Agile and a frAgile process is usually in the degree to which the organization embraces the disciplined engineering practices that support agility. Teams that succeed are often the ones adopting specific practices: test-driven development, automated regression testing, Continuous Integration, and more. Why do these practices make such a big difference? Elisabeth Hendrickson details essential Agile engineering practices and explains how they mitigate common project risks related to uncertainty, ambiguity, assumptions, dependencies, and capacity

Slides are here.

November 18, 2010

Ever wonder what a century of making software experience looks like? Are there nagging questions that plague your quality and testing efforts that you wanted answered? A gathering of Software Quality professionals from diverse industries will be available to answer your questions at the final SASQAG event of the season. The SASQAG Board members and friends will be participating in a panel discussion on software quality covering both Quality Assurance and Quality Control.

There are no slides available for this event