STPCon Fall 2008
THURSDAY AFTERNOON CLASSES
Quick links
Conference program home page
Wednesday full-day tutorials
Thursday Opening Keynote
Thursday AM: 100-200 classes
Thursday PM: 300-400 classes
Friday AM: 500-600-classes
Friday PM: 700-900 classes
Conference faculty
Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
301 Testing in an Agile Environment
By Megan Sumrell & Robert Walsh Contrary to what some believe, the agile view of testing is not “Don’t test,” “Only developers should test,” nor “The only good test is an automated test.” Agile attempts to augment traditional testing efforts by adding tests written and executed by developers and customers to those created and run by professional testers. TDD and unit testing, user acceptance testing (automated and manual), exploratory testing, usability testing, load and performance testing, integration testing and other test techniques all play significant roles in agile environments.
This class will illustrate how various testing efforts are used in responsible approaches to agile software development and explore ways that traditional QA efforts can be adapted to fit neatly into agile processes. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
302 Building a Software Testing Strategy
By Karen N. Johnson If you’ve ever faced strategic planning issues for a software project, this class will help. For a strategy to be effective, you must solicit ideas and build an understanding with your project stakeholders. This class explains how to communicate your strategy with other project leads.
Learn to brainstorm, build, implement and update test strategy, including details of scope, testing types, estimates, resources, plans, milestones, risk and acceptance criteria. You’ll learn how to update your strategy throughout the project and to discuss and gain input and acceptance throughout your organization. For beginning and mid-career test managers. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
303 Performance Testing for Managers
By Scott Barber Performance testing as an activity is widely misunderstood, particularly by managers. This presentation is designed to help managers increase the output of performance testers and their projects by applying better management practices. We’ll explore what managers should expect (and why they aren’t getting it), what additional value performance testing can bring (and blockers to achieving that value), tips for interviewing performance testers and methods for dealing with common performance testing challenges. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
304 Software Endgames: How to Finish What You’ve Started
By Bob Galen There’s no worse feeling than having your team work its tail off on a project only to have it fail to meet the customer’s scope or quality targets. So much focus is typically put on the beginning of a project that we fail to realize how important it is to end well.
In this class, Bob shares tools and techniques he’s used to successfully deliver on projects. Learn how to plan an iterative model for testing, create dynamic release criteria and connect them to your requirements, manage change in agile and non-agile environments, and effectively handle defects and winnow down change via several code freeze models. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
305 Fixing Memory Leaks and Other Defects
By Chris Gottbrath Memory leaks and similar defects can be frustratingly hard to pin down, particularly after applications or systems have been deployed. Quality professionals who want to be confident about the application they’re testing need tools that can detect memory leaks that run in the shortest amount of time possible.
In this class, you’ll learn how to test for memory leaks and other memory errors, how to hand off the problem to the development team, and how this important part of the bug-fixing process can be improved by using advanced tools that provide detailed reports of the state of heap memory. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
306 Test Strategy on a Whiteboard
By James Bach Make a picture of the thing to be tested, then mark it up with symbols indicating how you might test it. The result is a compact and easily explained summary of the test strategy. This can be a nice alternative to a long-winded test plan document, or a nice thing to include in addition to such a document. Test-industry pioneer James Bach explains why his whiteboard strategy is a good practice and how it can be a bad practice, too. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
307 Exploratory Testing: Not Just Parlor Tricks
By Robin Goldsmith Click, Click, Kaboom! Provoking strange software behavior often may be the main rationale for exploratory testing. While certainly attention-grabbing and even entertaining, such feats may be testing’s version of parlor tricks—all sizzle and no steak.
Learn why such tests divert test time and resources to superficial situations and distract testers from catching more important errors that exploratory methods are likely to miss. Learn more reliable and useful approaches for putting contextual testing into context to leverage exploratory testing strengths in ways that provide more substantive value by detecting more important defects.
Thursday, September 25, 3:45-4:45 pm
401 Help Your Boss Avoid Being an Idiot
By Robin Goldsmith We’ve all had a boss we’ve thought was an idiot. Whether dooming projects from the start with unrealistic budgets and schedules, failing to allow people to use skills the organization paid big bucks for them to learn, or pushing projects into production before they’re ready, boneheaded bosses aren’t just to be laughed at in “Dilbert.”
In this session, learn how bosses become the way they are and hear ways you can smarten them up to increase the chances for both of you to succeed. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
402 Explaining Testing to “Them”
By James Bach Testing can be hard to explain to management—or to anyone. In this class, software test guru James Bach presents quick and effective ways to get the point across so you can get the support you need to do your job. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
403 Maximizing SQL Server 2005 Performance
By Mary Sweeney SQL Server 2005 is a robust and highly performing database management system but how do you deal with bottlenecks and performance problems? In this session you’ll explore tips and techniques to gain the most from your SQL Server from an experienced practitioner working on the nation’s 4th largest database. Join us also to find out some of the new features and differences in the just-released SQL Server 2008.
What you’ll learn:
• The quirks that can hold up large queries and how to troubleshoot them
• The benefits and liabilities of your SQL Server 2005 installation
• The five important techniques you need to know to get the best performance from SQL Server 2005
• SQL Server 2008 performance enhancements Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
404 Combinatorial Analysis: A Pair-Wise Testing Primer
By Bj Rollison Pair-wise testing is a systematic procedure to effectively reduce the total number of tests by selecting a set of tests that evaluates every pair combination. It works because historical and root cause analysis shows that the majority of errors caused by the interaction of variables occur between two parameters rather than interaction between the variables for three or more parameters.
This class compares orthogonal arrays to pair-wise analysis, and then provides a detailed example of how to use one of the most powerful combinatorial analysis tools available today (Pair-wise Independent Combinatorial Testing, PICT) from Microsoft to systematically test complex interdependent parameters. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
405 Turn Your Test Team Into a High-Performance Organization
By Michael Hackett Want a road map to quality? Everyone, all development managers, test managers and their organizations are looking for ways to improve quality. Quality improvement can come in many forms: reducing risks by delivering higher and predictable quality product; optimizing time-to-market; increasing productivity; and building a more manageable organization. Some managers look for quality improvement by attempting to implement a more standard or formal process.
This sounds good, but how do you get there? In this class, you’ll learn how to evaluate your test process and strategy, create a culture for change, implement change, and use effective methods for measuring improvement. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
407 What You Must Know to Demystify Ant Build Scripts
By Matt Gabor Does your testing process include a pre-build before you test or an audit of the developer-supplied build? If not, you may be missing critical bugs that because of mismanaged production libraries are found only when the application is deployed. Most testing teams avoid managing the build process because the scripts that support the build are cryptic and difficult to understand.
Learn the components of Ant/XML scripts, how to identify problematic hard-coded source and library references, and the use of debug flags and statically defined directory information. Learn to audit the builds and define build script requirements to improve build quality. Thursday, September 25, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
408 Five Major Application Security Vulnerabilities
By Danny Allan Applications are frequently released with significant security risks because security coverage in the SDLC and QA cycles is often informal and undocumented. Companies are either relying on an overburdened security team to test late in the cycle, or they're throwing complex tools at QA teams, expecting them to master security testing with no formal training.
Solve this problem and increase adoption of security testing in development and QA without overburdening the teams. Danny will demonstrate the five biggest application security vulnerabilities and share techniques and best practices to build application security testing into existing QA processes. You’ll learn to understand Web security vulnerabilities and compliance issues, and how to integrate application security testing with defect tracking and remediation. | 
