Special Interest Groups (SIG)

Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are groups formed by AST members with a desire to pursue significant, long-term activity in an area of interest to the Association. As a member you are invited to join existing SIG or propose a new one. All SIGs are self supporting and AST currently has the following Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

Tester Education

AST’s Education SIG had a busy agenda for the annual meeting at CAST. Some of the major announcements at CAST included:

• The Black Box Software Testing Foundations course is getting a makeover with Foundations 2.0 scheduled for October 10. October seats are filled but it’s not too late to sign up for the November class.
• Bug Advocacy will be sporting a new look in November, too. Sign up now.
• Welcome to Mimi Mendenhall, BBST Course Coordinator. Mimi will handle the logistics of the courses including scheduling instructors, setting up registration, tracking student graduates, updating the BBST websites, and answering emails that come to bbst@associationforsoftwaretesting.org. Watch for the 2011 Class Schedule and other news from Mimi in the near future.
• Welcome aboard to 12 AST members who attended the third annual Ed SIG-sponsored Live! Instructors’ Orientation Course Jumpstart Tutorial After CAST Session.

DICTIONARY PROJECT

The Education SIG is sponsoring a Dictionary project to gather the common definitions of key terms in our field.

• We reject the notion that there is one and only one correct definition for key terms.
• The differences in definitions often reflect underlying differences in theory of good practice or legitimately different (and often informatively interesting) histories. As with great dictionaries like the Oxford English, we see great value in recording (and no value in suppressing) the actual diversity of usage in our field.

Please contact Cem Kaner (kaner@kaner.com) if you’d like to work on this project. Our technology is in place but we need an Editor-in-Chief.

VOLUNTEER NEWS

Would you like to get involved? The Education SIG is looking for a Volunteer Coordinator to welcome new volunteers and activists. We need someone with a talent for matching volunteers’ talents to the tasks ahead of us. Contact Becky (becky@beckyfiedler.com) or Cem (kaner@kaner.com) with any questions or to volunteer as coordinator.

JOIN US

Join the Ed SIG mailing list at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ASTeducationSIG/ to keep up with all the latest Ed SIG news and events.

Financial Systems (STiFS)

STiFS is a facilitated meeting of software testers and other QA professionals who work in financial services firms. It is a neutral forum (not biased toward any testing methodology or supporting vendor) to share, debate, and develop ideas on how to improve the testing of financial software. It is expected that attendees walk away from the workshop with fresh ideas and approaches, valuable hints and tricks, and contact names of leading industry colleagues with whom to network and share ideas.

For further information about STiFS, please contact Bernie Berger at bernie@testassured.com.