Tutorials

Each tutorial on Wednesday is a full day in separate rooms, starting at 9:00 am and going to 5:00 pm.

Tutorial #1 - Certification Debate

Room 401, Wednesday July 11, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm.

An all-day debate about certification testing programs, featuring Cem Kaner, Magdy Hanna from IIST, a rep from QAI, a rep from the ASTQB, a rep from the ASQ, an academic instructor.

In the morning, each will give a 30 minute presentation for 1/2 hour to address questions such as:

After the presentations, we will have a facilitated discussion among the audience and presenters.

Cem Kaner, JD, PhD, is a professor of computer sciences at Florida Institute of Technology. He also consults on technical and management issues, and practices law within the software development community. He is the lead author of two books, Testing Computer Software and Bad Software (both from Wiley).

Tutorial #2 - James Bach: Self-Education for Testers

Room 402, Wednesday July 11, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm.

I am a self-educating tester. For the ambitious thinker, self-education is a way of life. For the ambitious tester in particular, it is indispensible. If you think about it, testing itself is a learning process (and also a process of unlearning what is not so). In this tutorial, I will tell you how I do it. My self-education system has been, for me, a substitute for institutional education and a competitive advantage. Although I left school at an early age, if you already have a higher education, so much the better! You get the best of both worlds.

I will explain and demonstrate the methods that I use develop ideas for my articles, books, and classes, so that you can use them draw out and codify lessons from your own experience.

I will discuss:

James Bach is founder and principal consultant of Satisfice, Inc., a software testing and quality assurance company. His experience with competitive software development in leading Silicon Valley companies, such as Apple and Borland, led him to specialize in such aspects of the craft as "good enough" quality, risk-based testing, exploratory testing, and other techniques that require skill and judgment. He has also served as Chief Scientist at Software Testing Labs.

Tutorial #3 - Robert Sabourin: Just-In-Time Testing

Room 403, Wednesday July 11, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm.

We are all in the software business - it is a fact of life today. Systems and business entities depend on software to survive! Software testing is an integral part of the software development process, but very often organizations either neglect the process or inadequately test the deliverables of their software projects. Organizations with software testing teams are often trying to apply traditional analytic techniques to todayís new projects with limited success. Frankly, most organizations do not have well documented requirements for their projects let alone having anything resembling a written specification or design document. How can you test something without a specification? How can you test something when you have tremendous time pressure on you! How do you know what to test and most importantly what not to test? How do you test applications when they are live?

What will you learn?

Prerequisites

Some familiarity with or experience in any aspect of software development will help students understand the subject matter in the proper context. Students with little to no knowledge of the way software is developed will benefit from the course and be able to apply several methods taught but should complement this course with another programming or software development session.

Robert Sabourin has been involved in all aspects of development, testing and management of software engineering projects. Robert graduated from McGill University in 1982. Since writing his first program in 1972, Robert has become accomplished software engineering and SQA management expert and evangelist (don't tell me it can’t de done!). He is presently the President of AmiBug.Com Inc; a Montreal-based international management consulting firm specializing in the implementation of "light effective process" to achieve excellence in delivering on-time, onquality, on-budget commercial software solutions. AmiBug.Com provides management consulting, training and professional development directly and with various business partners.

Robert works with several major companies to establish software engineering teams, automate workflow to facilitate continuous software development in web based e-commerce applications, virtual online communities and multiple cross vendor integrated "e-commerce" for B2B and B2C applications.

Previously Robert was Director of Research and Development at Purkinje (3 years), which specialized in the development of sophisticated, client server, knowledge driven critical medical software used at the point of care. As R&D Manager at Alis Technologies (10 years), Robert championed many complex international multilingual software development and globalization efforts involving several intricate business partnerships and relationships including international governments (Czech, Russia, Egypt, France, Morocco, Algeria…) and corporations (Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, HP, Thompson CSF, Digital, Olivetti…). Systems included concurrent coordinated multilingual multiplatform product releases.

Tutorial #4 - Doug Hoffman: Advanced Test Automation Architectures: Beyond Regression Testing

Room 404, Wednesday July 11, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm.

When most of us think of Test Automation today we picture computer systems quickly running through a battery of regression tests. This picture may have more or less sophistication, but it nearly always starts with taking existing manual tests and converting them into automated scripts. These scripts are rerun as a regression test qualification for the software. This is an expensive undertaking and more frequently than not it is unsuccessful for a variety of reasons. It is especially true for management’s dream test set, where large numbers of regression tests are created to fully and automatically qualify a product.

Regression tests of this sort are the weakest form of tests for finding new defects. They are also the simplest form of test automation, most break very easily, are expensive to maintain, and do not take advantage of the full potential of automated tests. The regression tests merely automate what manual testers do, losing many of the advantages manual testing has for finding defects.

The presentation focuses on how automated tests can make use of the advantages and capabilities of computer automated tests. Some of the advantages include:

The Tutorial Covers

Douglas Hoffman has over thirty years experience in software quality assurance and has earned degrees in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and an MBA. He is currently employed by Hewlett-Packard as a QA Program Manager. He is a Founding Member and a past Director of the Association for Software Testing. He has been a participant at dozens of software quality conferences and Program Chairman for several international conferences on software quality. He was among the first to earn a Certificate from ASQ in Software Quality Engineering (ASQ-CSQE), has been certified in quality management (ASQ-CQMgr), and is an ASQ Fellow. He is active as a Fellow of the ASQ, participating in the Silicon Valley Section, Software Division, and the Software Quality Task Group (SSQA), and is also a member of the ACM and IEEE. He is current Auditor and Past Chairman of the SSQA and is the Immediate Past Chairman of the Silicon Valley Section of the ASQ.