Keynote Speakers

We're pleased to announce the following keynote speakers for CAST 2007:

"Bringing New Techniques Back to the Office: Peer-to-Peer Coaching"
Esther Derby, Esther Derby and Associates

By the conclusion of this conference, your head will probably be full of new techniques that you'll want to share with your colleagues when you return. You could wave the proceedings at them, and hope they pick up the techniques that way. You could do a brain dump of all your new ideas. Or you could carefully inject these new techniques into your team's existing practice through peer-to peer coaching. In this hands-on keynote, we'll look at different ways to coach--and practice, too.

Esther Derby has over twenty years experience in software development. She's been a programmer, systems manager, project manager, and internal consultant. She currently runs her own consulting firm, Esther Derby Associates, Inc., in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Esther works with people to increase their effectiveness in understanding and managing complex systems—like software development organizations and software development projects. Take a look at www.estherderby.com for more.

"Testing Web Services"
Keith Stobie, Microsoft

Testing Web Services will highlight what differentiates Services and shrink-wrapped software, including deployment, recoverability and rollback testing, and Quality Of Service metrics. Web Services Testing takes many concepts to the extreme, like Operational Profile via forked production traffic and beta testing using Design of Experiments.

Keith Stobie is a Test Architect at Microsoft where he plans, designs, and reviews software architecture and tests for Search and XML Messaging (Windows Communication Foundation). Over the past 25 years he has focused on software testing distributed systems including Tandem Fault Tolerant systems, Informix Parallel database, and transactional and collaborative software at BEA Systems. Keith provides training on inspections and quality process, and test training, strategy, methodology, design, tools, and automation. Keith has mentored and coached hundreds of professionals in the field. He writes and speaks to conferences around the world on software engineering, SQA, and testing.

"Today's Testing Innovations"
Lee Copeland, SQE

As a consultant, Lee Copeland has spoken with hundreds of software testers in different organizations. Generally, he comes away from them depressed with the state of testing. Many neither know about nor have adopted recent innovations in our field. Here, Lee will share some of the important innovations in testing, including the context-driven school, test-first development, open source tools, session-based test management, and others. Join Lee to see if his list matches yours.

With more than 30 years of experience as an information systems professional at commercial and nonprofit organizations, Lee Copeland has held technical and managerial positions in applications development, software testing, and software process improvement. Lee has developed and taught numerous training courses on software development and testing issues and is a well-known speaker with Software Quality Engineering. Lee presents at software conferences in the United States and abroad. He is the author of the popular reference book, A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design.

"The Bionic Tester"
Harry Robinson, Google

Say "test automation" and a lot of people will assume you are talking about regression scenarios and capture/replay tools. But test machines are an underused resource that can amplify your testing abilities by creating and checking thousands of tests around the clock. This talk will focus on how you can use simple programming and free tools to create simple, powerful, on-the-fly test generation to supplement your own exploratory testing.

Harry Robinson is a Software Engineer in Test for Google. He coaches teams around the company in test generation techniques. His background includes ten years at AT&T Bell Labs, three years at Hewlett-Packard, and six years at Microsoft before joining Google in 2005. While at Bell Labs, he created a model-based testing system that won the 1995 AT&T Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Area of Quality. At Microsoft, he pioneered the test generation technology behind Test Model Toolkit, which won the Microsoft Best Practice Award in 2001. He holds two patents in software test automation methods, maintains the site www.model-based-testing.org , and speaks and writes frequently on software testing and automation issues.