Keynote Presentations

Jerry Weinberg: Lessons from the Past to Carry into the Future
Tuesday, July 15, 9:00am - 10:30am

Fifty years ago, in 1958, Jerry established the very first separate software testing group, to aid in producing life-critical software for Project Mercury. Jerry will speak of many steps, done and not yet done, needed to complete the task of creating a true software testing profession.

For the last 50 years, Gerald Weinberg has worked on transforming software organizations. For example, in 1958, he formed the world's first group of specialized software testers. He is author or co-author of may articles and books, including The Psychology of Computer Programming and the 4-volume Quality Software Management series. He is perhaps best known for his training of software leaders, including the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference and the Problem Solving Leadership (PSL) workshop.

Robert Sabourin (with Anne Sabourin): Applied Testing Lessons from Delivery Room Labor Triage
Tuesday, July 15, 1:00pm - 2:30pm

In a panic, you arrive at the hospital. Your contractions are irregular. Their intensity varies dramatically – some soft – some sharp – all unexpected. Periods range from 10 seconds to almost 2 minutes. You are in a cold sweat. Could this be labor? You are not sure if you broke your water. You are not sure if your car is legally parked. And you have absolutely no time or interest in offering a complete medical history to some stranger. You are not alone... it looks like every other pregnant woman in the city decided to give birth right now. Oh—and your husband has just fainted!

Should you be admitted or should you go home? The Delivery Room Labor Triage Nurse meets you and through a blend of charm, psychology, empathy and compassion applies protocols, knowledge, wisdom and experience to help guide you.

Labor Triage involves assessment of patient acuity level and initiating nursing actions and interventions. Triage nurses apply a blend of established medical protocols, heuristics and common sense based on their rich experience and generations of shared knowledge and wisdom. Triage involves a blend of key questions, quick tests, observations and evaluations. The triage nurse must identify and focus on the variables that matter.

This talk presents several labor triage examples from recent cases at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal Canada. The authors walk though these experiences and draw parallels to software testing triage including decision making about bugs, (assessing severity, criticality, establishing priority,) focusing testing and requirement change management. Cases presented illustrate circumstances in which triage nurses drop existing protocols and use their own intuition to guide decision making assessment and action in critical cases.

Many aspects of delivery room triage apply to software testing. This talk will explain how these experiences have been applied in software development teams. Robert Sabourin has been applying aspects of delivery room triage to projects since 1987 in several companies in many different technical and business contexts. Rob will even show an example of how he uses labor contraction pain intensity scales to help assess bug severity!

About Robert:

Robert Sabourin has been involved in all aspects of development, testing and management of software engineering projects since graduating from McGill University in 1982. He is the Director of Research and Development at Purkinje Inc, a Montreal based International firm specialized in developing medical software. Robert was the Manager of Software Development at Alis Technologies for over ten years. He has built several successful software development teams and champions the implementation of "light effective process" to achieve excellence in delivering timely commercial quality software solutions.

Robert is a frequent guest lecturer at McGill University where he relates theoretical aspects of Software Engineering to real world examples and demonstrations. Recently Robert has completed a short book illustrated by his daughter Catherine. I Am a Bug (ISBN 0-9685774-0-7) uses the style of a children's book to explain elements of the software development process in a fun, easy-to-read format.

Robert has been the author of several papers and presentations relating to software development at a number of international conferences.

Cem Kaner: The Value of Checklists and the Danger of Scripts: What Legal Training Suggests for Testers
Wednesday, July 16, 9:00am - 10:30am

Exploratory testing is a general approach to testing, including all aspects of product/market research, test design, execution, troubleshooting, result reporting, etc. To see what is different about exploratory testing, contrast it with its opposite, scripted testing. In practice, most testing that people actually do probably sits in the middle, somewhere between pure exploration and perfect scripting. My bias is that most of the best testing sits a lot closer to the exploratory side of that continuum. And yet, I tell people they should use checklists to structure their work. How can that be? Aren't checklists really just abbreviated scripts? As a law student, and then as a lawyer, I relied heavily on detailed checklists and task outlines and templates for forms, but we were trained to use them as aids to critical thinking in the moment, rather than as directives to be followed. This talk considers that distinction, and how it has helped me approach many testing tasks in a way that provides structure but doesn't restrict exploration.

About Cem...

Cem Kaner is a Professor of Software Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology. He is the senior author of three books: Testing Computer Software; Lessons Learned in Software Testing; and of Bad Software. He also leads the AST-BBST course series project. Prior to going back to school in 2000, Dr. Kaner worked in Silicon Valley for 17 years as a programmer, tester, technical writer, human factors analyst, salesperson, attorney, manager (testers, writers, programmers, projects), director, development consultant, and free-lance teacher. He holds a Ph.D. (in human experimental psychology), a J.D. (law degree), and a B.A. in No Declared Major (mainly math and philosophy). For his work on the law of software quality, he was elected to the American Law Institute in 1999.

Brian Fisher: The New Science of Visual Analytics
Wednesday, July 16, 1:00pm - 2:30pm

Innovations in information and communication technology enable us to collect and process immense quantities of data about our physical environment and human activity. We accumulate these mass stores of information based on our belief that they will help to build understanding and inform decision-making in a wide range of areas of human interest. The resulting "data glut" has posed a huge challenge for data mining and related computational approaches. Visual analytics takes a different approach to the problem. Defined as “the science of analytical reasoning supported by the interactive visual interface”, visual analytics combines cognitive and perceptual sciences, computation and mathematical methods, and graphical design to produce computer-generated representations of complex datasets that are engineered to aid users’ innate abilities to find known and to discover new patterns in visual displays, and through dialog with the representations, to understand the situations they represent. In the words of Thomas and Cook, 2005, visual analytics enables knowledge workers to "to detect the expected and discover the unexpected" in massive datasets. The visual analytics approach to information system development is being explored in areas as diverse as science and medicine, design and manufacturing, and law enforcement and disaster relief.

Brian Fisher is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at Simon Fraser University and Associate Director of the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC) at the University of British Columbia. He is also a member of the SFU Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Mathematical and Computational Sciences, and the UBC Brain Research Centre and Institute for Computing, Intelligent and Cognitive Systems. His research focuses on the cognitive science of human interaction with information systems, with the goal of developing new theories, methods, and methodologies for development and evaluation of technology to support human understanding, decision-making, operation management, and collaboration. This is done in collaboration with the US National Visualization and Analytics Centre and its regional centres for applications in disaster relief and anti-terrorism and with the Boeing Company on understanding aircraft safety, reliability, and maintainability data. In addition to his SIAT courses Brian has taught in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, Kinesiology, and Psychology and is currently collaborating with the SFU Business School to build an interdisciplinary graduate curriculum in visual analytics.

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