Preconference In-Depth Tutorials & Workshops

Each selection runs a full day and includes lunch.
Tutorials and workshops are interactive and hands-on. Class sizes are limited, and seating is first-come, first-served.

Tutorials for Monday, November 15, 8:30-5:00

A	Becoming an Influential Test Team Leader  Randall W. Rice, Rice Consulting Services, Inc. Test team leadership has many unique challenges, and many test team leaders find themselves ill equipped to deal with the problems they must face on a daily basis. In this session, Randall Rice focuses on the influence of leadership in the context of software testing. He examines how to become a person of influence in your organization, deal with interpersonal issues, mentor your team, and market testing and software quality to the rest of your organization, especially management. Discover the dynamics and mechanics of test team leadership, including how to lead a team to work together to accomplish a set of objectives, solve problems, motivate, measure your progress and effectiveness, and learn from past projects. Take away new tools and insights that can make you more effective in your leadership role and a trusted advisor to senior management.
	About the Instructor Randall Rice is a leading author, speaker, and consultant in the field of software testing and software quality. A Certified Software Quality Analyst, Certified Software Tester, Certified Software Test Manager, Randall has worked with organizations worldwide to improve the quality of their information systems and to optimize their testing processes. Randall is co-author of the book, Surviving the Top Ten Challenges of Software Testing.

B	Key Test Design Techniques Dale Perry, Software Quality Engineering Go beyond basic test methodology and discover ways to develop the skills needed to create the most effective test cases for your systems. All testers know we can create more test cases than we will ever have time to run. The problem is choosing a small, “smart” subset from the almost infinite number of possibilities. Learn how to design test cases using formal techniques, including equivalence class and boundary value testing, decision tables, state-transition diagrams, and all-pairs testing. Learn to use more informal approaches, such as exploratory testing and random testing, to enhance your testing efforts. Choose the right test case documentation format for your organization and continually improve your test designs using the test execution results.
	About the Instructor Dale Perry has more than 25 years of experience in information technology. He has been a developer, DBA, project manager, tester, and test manager. Dale’s project experience includes large-system conversion, distributed systems, online applications, and client/server and Web applications. With Software Quality Engineering for seven years, Dale has specialized in training and consulting on testing, inspections and reviews, and other testing and quality related topics.

C	How to Break Software Helayne Ray, Florida Institute of Technology What do you do when you are asked to test a particular feature of an application? In truth, testing theory only provides general guidelines and often falls short of helping you design a total testing strategy capable of guiding your testing activities. This tutorial changes that outcome. “How to Break Software” demonstrates a set of specific techniques you can use to effectively test any software application. With her explanation of software fault models, Helayne Ray helps you understand what software does and how it can fail. She then refines this fault model into a set of ''attacks'' that are targeted toward the software’s most vulnerable points. Helayne presents this new software-testing paradigm, using real bugs in real software applications as examples. Anyone who loves breaking software will gain a lot from—and enjoy—this tutorial.
	About the Instructor Helayne Ray is an information systems and technology executive with more than 26 years of experience. With extensive technical experience in project and system design, development, testing, and implementation, she has led IT organizations in the engineering, manufacturing, and health fields. The recipient of numerous Total Quality awards, Helayne currently is a Senior Research Project Manager for the Center of Information Assurance and an adjunct instructor in computer science at the Florida Institute of Technology.

D	Selecting and Integrating Testing Tools Michael D. Sowers, Software Development Technologies Michael Sowers provides a broad perspective of the software test tools available today and includes a practical guide for evaluating, selecting, and managing test tool implementation. Michael presents core test tool terminology, concepts, best practices, and techniques for evaluating and implementing test tools. He offers live demos of representative, full-function tools that you can use to reduce risks and improve quality across a typical product development lifecycle. Learn how to effectively integrate tools into the testing process. Examine a “best-of-breed” list of tool vendors as well as verification and validation automation practices. Leave with a deeper understanding of the hundreds of quality test tools available and be better able to determine your technology needs.
	About the Instructor Michael D. Sowers has more than two decades of experience in the software engineering and quality fields, with extensive experience in requirements gathering, defect prevention techniques, defect containment approaches, software verification and validation practices, and software engineering methodologies. Michael, Executive VP of Software Development Technologies, tracks innovations in software test tooling and regularly reviews product releases from major commercial testing software providers.

E	Introduction to Systematic Testing Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering Too often, testers are thrown into the quality assurance/testing process without the knowledge and skills essential to perform the tasks required. To be truly effective, you first must understand what testing is supposed to accomplish, and then see how it relates to the bigger project management and application development picture. After that, you can ask the right questions, such as: what should be tested? how much testing is enough? how do I know when I’m finished? and, how much documentation do I need? This tutorial details a testing lifecycle that parallels software development and focuses on defect prevention and early detection. Learn when, what, and how to test, plus ways to improve the testability of your system. Learn the basics for implementing a systematic, integrated approach to testing software.
	About the Instructor An experienced test manager, consultant, and lecturer with Software Quality Engineering, Rick Craig has helped hundreds of companies improve their testing in countries throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Rick is a technical editor for StickyMinds.com, is the co-author of Systematic Software Testing, and has been a featured speaker at testing conferences since 1983. Rick is currently a Colonel in the United States Marine Corps Reserve.

F	Managing Test Outsourcing  Martin Pol, Polteq IT Services, B.V. and Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering When outsourcing all or part of your testing efforts to a third party supplier, a special approach is required to make testing effective and controllable. In this tutorial, Martin Pol and Lee Copeland explain the roadmap for successful outsourcing, how to define the objectives and strategy, and what tasks should be outsourced. They describe how to select your supplier and how to migrate, implement, and cope with people issues. They discuss contracts, service level agreements, compensation issues, and monitoring and controlling the outsourced test work. To help you gain a practical perspective of all the steps in the outsource process, Martin and Lee share a real-life case study, including a spreadsheet-based monitoring tool.
	About the Instructors Martin Pol has played a significant role in helping raise the awareness and improve the performance of testing in Europe. He is the co-author of the TMap® method that has become a standard approach for structured testing and the Test Process Improvement (TPI®) method. Martin provides international test consulting services through Polteq IT Services, B.V. Martin has worked with test outsourcing for more than fifteen years, successfully dealing with technical, management, and cultural issues.
	With more than 30 years of experience as an information systems professional, Lee Copeland has held technical and managerial positions at commercial and nonprofit organizations 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.

G	Testing with Use Cases Ross Collard, Collard & Company Many people think they intuitively know what to test. The truth is that effective test case design can be intellectually challenging and even intriguing. In this session, Ross Collard addresses the question, “How do I utilize use cases to help develop an effective set of test cases?” This session employs real-life testing scenarios to answer that question. Learn to develop test cases from use cases, how to review and critique use cases and test cases, and how to analyze use cases for testability. You will learn to design workable, re-usable test cases with reasonable assurance of test coverage and reliability. Participants attending this tutorial should already understand the major test case design techniques, such as path analysis, equivalence partitioning, boundary value, and risk prioritization.
	About the Instructor Ross Collard is a consultant currently working on testing and quality assurance projects for major corporations in the US and around the world. He has a master's degree in computer science from California Institute of Technology and an MBA from Stanford. He has taught courses on testing for the University of California-Berkeley and Harvard University and spoken at software testing and quality conferences around the world.

H	Implementing a Test Automation Framework Linda Hayes, Worksoft, Inc. Linda Hayes presents a detailed implementation approach for test automation that accelerates the development effort, dramatically shortens the learning curve, allows non-technical analysts to develop and execute automated tests, and even simplifies test library management and maintenance. Learn how to use this practical and proven table-driven approach with any commercial or internally developed testing tool and how it applies to Web, client/server, mainframe, and character-based applications. Linda provides authentic sample scripts, new knowledge, and skills you can use as the framework for a new automation project or to make an existing project more successful.
	About the Instructor Linda Hayes is Chief Technology Officer at Worksoft, Inc., a software company specializing in test automation. She has more than nineteen years of experience in software quality and testing and holds degrees in accounting, tax, and law. Linda is a frequent speaker and award-winning author of books and articles, including a monthly column in Datamation and regular columns on StickyMinds.com.

Workshops for Monday, November 15, 8:30-5:00

Due to the interactive nature of these workshops, class sizes are limited, and seating is first-come, first-served.

I	Scripting for Testers Bret Pettichord, ThoughtWorks Are you a tester who is interested in developing or improving your programming skills to aid your test efforts? Automated testing means programming, but programming doesn't have to be hard. Using the Ruby scripting language in this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to script tests for Web-based software. You will use an open-source Ruby tool kit to explore techniques for automating browser-based testing. Learn how to write automated functional tests for Web applications, understand how to define a base state for your functional tests, and discover the pros and cons of different approaches for automating Web application testing. By the end of the day, you will have written automated tests for a sample application. Participants should have some programming skills in at least one language and understand basic programming concepts such as variables and if-then statements. Working in pairs is encouraged. All participants should bring a laptop (Windows 2000/XP) to this hands-on session.
	About the Instructor Bret Pettichord is a leading writer and consultant specializing in agile testing, homebrew test automation, context-driven testing, and software testability. He co-authored Lessons Learned in Software Testing, a Jolt-award finalist, and is host and founder of the annual Austin Workshop on Test Automation. He is a consultant with ThoughtWorks, an international firm specializing in applying agile methods to enterprise software, and a consulting researcher to the Center for Software Testing Education at Florida Institute of Technology.

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