Software Quality Engineering - Web Seminars Archived Presentations

Web Seminars are free informational seminars brought to you by Better Software magazine and StickyMinds.com and sponsored by leading industry solutions providers. Industry experts and authors from Software Quality Engineering and the sponsoring company will answer questions for you through these interactive sessions.

Click on the link below to access the PowerPoint presentation presented.

On Demand Web Seminars

Test Data Management in Complex Environments
Date	Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 11 a.m. ET
Featured Speakers	Pradeep Govindasamy, Cognizant Testing Services Kannan Subramanian, Cognizant Testing Services
Details	Test data plays a central role in testing and greatly impacts your testing effectiveness and productivity. Although it is possible to extract test data from a production environment, the process is time consuming and often leads to unacceptable data privacy and security issues. On the other hand, generating test data from scratch is tedious and cumbersome, requiring a profound knowledge of an application’s business rules. In complex environments, test data generation can eat up valuable testing time and resources, resulting in lower quality and a reduction to the value of testing to your project and organization. This Web seminar helps you strike a balance between the two approaches, offering an efficient test data management process that saves time and reduces costs. Expert consultants from Cognizant Testing Services will explain ways to generate and manage test data in complex environments. Pradeep and Kannan describe innovative techniques and a proven process for creating or extracting comprehensive test data, masking test data to ensure privacy, and purging redundant test data. In this Web seminar, you will learn: How proactive test data management improves efficiency and effectiveness Ways to reduce the test data complexity Approaches for critically evaluating tools that manage test data
Presentation	View Full Presentation PowerPoint Presentation (1.4 MB)

Establishing Objectives that Make Your Performance Testing Matter
Date	Tuesday, September 9, 2008, 2 p.m. ET
Featured Speakers	Scott Barber, Chief Technologist of PerfTestPlus Matthew Demeusy, Principal Product Manager for the Oracle Application Testing Suite
Details	All too often, the majority of a performance testing effort is spent struggling with technical challenges that, even when resolved, don't end up providing the information that the stakeholders need. Why? Because the stated or presumed objectives of the performance testing effort often do not map to the stakeholder's informational needs. During this talk, Scott Barber will present an approach for getting objectives in line with informational needs to help ensure not only that your performance testing will be more relevant but also that you don't spend time conducting performance testing that solves technical challenges that don't add value to your project. Attend this Web seminar and you will learn: Load testing methodology for Web applications—Web applications face a variety of potential bottlenecks that vary based on the particular application, its target audience, and the infrastructure it resides on. We will discuss how to find the proper load testing methodology for your application and the role of tools in this test methodology. Tool implementation speed—With the wrong tool, simply creating tests can become a major resource drain, detracting from the ultimate goal of testing itself. The correct tool will be powerful, easy to learn, and rapid to deploy, allowing the tester to focus primarily on the tests at hand. We will talk about rapid load test script creation within the context of the Oracle Application Testing Suite.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (3.73 MB)

Just in Time! Applying Lean Principles to Agile Practices
Date	Tuesday, August 12, 2008, 11 a.m, ET
Featured Speakers	Alan Shalloway, Founder and CEO of Net Objectives
Details	Lean has many facets–the paradigm from which it springs, its principles, its practices, and more. These all lead to the concept of doing things at the right time in order to eliminate waste and to speed up delivering value. This is known as “Just in Time.” Much can be learned by contrasting Lean’s manufacturing approach to mass manufacturing. Mass manufacturing parallels a waterfall approach by doing each step (analysis, design, code, and test) separately, while Lean manufacturing parallels an agile approach of building a story at a time. By contrasting these two approaches, wastes in waterfall software development are made apparent. In fact, it is clear that in the area of software–a knowledge-based process–things are much worse and we must adopt Lean’s JIT to minimize waste. Attend this Web seminar and you will learn: How you must focus on eliminating delays between steps to eliminate waste in the process as well as to speed up delivery of business value That keeping people busy by working on multiple projects is counter-productive How to reduce batch sizes via sequencingow to prioritize features and testing based on business value The difference between Pull and Flow and waterfall methods exemplified in two real-life storyboards
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (3.8 MB)

Ensuring Business Value from Distributed Testing in an Agile Environment
Date	Thursday, July 24, 2008, 11am ET
Featured Speakers	Pollyanna Pixton President and Founder Evolutionary Systems Co-Founder Institute for Collaborative Leadership
Sponsor	Cognizant
Details	Establishing and communicating business value from the start of a project will help any team work towards the right goals and build the right product for the customer. In agile environments and across distributed teams, prioritizing and communicating values becomes imperative to ensure the right product is developed. For such teams, storyboards that clearly state the business value are of tremendous value to everyone on the project: to stakeholders, testers, project managers, and the customers. Business value is the key metric that every team member should be following. Attend this Web seminar and you will learn: How to prioritize features and testing based on business value What key metrics you should be tracking How testers contribute to the business value of a product
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (8.31 MB)

Agile Reporting and Metrics: Project Intelligence for Successful Software Delivery
Date	Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 11am ET
Featured Speakers	Sanjiv Augustine Co-founder and board member of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) President of LitheSpeed LLC Roland Cuellar Vice president of LitheSpeed LLC Certified ScrumMaster and Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Ross Pettit Client Principal ThoughtWorks
Sponsor	ThoughtWorks
Details	Agile teams, like all application development teams, need to quantify the business value they deliver. It's no wonder that many agile teams constantly search for answers to questions like: What are the metrics we should be tracking? What's useful and what's not? How do we provide visibility into project progress to management and other stakeholders? How do we track progress without being overwhelmed by the overheads? Which tools help us identify risks before it's too late What You'll Learn Attend ThoughtWorks' Web seminar on agile metrics to learn from and discuss with three of the world's foremost agile metrics experts. You will learn how you can measure and communicate the value of your agile software initiatives.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (1.61 MB)

Using Lean Thinking to Improve Agile Testing: The New Role of QA
Date	Tueaday, June 10, 2008, 2pm ET
Featured Speakers	Alan Shalloway CEO Net Objectives
Sponsor	SQE Training
Details	Testing obviously takes on new importance in agile development. Automated acceptance test, test-driven development, and other techniques are rising in both importance and practice. These are necessary, but not enough. Finding errors is only half the problem--and not the most important half at that. Testing must improve the development process to avoid the errors in the first place. Errors aren’t just bugs. They include communication errors, errors in understanding, and many other kinds of errors. Quality assurance in the agile world must be one of preventing errors, not merely finding them. This Web seminar discusses how QA can improve both the product and the process being used to develop the product. Participants will learn: Why automated acceptance testing enables agile methods How QA must work with development teams in order to improve the process of analysis, design, and code How lean thinking is essential in the agile testing environment Developers, analysts, testers, and people formally in a QA role will benefit by attending. New ways of conducting acceptance testing, as well as how to coordinate developers with testers, will be discussed. In particular, the need for moving test involvement up to the front of the development cycle will be discussed as well as how this can greatly improve the process overall.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (1.58 MB)

Driving Business Agility with Lifecycle Coordination
Date	Wednesday, May 28, 2008, 11am ET
Featured Speakers	Melinda Ballou Program Director of IDC’s Application Life cycle Management service Dominic Tavassoli Vice President responsible for Application Lifecycle Management Telelogic
Sponsor	Telelogic
Details	Seamless integration of development tools - from specs to changes. Coordination and communication built right in. Collaboration between teams - working globally yet fully synchronized. If these solutions can help your software development operation, you will want to attend Telelogic's Web seminar on application lifecycle management. As businesses struggle with financial and resource challenges in a global economy, Melinda will discuss how to leverage the software delivery lifecycle for success, including: Efficient management of global teams Close communication and collaboration across disparate groups Improved quality and fewer product defects due to miscommunication Dominic will present Telelogic capabilities and differentiators. While others are making those application lifecycle management promises, Telelogic delivers on them. Your organization can achieve these benefits from application lifecycle management and this exclusive Web seminar will show you how.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (2.2 MB)

Avoid Throwaway Test Automation
Date	Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 11am ET
Featured Speakers	Jeff Jewell Consultant Adrian O'Leary Director of Testing Centers of Excellence North America
Sponsor	Cognizant
Details	Automated testing is seen as a great way to get more testing done and save money doing it. But if it isn't done right it will only help you get less testing done and spend more money. Far too many companies find themselves spending time and money on tools and tests that bring them no value. Eventually, the tests they tried to develop and the tools they bought could wind up sitting on a shelf gathering dust. In this Web Seminar you will learn: Considerations in choosing an automated testing tool, including deciding between commercial or open source tools Challenges to doing automated testing well Key principles to getting value from automation
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (956 KB)

Creating an Effective Quality Management Strategy for Web 2.0 and SOA
Date	Tuesday, April 22, 2008, 2 pm ET
Featured Speakers	Sam Ceccola Chief Technology Officer Capgemini North America Jeff Meyers Senior Product and Marketing Manager HP SOA Quality Management Productsspan>
Sponsor	HP Software
Details	Join industry experts from Capgemini (Americas CTO, Sam Ceccola) and HP Software to hear what is in store for the future of Web 2.0, how it affects the enterprise and why you need to act now to address the quality issues of this new enterprise architecture. Attend this webinar and you will learn: Why you need to prepare now for the Web 2.0 enterprise How you should apply a risk-based testing strategy to SOA and Web 2.0 applications Why promoting visibility of providers and consumers helps you test more effectively How to create a test plan for a Web 2.0 application
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (2.07 MB)

Four Tips for Managing Distributed Development Teams
Date	Tuesday, March 25, 2008, 1:00 p.m. ET
Featured Speakers	Scott Barber Martin Van Ryswyck Vice President of Engineering Electric Cloud Jim Bell Vice President of Marketing Electric Cloud
Sponsor	Electric Cloud
Details	In this presentation we will examine how geographically distributed teams can improve software production processes through asset reuse, shared infrastructure and resources, and repeatable processes. We'll focus on the impact of distributed development on the back-end processes that follow check-in of new code: the build, package, test, and deploy tasks that are often the bottleneck to timely and efficient project completion.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (2.73 MB)

Whose Environment is It, Anyway? Performance Tuning in a Virtual Environment
Date	Tuesday, March 11 at 2 p.m. ET
Featured Speakers	Scott Barber Chief Technologist PerfTestPlus Dan Koloski CTO & Director of Strategy Emprix Inc. -Web Business Unit
Sponsor	Empirix
Details	The adoption of virtualization is dramatically increasing worldwide as companies seek to reduce costs and maximize the productivity of their IT infrastructure. Chances are is that your company is among them. Virtualization as a term has a variety of meanings, some of which dramatically affect the QA organization. For example, do all of these virtual environments scale? Do you know how your applications perform in these new environments? And how can you tune to ensure application performance and scalability in a virtual environment? This webinar will answer these questions and demystify the impact (or lack of impact) that virtualization can have on application performance and discuss ways to tune applications in today’s virtualized environment.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (2.73 MB)

How to Drive Quality With a Strategic QA Approach
Date	Tuesday, February 26, 2008, 11:00 a.m. ET
Featured Speakers	Dominic Tavassoli Vice President of Product Marketing Telelogic
Sponsor	Telelogic
Details	Quality Assurance is essential to helping your company save time and money, not to mention potentially preventing costly and tragic accidents. Despite this, QA is frequently misunderstood. QA managers oftentimes feel that they lack influence over project decisions and worry that their function is perceived as a cost center. That's all about to change—find out how at the How to Drive Quality With A Strategic QA Approach Web seminar.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (1.41 MB)

Envisioning the Next Generation of Functional Test Tools
Date	Tuesday, February 19 at 11 a.m. ET
Featured Speakers	Jennitta Andrea Independent Consulant Ward Cunningham Software Engineer Wiki Inventor
Sponsor	ThoughtWorks
Details	Test-driven development (TDD) has turned software development on its head. Now that automated functional tests are written before system code, they perform double-duty: requirement specification and regression test suite. Here, the key strategic challenge is effectively specifying requirements as tests. The key tactical challenge is selecting an appropriate tool. This presentation will provide insights to help navigate both challenges.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (845 KB)

Harness the Power of Virtualization for Fast, Self-service Build-test-deploy Processes
Date	Thursday, November 29th, 2007, 2:00 p.m. EST
Featured Speakers	Martin Van Ryswyk VP of Engineering Electric Cloud, Inc. Melinda Wilken Senior Product Marketing Manager VMware
Sponsor	Electric Cloud, Inc.
Details	Enterprises everywhere are beginning to see the benefits of virtual machines in reducing IT infrastructure costs and eliminating “server sprawl.” But, particularly in the build and test phases, software development tools and processes are typically script-driven, disconnected and not automated. Join our Web seminar to hear from VMware and Electric Cloud how software production automation is the perfect complement to a dynamically provisioned virtual infrastructure, reducing IT costs and making more efficient use of resources in the software development environment. Attendees will learn how virtualized software production management can reduce developers’ dependence on IT to configure and run build and test environments and improve quality through frequent builds and tests on all target environments and configurations.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (2297 KB)

The Reuse Spectrum – From Code to Requirements and Beyond
Date	Tuesday, November 6th, 2007, 2:00 p.m. EST
Featured Speakers	Chuck Allison Author, Professor Software Quality Engineering Utah Valley University Dr. Martin Sarabura Solutions Architect MKS
Sponsor	MKS
Details	Reusing code and software components is a common practice, yet organizations still struggle with effectively implementing reuse—even when it's automated. There aren't many guidelines that help us to reuse software without having to depend on an old set of requirements. The same goes for managing projects that share similar requirements yet have distinct differences: What guidelines can we use to determine what can or cannot be reused in the new product's lifecycle? This Web seminar looks at the broad spectrum of reuse and talks about extending the range to include requirements. Chuck Allison, a regular contributor to Better Software magazine and professor at Utah Valley University, will begin with a review of code, design, and architecture reuse. Then Dr. Martin Sarabura of MKS will elaborate on general reuse concepts and methodologies. He will discuss how companies can extend their established best practices and concepts for code reuse and configuration management (for example, parallel development, versioning, and baselining) to implement requirements reuse and advance their requirements management practices.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (448 KB)

Quality Assurance Begins with Requirements
Date	Thursday, October 25, 2007, 2 p.m. EST
Featured Speakers	Tim Lister Software Consultant Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc. Andy Gurd Director, Product Marketing, Product Portfolio and Requirements Management Telelogic
Sponsor	Telelogic
Details	The most damaging and costly errors often occur at the requirements analysis stage and remain undetected until late in the project. That is why it is important to integrate QA into the complete lifecycle activity, not just when testing begins. In this Web seminar, you'll learn about the cost savings reaped by finding and fixing errors early and how doing so will improve the quality of your applications. More importantly, you'll learn ways to prevent errors from occurring in the requirements analysis stage.
Presentation	PowerPoint Presentation (1.78 MB)

Performance Test Execution and Reporting
Date	Thursday, September 6, 2007
Featured Speakers	Dale Perry Consultant Software Quality Engineering Colin Mason Senior Consultant Empirix Inc.
Sponsor	Empirix Inc.
Details	As discussed in previous Software Quality Engineering and Empirix Web seminars, an effective performance test requires a team effort. In this Web seminar, Dale Perry delves into the continuation of the performance tester's journey, specifically during the final phases of performance testing. Colin Mason of Empirix will discuss the Rapid Bottleneck Identification (RBI) methodology, a time-tested best practice for load testing that is used during Empirix's e-Load Expert Hosted Load Test engagements to efficiently provide actionable information to the technical staff.
Presentation:	PowerPoint Presentation (701 KB)

How Production Management Software Keeps the Agile Heartbeat Going
Date	Tuesday, August 6, 2007
Featured Speakers	John Graham-Cumming Co-Founder Electric Cloud, Inc. Jim Bell Vice President of Marketing Electric Cloud, Inc.
Sponsor	Electric Cloud, Inc.
Details	Agile development techniques hearken back to a time when most developers were able to work on small projects, in small teams, and integrate regularly with other developers to ensure continued progress. But for most build/release teams there's no longer such a thing as a small build on a single machine. Even when developers can work with manageable units that they can build and test frequently, the build team is faced with integrating a large body of code on a daily basis (if not more frequently), typically on many target platforms. Continuous integration has become a popular development practice, but to the build team the words “multiple (verified) integrations per day” mean a radical change from the old nightly build routine.
Presentation:	PowerPoint Presentation (1.83 MB)