Are Lifecycles Still Relevant?

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Erik Simmons
Intel Corporation

For many decades, software lifecycles have played an important role in guiding software development. Over the years, various life cycles have been invented to achieve risk reduction, adherence to processes, success in evolutionary or unstable environments, and other goals.

More recently, the agile software movement has changed the way most people think about software development.

• Are lifecycles still relevant in today’s software development environment?
• Can they play a role in moving quality forward?

The key may lie in how we look at a lifecycle and what we ask it to do.

Erik Simmons works in the Corporate Platform Office at Intel Corporation, where he is responsible for requirements engineering practices and supports other corporate platform and product initiatives.

Erik’s interests include software development, decision making, heuristics, systems engineering, risk, and requirements engineering. He has made invited conference appearances in New Zealand, Australia, England, Belgium, France, Germany, Finland, Canada, and the US.

Erik holds a Masters degree in mathematical modeling and a Bachelors degree in applied mathematics from Humboldt State University, and was appointed to the Clinical Faculty of Oregon Health Sciences University in 1991.

Agile, Testing, and Quality: Looking Back, Moving Forward

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Elisabeth Hendrickson
Quality Tree Software

Once considered radical, Agile approaches have become mainstream, with Scrum as the most well-known and most adopted of the Agile methods.

For the last several years, Elisabeth Hendrickson has worked with a variety of Agile teams, some for whom agility came naturally and others who struggled with the transition. In this keynote, Elisabeth will:

• Discuss common testing and quality related challenges for Agile teams.
• Highlight practices that have gained widespread adoption and practices that turn out to be easier said than done.
• Examine why some teams find it easier than others to make a real transition to Agile.
• Look at how tools have changed to support Agile.
• Explore emerging trends to see where we’re headed next.

Elisabeth Hendrickson is a consultant specializing in Agile Testing. She started in the software industry in 1984 and has held positions as a Tester, Test Manager, Test Automation Manager, and Quality Engineering Director.

Elisabeth founded Quality Tree Software, Inc. in 1997 to provide training and consulting in software quality and testing. She’s written numerous articles and is a frequently-invited speaker at major conferences.

In 2003 she became involved with the Agile community. These days Elisabeth splits her time between teaching, speaking, writing, and working on Agile teams with test-infected programmers who value her obsession with testing.