Debra Lavell has 10 years experience in quality engineering, currently working as a Program Manager in the Platform Quality Methods Group, part of the Corporate Platform Office at Intel Corporation. Her role is to help drive good requirements engineering practices into Intel’s various product development teams. Prior to her work in quality, Debra spent 8 years managing an IT department responsible for 500+ node network for ADC Telecommunications. Debra has been involved in PNSQC since 1999, as an attendee, paper presenter, and various positions on the board. Debra is a member of Portland, Oregon’s Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) steering committee where she coordinates the monthly speakers, and communicating meeting information. She holds a Bachelor’s of Arts degree in Management with an emphasis on Industrial Relations.

Email: president at pnsqc.org

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.

Email: vp at pnsqc.org

Doug Reynolds is a Software Quality Engineer at Tektronix Inc., in Beaverton Oregon. Doug has worked for Tektronix for the past 13 years. He holds a Master of Computer Science and Engineering from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering Technology from Oregon Institute of Technology. Doug has presented at PNSQC on four different occasions and has assisted with the Exhibits Committee, Selection Committee, and Review Committee. This past year Doug was the PNSQC Secretary and is currently serving as the PNSQC Treasurer.

Email: treasurer at pnsqc.org

David graduated from Cambridge (UK) with a degree in Mathematics. He spent the years between 1960 and 1995 working worldwide in the oil exploration profession using the computer for both seismic signal analysis and for mapping. In 1995 he moved to Portland where he was briefly involved in a medical ultrasound startup venture. In 1999 he took over as IT manager at the CDRC division of OHSU and presented a PNSQC paper on their Y2K project methodology. In 1999 he also graduated from OGI with a MS degree in computer science. When he retired in 2004 he became increasingly involved in PNSQC and has served as program chair for the past three conferences.

Email: secretary at pnsqc.org

Bill Gilmore is the Operations and Infrastructure chair for PNSQC. He has worked in software engineering for over 20 years in various development, management, process and consulting roles. He worked in two small companies, then worked at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon. He moved to Oregon in 1993 to head up the Software Process Improvement program at Tektronix. Most recently he worked at Intel for 10 years with several product teams and business groups on software product quality, product life cycles and several areas of software engineering. He led CMM and product life cycle assessments and organized and led follow-on improvement programs. Bill has a Ph.D. in Astronomy; has published papers in Software Engineering, Strategic Planning, and Astronomy; and has presented at several conferences.

Email: operations at pnsqc.org

Marilyne Pelerine works as IT QA Manager for Symetra Financial in Seattle, a company with over $20 billion in assets. She has worked in information technology for several financial services companies in various roles for the past 18 years. As part of Quality Management Services, and under her leadership, the QA team provides focus on quality through best practices resulting in cost-efficient technology solutions for Symetra’s business partners and excellent service to customers. Marilyne holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Management and Psychology from University of Massachusetts. This is her first year serving on the PNSQC Board of Directors.

Email: audit at pnsqc.org

A quality evangelist and current Conference and Program Chair, Ian is a veteran software developer, quality assurance engineer, and manager with experience in the manufacturing, financial services, construction, and security domains. Since 1979, Ian has improved productivity and software quality through rigorous development methods and processes and now through the diligent application of Agile methods. He attended the very first PNSQC in 1983. Ian has contributed to SAO QASIG, PDX Software Roundtable, ASQ’s CSQE, and the SEI’s SEPG conference. As an Agile Alliance member and Agile Manifesto signer, his current interests include a) collaborative quality and b) applying agile methods to nurture high performing teams that produce profitable, maintainable products. Go, Beavs!!

Email: program at pnsqc.org

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We start with the “What”; experience gives us the “How.” Applying our knowledge of process, developing a technique of implementing it and adapting that implementation to the constraints of the project and culture bring success. Project methodologies are not static and must adapt. Critical chain, agile and classic waterfall all have their place and a blend of them can be used on the same project.When determining what to do to improve project deployment, you often have to start by bringing things back to a common baseline-implementing all or part of a classical project management process. This has the effect of “draining the lake” so that the rocks are visible. From there you can look at implementing a different approach.It is desirable to implement a new philosophy from the start, but that requires the knowledge that something is wrong with the current methodology. More likely the attitude is that it is the project that is “bad.” Blaming the project lays the blame on one entity and not the organization’s methodology. Subtle, even covert, implementation of different processes on a project and then reporting on the success, sighting other areas where the technique will work, helps evolve the management style.

The process that’s required for developing software is determined by the attributes of the quality required. And those attributes are determined by what the users (who the users are, what their needs are, and the environments in which they will use the product) require for their usage to be beneficial, successful and/or enjoyable. Which means, if you don’t have an in-depth understanding of the users and how they will use the product, you can’t make claims about quality or what process to follow to provide it.

Software processes and methodologies are tools software professionals use to build products that satisfy their user base. It is important to choose the right tool for the job considering the complexity of the project, the experience level of the people using them, and a proven track record of working. Processes and methodologies give us an avenue to build successful products and are not as important as building a cohesive team focused on a common goal.

What do we mean by “mature” software development processes? Software-intensive organizations need the ability to control, manage, and optimize product development, to be sure; but maturity entails more than this. Maturity also implies that an organization’s development processes are well-adapted to its operational and strategic objectives, and that these objectives may be achieved with a minimum of internal conflict, confusion, stress, and frustration. The Technical perspective (e.g., metrics and measurement; process definition; V&V) is necessary, but not sufficient to achieving software quality. Success requires that the Organizational perspective (e.g., innovation; creativity; adaptation to market conditions) and the Personal perspective (e.g., jelled teams; working styles and communication skills; trust, advice, and friendship) must also be taken into account. Skillful blending and balancing of T+O+P considerations is the hallmark of a truly mature software organization.

My work on improving software quality focuses on the “real” developers–the people actually writing the code. As a result, I’m interested in tools, techniques, and methodologies that these people can use to improve the quality of the code they produce. Regardless of the development process being used, these people need to know what they’re supposed to produce and the constraints under which it must be created (requirements), need to have a vision for how they’ll implement it (design), need to produce something executable (coding), need to have a way to verify that they’ve implemented what they’re supposed to (testing), and need to satisfy a host of additional requirements that are often left unstated (e.g., source code comprehensibility, modifiability, and portability). They must also typically balance pieces of “best practice” advice that may not be fully compatible, e.g., encapsulation vs. testability, speed vs. loose coupling, graceful failure vs. minimal footprint. I’m especially interested in the issues facing library developers, who can never know all the ways in which their software is used and who must typically ensure backwards compatibility for almost every release. Finally, because I often work with C++ developers whose code bases are very large, were developed over a decade or more, are extremely performance-sensitive, and are mission-critical, I’m interested in the practicality of quality improvement recommendations for software systems of this nature.

I am honored again this year to host a panel of experts about a topic I think may be important in our community. With this year’s conference theme: “Quality: A Competitive Advantage,” the conference organizers let me choose a sidebar on a congruent topic, so I chose something very few of us stop to think about - value.There are many definitions of quality, for example, but my favorite is from Jerry Weinberg: “Quality is value to some person.” Value is not about price, it is about what you get for the cost. Something given free, may wind up “costing” you a lot of time and money. Conversely, something that is expensive may prove to pay for itself very quickly.It is a subjective concept that intrigued me enough to want to choose colleagues who I thought would bring value to the topic of Value, so consider this an invitation to spend some time exploring it with us at lunch on Wednesday!

I have been strongly influenced by Jerry Weinberg in my thinking about quality and value. He defines quality as “value to some person,” and value as “what someone will do or pay to have his or her requirements met.” He also points out that, like quality, “purpose” is not an intrinsic property of a product, but rather a relationship between the product and a person. Finally, that which we call a product is a system built out of smaller systems and part of some larger system.For some testers, these ideas are unsettling. “Surely quality, purpose, and value aren’t subjective!” is a common reaction. “How can we testers make decisions about quality if everyone’s idea of quality is different?” After years of thinking about it, I am convinced that quality, purpose, and value are subjective, and that testing therefore involves a good deal of uncertainty. We testers can live with that uncertainty, though, and even embrace it. First, our role is to provide information to managers and to the rest of the project community, not to make decisions about the product or the project; that is properly a management task. Second, I believe we do better testing when we consider the system, instead of the product; multiple users, instead of “the user”; possible purposes, instead of “the purpose”; and varieties of values, instead of “the value”. If we embrace subjectivity-or diversity-we can anticipate more risks, find more bugs, and provide more value to more people.

Brian believes that if software quality professionals want to not merely survive but thrive in an increasingly competitive world, they need to understand how value is determined by customers and by business stakeholders.

The concept of “value” as it applies to software or other products or commodities is a difficult one. While value can be measured in objective units, such as dollars and cents, in reality it is largely subjective. Unlike quality, for instance, which is measurable against specific standards or a set of objectives, the value of a product is typically defined in terms of what a customer is willing to exchange for it. In a perfect world, high quality always equals high value, but as we see every day, that is not always the case. While quality frequently drives value, especially over the longer term, customers are still the final arbiters. Customers are influenced by a marketing, packaging, reputation, pricing, accessibility -in addition to their own objective standards.The key to producing something of value as it pertains to software is deceptively simple — understand what your customers not only need, but what they want, and then design and build a quality product to those standards. It gets more deceptive and less simple when you recognize the danger of listening to your customers too closely, forgetting that they are paying you to build them a product for a reason - often because they lack the skills or the resources to build it themselves. All too often testers are confined to a strict quality assurance role - they verify quality all day, testing output against input, a product against a design. However, testers are first and foremost customer advocates. In the rare cases where they are given the voice to test the design itself, at that point, a tester evolves beyond “simply” verifying quality, and can begin truly testing a product’s value.

The value that I have been most concerned about for the past six years has been educational value. Most software testing techniques were developed during a time when a big program was 10,000 lines and written in COBOL, a language almost anyone can read. An enterprising tester could read the entire program, list all the relevant variables, identify most of the interesting combinations, and lovingly handcraft an appropriate set of tests. Today, we snap together massive programs–my cell phone has over 1,000,000 lines of code. Programmer productivity has skyrocketed while tester productivity has increased linearly. At its best, (slightly) automated regression testing increments tester productivity a little more. When programmer productivity rises sharply faster than tester productivity, our impact on projects declines. To the extent that testing is valuable (and I do think it is very valuable) the diminishing significance on projects that is a natural consequence of differential productivity becomes a serious problem.One of the reasons programming evolves so rapidly is the strong educational support for programmers at university. New ideas spread quickly, into new courses or modifications of the standard courses. Educational support for testers is not so strong. There are no degree programs in testing–most universities offer zero or one testing course. Even the handful that offers two or three courses can only teach so much in that small amount of time. As a result, most training in testing will probably continue to be industrial–learning on the job by yourself, by in-house classes, or from a commercial trainer.I went back to university because I felt, as a successful commercial trainer, that the short course format offered little potential for skill development or for the development of a real appreciation of new ideas. There just isn’t enough time in the short-course format, not enough time in class, not enough time for homework, and not enough calendar time for someone to think over a new idea, try it on her own projects, then come back to the course and comment on how it worked (or didn’t) in her situation.My question is this: “How can we adapt the university instructional models to industrial training, in order to promote skill development and propagation of new ideas and technologies?”If testers are going to continue to add serious value to projects, we need educational support that can help foster and spread deep change, rather than teaching and testing students (certification candidates) a superficial rehashing of the same stuff people were learning in the 1980’s.

How do you model a system for software application development? How do you measure, manage, and control such a system? How might you go about defining the goal and measuring productivity and quality in meaningful ways that matter to customers? How would you create a methodology in the spirit of the teachings of W. Edwards Deming?This presentation will promote the idea that application development can be modeled as a value chain and mapped with a state model allowing the tracking of work items queuing at each stage in the process lifecycle. Such foundation then enables the use of techniques such as the Theory of Constraints, Lean/Kaizen and Six Sigma to measure, manage and control a quality assurance program to drive continuous improvement.

David Anderson is the author of “Agile Management for Software Engineering” published by Prentice Hall in 2003. He is a recognized expert in agile software development and management methodologies, the application of management science and techniques such as The Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Six Sigma to software engineering problems. David works for Microsoft as the architect for the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) methodology and designed the MSF for CMMI Process Improvement process template - the first mass market solution to bring together agile and CMMI. David is a regular conference speaker. He has published widely on the topics of software development management, productivity, quality assurance, and continuous improvement.

Jon Bach

Two decades after the term “exploratory testing” was invented, testers and managers still do not understand it completely. Worse, experts consider it an art, implying that there is no way to teach it or improve one’s skill at it. This presentation will try to shatter that myth and describe specific skills and tactics that testers can use to improve their unscripted testing ability while gaining credibility and confidence.

In his ten-year career in testing, Jon Bach has led projects for many corporations, including Microsoft, before starting with Quardev - an onshore test outsourcing company in Seattle. As Manager for Corporate Intellect, he manages testing projects ranging from a few days to several months using Rapid Testing techniques (like SBTM). He is the speaker chair for Seattle’s Quality Assurance SIG, as well as a regular guest speaker for Seattle-area testing forums and universities. In 2000, Jon and his brother James created “Session-Based Test Management” - a technique for managing (and measuring) exploratory testing, for which he is a recognized expert.

Jim Brosseau

Software development in a team environment needs to be consciously managed to be effective, and we all need to recognize our role in this effort.

Jim Brosseau has a career spanning more than 20 years in a variety of roles and responsibilities. He has held successively more responsible positions in military and defense contracting, commercial software development, and training and consulting. He has worked in the QA role, and has acted as team lead, project manager, and director. In addition, Jim has worked with more than 60 organizations in the past 7 years with a goal of reducing business inefficiencies. An integral part of this effort has been a focus on techniques for measurement of productivity gains and ROI for refined development and management practices.

Jim Brosseau

While commonly used external benchmarks can provide some insights, it is important to balance this with internal information to gain a complete objective picture.See P-112 for bio.

David Card

In an era of tight budgets and increased outsourcing, getting a good measure of an organization’s productivity is a persistent management concern. Unfortunately, experience shows that no single productivity measure applies to all situations. This article discusses the key considerations for defining an effective productivity measure.

David Card is a fellow of Q-Labs. Previous employers include the Software Productivity Consortium, Computer Sciences Corporation, Lockheed Martin, and Litton Bionetics. He spent one year as a Resident Affiliate at the Software Engineering Institute and seven years as a member of the NASA Software Engineering Laboratory research team. David is the author of Measuring Software Design Quality (Prentice Hall, 1990), co-author of Practical Software Measurement (Addison Wesley, 2002), and co-editor ISO/IEC Standard 15939: Software Measurement Process (International Organization for Standardization, 2002). He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Systems and Software; he is chair of the IEEE Standard 1044, Classification of Software Anomalies, revision project; and a Senior Member of the American Society for Quality.

John Carrillo

In companies today over 80% of processes are automated in software. This means that the performance of your organization can be linked directly to the performance of your software. If you deliver the wrong software or the software doesn’t perform as anticipated - you’ve got problems. Requirements (any request for change) are essential to the success of development projects. This presentation will share insights and best practices of companies taking a requirements-driven development approach to ensure requirements serve as a proxy for the customer (both external and internal) throughout the development process (define, design, simulate, develop, validate, deliver) in the context of their business.

John Carrillo is Senior Director, Strategic Solutions with Telelogic. The Telelogic Solutions Group provides domain expertise, thought leadership, and expert opinion to its global customer base. With over 15 years in the commercial and defense industries, John’s experience includes roles in technical sales, management, process consulting, systems engineering, product development, and program management. John holds degrees in Electrical Engineering (EE) and Sociology from Loyola Marymount University and California State University at Long Beach. He completed EE graduate studies at California State University in Long Beach.

Patrick Copeland

Come and peek inside the doors of the world’s fastest moving innovation factory. For every service Google releases there are dozens that are in various stages of experimentation. This highly charged atmosphere creates many challenges for our engineers in test. From our approaches to automation, to the way we divide the work within the project team, we have developed many innovative adaptations to common testing models. This talk will be a brief glimpse of our ideas and will be of interest to people who need to “thinking differently” about quality.

Patrick Copeland is currently Director of Quality Assurance at Google where he develops innovative approaches to testing. Previously he managed the SQL Programming Model QA team while at Microsoft Corporation. As an undergraduate, Patrick attended the University of Arizona; he received an MS from the University of Southern California.

John Copp

Effective software testing gives companies a competitive edge. One way to improve testing is to understand better the mind of the tester. Drawing upon his research in human behavior, the author guides us through a “deep dive” into the inner world of the software tester.

John Copp, a once-upon-a-time psychologist, has advanced degrees in psychology, anthropology, and computer science. Originally a researcher and former Guggenheim Fellow, John made the switch to the computer industry 20 years ago where he has been a developer, database administrator, and test engineer, his current role at McAfee.

Jacek Czerwonka

This presentation introduces PICT, a pairwise generation tool recently released to the public by Microsoft. PICT is one of the most powerful combinatorial test generator available, it’s also one of the simplest and most usable tools.

Jacek Czerwonka works in one of Microsoft’s test organizations. For the last few years, he has been involved in designing and implementing pairwise-related tools and evangelizing pairwise testing at Microsoft.

Claudia Dencker

In the 2000’s ad hoc testing came of age and was beautifully articulated and defined as exploratory testing. But test procedures and testing tables were too heavy for this light, highly agile and wonderfully effective form of testing. Instead, test maps should be considered a complement to exploratory testing. With test case maps testers are able to provide management the objectivity they need to track the testing process and still achieve high productivity and efficiency as realized with exploratory testing.

Claudia Dencker is President of Software SETT Corporation, a company specializing in hosted test case management and tracking for QA professionals. Ms. Dencker has taught software testing and global team management classes worldwide through the IEEE, Software SETT and the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has over 20 years in software QA and testing.

Frank Goovaerts

This presentation discusses the use of Evo (Evolutionary Method) to deliver quality products on time. The method enables teams to detect early signs of schedule trouble and take corrective action.

Frank Goovaerts has engineering degrees from the University of Leuven (Belgium) and the University of Cincinnati. He has worked in the software industry since he graduated in 1981. For the last 16 years he has been with Tektronix in a variety of roles varying from developer, to project lead, functional manager and currently Director of Software Engineering for the performance oscilloscope group. Tektronix is a world leader in test, measurement and monitoring equipment. Frank is an advocate for process improvement and continues to drive his organization to create better software, on time.

Bhushan Gupta

Software Quality can be quantified and measured to provide a desired customer value. The quality attributes Installability, Learnability, Performance, Realability, Scalability, along with functionality, provide a sound basis to define the Total Customer Experience.

Bhushan Gupta has 20 years of experience in software engineering, 10 in the software industry. Currently a Process Engineering Architect at Hewlett-Packard, he joined the company as a software quality engineer in 1997 where he was responsible for identifying key process areas to reduce rework. Based upon Hewlett-Packard quality parameters, he has developed quality goals, quality plans, and software validation strategies for several products. In his current position, he has customized the evolutionary lifecycle for the Digital Publishing Division; contributed to software validation planning and execution processes; developed metrics for software problem reports (defects), project retrospectives, and software process improvements.

Thomas Gutschmidt

This presentation chronicles how one small team at Microsoft used social engineering to create their own test-centric development strategy, spread adoption of the strategy in a Waterfall community, deliver an innovative product, and not go crazy, all within a short 12 months.

Thomas Gutschmidt has been professionally involved in the computer industry for the past seven years. He currently works for Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. He is also a freelance author and writer and has been involved in several open source game projects and module development projects.

Don Hanson

The benefits of agile development practices are well established. A myriad of books describe agile development. However, these texts leave unanswered questions around transitioning from traditional models in real-world environments. This presentation will answer these questions and provide descriptions of what worked.

Don Hanson founded his first commercial software company in the early 90’s, developing an evolving line of animation plug-in products. He has since developed commercial software products for the enterprise market and lead user-interface development for a mobile wireless navigation startup. Currently, Don is the development manager for the integration platform used to manage security products with $500 million in annual sales at McAfee, Inc.

Jean Hartmann

The Internet Explorer team at Microsoft is exploring the use of model-driven testing techniques and tools to increase quality and make the testing process more systematic and efficient. This presentation will describe the introduction of such technology.

Jean Hartmann has been working in the field of QA and testing for nearly twenty years. While his early interests focused on smarter regression testing strategies, his focus since 1998 has been model-based testing techniques and tools. At Siemens Corporate Research, his R&D team developed a UML-based test generation environment, which is being used successfully within a number of the Siemens operating companies. With a recent move to Microsoft as an IE Test Architect, he continues to pursue this topic and his passion for making testing a more systematic and efficient discipline.

Dawn Haynes

Presenting a strategy for engaging key members of the development and deployment staffs to assist test teams in planning and executing performance tests - dramatically accelerating the process and minimizing down time during testing cycles.

Dawn Haynes is a consultant providing software quality, testing, and training services for companies such as Quality Tree Software and SQE. With over twelve years of experience in manual, automated, and performance testing of software systems, Dawn has performed advanced technical training, curriculum and course development, and training department management. Dawn’s career has included successful technical positions at Xerox, Rational Software, SoftBridge Microsystems, and Ipswitch, Inc. Dawn is a member of ASQ and ASTD, and has participated in several invitation-only industry initiatives. She is a contributing author of the book “Quality Web Systems: Performance, Security & Usability.” Dawn holds a BSBA in MIS from Northeastern University.

Paul Hemson

This presentation discusses real-world lessons and guidance for a testing organization, obtained from applying agile development techniques on multiple software projects from the perspective of a test manager or test lead responsible for planning and executing the feature and system level testing on an agile project.

Paul Hemson has spent the past 15 years in various QA leadership and management roles at Mentor Graphics, Intersolv, Cadence, and for the past 4 years as a QA Director at McAfee, Inc. in Beaverton. At McAfee he is responsible for a large, global QA organization. Prior to his QA roles, Paul spent 6 years in software support and development positions at Mentor Graphics. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Swansea University (UK).

Chris Hetzler

As more and more projects are developed using the various agile methodologies, it is important to the success of these projects that the testers involved know how their role fits into the development pattern being used. This presentation seeks to define that role within the framework of agile development.

Chris Hetzler received both a B.S. in Computer Science and a M.S. in Software Engineering from NDSU. He currently works in the Fargo development office of Microsoft Business Solutions where he has been involved with the testing of numerous legacy and next-generation products, including Microsoft Dynamics GP & BP, Dynamics eConnect, and Dynamics Web Services, where he was the lead technical tester.

Mukesh Jain

Historically, application development is often estimated and tracked based on a gut feeling. A schedule is developed from the rough estimate, and as the team tries to meet schedule, it struggles to meet those deadlines. Corners get cut and often the last phase - stabilization- suffers the full impact of poor planning and estimating. Customers are dissatisfied, teams are exhausted and sometimes quality has been compromised in the drive to meet the promised date. Team Software Process (TSP) shifts the focus from testing as the ‘find it and fix it’ stage, to each individual engineer acting to prevent defects throughout the project lifecycle. Team members record data during project execution, tracking key metrics and taking corrective action as soon as project deviates from the plan. Each engineer performs a self-review to ensure the quality of their own output before it goes to the next phase. This brings in high level of predictability in schedule, effort, and quality.

Mukesh Jain is leading Six Sigma, TSP/PSP, SDLC, Process, and Business Intelligence initiatives in Microsoft. He has over 10 years of experience with various positions including Developer, QA, Project Manager, and Quality Manager. He has led multinational companies in India with TSP/PSP, ITIL, Six Sigma, ISO 9000 and SEI CMM Level 3-5 implementation and certification. He holds Engineering degree in Computer Science. He is an SEI Authorized TSP Launch Coach, PSP Instructor, PSP Engineer, ISO 9000 Internal Auditor, CQA, CQIA, CSQA, CSTE, and Master-Microsoft Office Specialist. He served American Society for Quality (ASQ) as Secretary (2000-2003). He Served International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) as Vice-President (2001). As an executive member, he organized TUG Asia 2005 in India in March 2005. He has written several papers on the subject of software quality and project management and presented them in Microsoft and other companies and at international conferences, including IEEE, QAI, ASQ, SPIN, PMI, and SEI.

Karen Johnson

Performance testing can generate volumes of output. Learn how to organize your test results in a way that helps you understand and then interpret the test output. Learn how to present and communicate performance test information to management in a helpful, instructive, and insightful manner.

Karen Johnson, Quality Assurance Manager at Bacon’s Information, has 21 years experience in IT. She has extensive experience in all aspects of quality assurance in a variety of software applications. Karen has spoken at StarEast and StarWest conferences. She has been published in Software Testing & Quality Engineering magazine - now known as Better Software. She is a tutorial chair for 2006 Conference for the Association for Software Testing. Karen is also a member of WOPR - the workshop on performance and reliability, LAWST - the Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing, and AWTA - the Austin Workshops on Test Automation (AWTA).

John Lambert

Testers sometimes worry too much about what others think. This presentation will identify four behaviors that hold testers and their products back - asking permission to open bugs; fretting over feature, team, and discipline boundaries; neglecting to interpret data and recognize trends; and commiserating instead of improving.

John Lambert is a test technical lead at Microsoft and works on the next-generation web services runtime (”Indigo”). He helps with test automation and test methodologies for the team. John has bachelor of science and master of science degrees in computer science from Case Western Reserve University; his thesis was on using stack traces to identify automatically failed executions in a distributed system. John spent a summer as a program manager intern at Microsoft working on server appliances and a summer as a research intern at Cigital investigating malicious software detection techniques. He has presented at PNSQC and STAR.

John Lambert

Designing, implementing, and running tests are critically important tasks - but sometimes we need a break. This presentation will describe four non-testing techniques that improve quality in a short time slice - watching bugs, helping developers, talking to other testers, and increasing positive interactions.See P-160 for Bio.

Doug Levin

Product developers are aware of the opportunities and obligations associated with open source and third party software. However, many developers do not realize they may be violating intellectual property. With source code increasingly available for free, you must retain control of your product development process and manage compliance of intellectual property.

Prior to founding Black Duck, Doug Levin served as the CEO of MessageMachines and X-Collaboration Software Corporation, two VC-backed companies based in Boston. From 1995 to 1999, he worked as an interim executive or consultant to CMGI Direct, IBM/Lotus Development Corporation, Oracle Software Corporation, Solbright Software, Mosaic Telecommunications, Bright Tiger Technologies, Best!Software and several other software companies. From 1987 to 1995, Doug held various senior management positions with Microsoft Corporation including heading up worldwide licensing for corporate purchases of non-OEM Microsoft software products. Previously, he held senior management positions with two startups in California and served as an IT and financial consultant to an overseas development company. Doug is an adjunct professor of Entrepreneurship and Management at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also holds a certificate in international economics from the College d’Europe in Bruges, Belgium.

David Liebreich

The Mozilla Project has a long history of relying on community testing and other quality-related feedback from our users. Learn how the Mozilla Project encourages and processes this feedback, and how you can apply the lessons learned to your own projects.

Dave Liebreich has almost 20 years experience developing and supporting the development of software. Currently employed at Mozilla Corporation, he is trying to figure out how to improve and increase the testing performed in this huge open-source project.

Christopher Manuel

Testing, an often-underappreciated activity in the software development industry, is finally being recognized as a core function for any organization developing or utilizing software. With potential areas for process improvements and cost savings becoming more finite, there is still plenty of ROI to be realized in the quality assurance and testing domain. Whether through judicious use of test automation, more mature processes, or utilization of offshore resources, it is possible to decrease overall spending while improving quality. Find out how through real world examples that can be applied to your quality assurance test (QAT) organization.

Chris Manuel is Director, Quality Assurance Test (QAT) Practice at Rapidigm (now a Fujitsu Consulting Company). Previously he held several positions at Rapidigm including Practice Manager, E-Business Associate Director. Chris started his career with American Management Systems (AMS), a global consulting firm based in Fairfax, VA. With 12 years of experience in IT consulting and professional services, Chris has lead initiatives for Fortune Global 50 organizations including Microsoft, General Motors, and Wal-Mart. Chris has contributed to various publications including the periodical Software Business and has spoken at software development leadership forums in California, Washington and Ohio. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Dr. James McCaffrey

Learn MAGIQ - a powerful but quick and easy technique to evaluate the overall quality of any type of software system. Use MAGIQ to determine how your systems stand up against competitor’s systems, and for build quality analysis.

Dr. James McCaffrey works for Volt Information Sciences, Inc. where he manages technical training for software engineers working at Microsoft. He holds a doctorate from the University of Southern California, a bachelor’s in mathematics from California State University at Fullerton, and a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of California at Irvine. He worked as a lead software engineer at Microsoft on key products such as Internet Explorer and MSN Search. James is the author of “.NET Test Automation Recipes: A Problem Solution Approach” (Apress), and is a contributing editor for MSDN magazine.

Pamela Perrott

What more can we measure than the number of open and closed defects or test cases run? There are several measures to manage and predict the testing process, and to answer questions like, “How much time do we need in testing?”, and, “Is the software good enough to release?”

Pamela Perrott is a Senior Quality Architect at Construx Software. She has been in the IT industry for 23 years as a programmer, systems programmer, analyst, project manager for tools implementations, and instructor. Pam is expert in quality practices, such as implementing inspections, and has a deep knowledge of software process improvement, testing, and software project management. Prior to working at Construx, she integrated new technologies, implemented inspections, and performed complex requirements management at Verizon Wireless. Pam has an AB from Bryn Mawr College in Biology, an MA from Cambridge University in Biochemistry, a Certificate in Data Processing from North Seattle Community College, and a Master’s in Software Engineering from Seattle University. She is also a Certified Function Point Specialist (CFPS) and a Certified Software Test Engineer (CSTE).

Ashu Potnis

Use Cases are a very powerful technique for capturing and communicating requirements for a software project. Yet use cases are often misunderstood, underused, and even avoided. In this session, you will learn how to write precise use cases, and then how they can be do double duty - leveraging the use case specifications to create test case specifications automatically.

Ashu Potnis works for TechnoSolutions Corporation in Vancouver, Washington. He began his career 20 years ago typing COBOL code on mainframe “character mode” screens. He has been through it all - 3GL to Web Services, Waterfall to Iterative processes. The Software Development Lifecycle remains remains near and dear to his heart. In 1996, he co-authored a popular software development tool for Oracle Databases, SQL Navigator, which currently enjoys an installed base of over 100,000 users.

Mike Roe

The first step to identifying bugs is to imagine their existence. A tester’s imagination is key to identifying issues with requirements, finding bugs in software, and reporting them in ways that will grab stakeholders’ attention. Learn how to leverage and develop your own imagination, and that of your fellow testers.

Mike Roe is a Senior QA Engineer for Symyx Technologies, a chemical research company based in SantaClara, CA. He works with a software development team in Bend, Oregon. He has tested software for about eight years in various industries including chemical research, government licensing, accounting, aerospace, and software. For the last three years he has tested scientific electronic lab notebook software (iELN) and the systems in which they are managed.

Brian Rogers

A test team, while responsible for ensuring quality of a feature or product, is not infallible. Just like production code, test code suffers from common problems. This talk will describe tools and low-overhead process for identifying and removing these problems.

Brian Rogers is a tester at Microsoft, working on the next-generation web services runtime (”Indigo”) where he improves test code quality across his team.

Robert Roggio

This presentation provides a case study centering on tracing functional requirements from Needs to Features, to Use Cases and to an Analysis Model using forward and backward traceability matrices. Developers included two teams of graduate students using the Rational Unified Process as a methodology and, to a lesser degree, Requisite Pro as a tool.

Bob Roggio is currently a professor of computer and information sciences in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of North Florida. Previous academic positions held include Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Auburn University (1984-1987), Chair of the Computer and Information Sciences Department at The University of Mississippi (1987-1991), and Dean, College of Computing Sciences and Engineering at University of North Florida (1991-1994). In mid 1994, he returned to full time instruction and research with primary emphasis in software engineering. During his academic career, he has presented and authored/co-authored over forty scholarly publications in journals or conference proceedings worldwide. Prior to his academic career, Bob spent twenty years in the U.S. Air Force both at home and abroad where his principal duties centered upon the definition, design, development and implementation of a wide range of computing applications. He holds a B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Oklahoma, an M.S. degree in computer science from Purdue University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Auburn University.

Manoharan Vellalapalayam

Modern software applications that are rich in features and large in size need new innovative approaches applied to test result analysis in order to gain competitive advantage. This presentation offers a new innovative and practical approach to result analysis successfully applied to various large CAD software projects at Intel.

Manoharan Vellalapalayam is a software architect at Intel with Information technology group. He has over 15 years of experience in software development and testing. He has created innovative test tool architectures that are widely used for validation of large and complex CAD software used in CPU design projects at Intel. Chaired validation technical forums and working groups. He has provided c