Keynote Speakers

Monday, October 18

Project Patterns: From Adrenaline Junkies to Template Zombies

Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild

Tim Lister and five of his partners at the Atlantic Systems Guild have compiled project patterns they’ve observed in their combined 150 years of project consulting and summarized them in a new book, Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior.

Tim will begin his keynote presentation with examples from his new book by describing common patterns he’s observed at individual, project, and organizational levels. Tim has come to believe that project patterns are far stronger and more important than “best practices” will ever be. What are project patterns? They are the habits, decision-making practices, and unstated rules of corporate culture that dominate business life. The key to using project patterns is to identify your organization’s current patterns. If they are positive patterns, how can you replicate them across all projects? If they are negative, how can you break the habits?

Tim’s keynote will include audience participation! Tim plans to ask the audience to share some of their own project patterns. The goal is to go back armed with realistic goals and objectives for improvement in your organization.

A principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc. based in New York City, Tim Lister divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing. Tim is a co-author with his Guild partners of Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior. He is co-author with Tom DeMarco of Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects, the Jolt Award winner as General Computing Book of the Year for 2003-2004, and Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, now available in fourteen languages.

Tim has over 35 years of professional software development experience. He is currently a member of the Cutter IT Trends Council, the IEEE, and the ACM. He is in his twenty-third year as a panelist for the American Arbitration Association, arbitrating disputes involving software and software services.

Tuesday, October 19

Using Simple Automation to Test Complex Software

Harry Robinson, Microsoft

Software continues to grow more complex. Users want powerful features, they want those features to work smoothly, and they want those features delivered yesterday. Such demands make our industry a fascinating place to work, but they can make a test team’s job a difficult challenge.

It might be natural to think that elaborate test systems will solve your problems; however those tools and infrastructures impose their own costs, and can distract you from your real mission of delivering great software.

Over the past year, Bing test teams have been experimenting with a simpler approach. Turning away from monolithic test infrastructures, we are finding that lightweight automation and heuristic oracles keep our tests flexible and productive while extending the reach of our exploratory testers.

Harry’s keynote presentation will take the audience through the Bing team’s journey to simplify and improve their testing — by offering the lessons learned, strange encounters during the process, and the encouraging results observed.

Harry Robinson is a Principal Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) for Microsoft’s Bing team. Harry has over twenty years of software development and testing experience at AT&T Bell Labs, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Google, as well as time spent in the startup trenches.

While at Bell Labs, Harry created a model-based testing system that won the AT&T Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Area of Quality. At Microsoft, he pioneered the model-based test generation technology, which won the Microsoft Best Practice Award. Harry holds two patents for software test automation methods, maintains the site www.model-based-testing.org, and speaks and writes frequently on software testing and automation issues.