Invited Speakers

Five Trends Affecting Testing

Rex Black

http://www.rexblackconsulting.com

Five strong winds of change are blowing in the software and systems engineering world. As winds affect a sailboat, these winds of change will affect testing as a field, and testers as a community. Your career as a tester is at stake, and both risks and opportunities abound. In this presentation, Rex will discuss these five trends and how they affect testing.

He will offer cautions about the risks and identify the potential opportunities testers face. For each trend, he will provide references to books and other resources you can use to prepare yourself to sail the ship of your testing career to the destination you desire-professional success.

With almost a quarter-century of software and systems engineering experience, Rex Black is President and Principal Consultant of RBCS, Inc., a leader in software, hardware, and systems testing. For over a dozen years, RBCS has served its worldwide clientele with training, assessment, consulting, staff augmentation, off-site and offshore outsourcing, test automation, and quality assurance. RBCS has over 100 clients spanning twenty countries on five continents, including Adobe (India), ASB Bank, Bank One, Cisco, Comverse, Dell, the US Department of Defense, Hitachi, NDS, and Schlumberger.

His popular first book, Managing the Testing Process, now in its second edition, has sold over 22,000 copies around the world, including Japanese, Chinese, and Indian releases. His two other books on testing, Critical Testing Processes and Effective and Efficient Software Testing, have also sold thousands of copies, including Hebrew, Indian, Japanese and Russian editions. He has written over 20 articles, presented hundreds of papers, workshops, and seminars, and given over a dozen keynote speeches at conferences and events around the world.

Rex is the President of both the International Software Testing Qualifications Board and the American Software Testing Qualifications Board.

First to Market or First to Fold? A General Systems View

Michael Bolton

http://www.developsense.com

http://www.developsense.com/blog.html

Optimistic marketers often speak of the enormous advantage of being first to market in a particular category, but is being first to market really an advantage? Look at some of the spectacular successes of products, brands, and technologies and you will see that time and again, contrary to popular wisdom, the later arrivals tend to do better. Why?

The answer is that the winners are first to market with a product of sufficient quality. In this presentation, Michael Bolton shows how general systems thinking can help us to identify some of the factors that govern the success or failure of an innovative product, service, or strategy.

Michael Bolton has over 15 years of experience in the computer industry testing, developing, managing, and writing about software. He is the founder of DevelopSense, a Toronto-based consultancy. He was with Quarterdeck Corporation for eight years, during which he delivered the company’s flagship products and directed project and testing teams both in-house and around the world.

Michael has been teaching software testing for five years. He was an invited participant at the 2003, 2005, and 2006 Workshops on Teaching Software Testing in Melbourne, Florida (hosted by Cem Kaner and James Bach), is an annual attendee at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and is an active member of Gerald M. Weinberg’s SHAPE Forum. He is also the Program Chair for TASSQ, the Toronto Association of System and Software Quality, and a co-founder of the Toronto Workshops on Software Testing.

The Keyhole Problem

Scott Meyers

www.aristeia.com

Software too often imposes gratuitous restrictions on how we see or interact with the world – forcing us to experience the world through the keyhole of a door. The Keyhole Problem arises every time software artificially restricts something you want to see or something you want to express. If you want to see an image, but your image-viewing software artificially restricts how much of that image you can see at a time-that’s the keyhole problem. If you want to specify a password of a particular length, but your software says it is too long-that’s the keyhole problem. If you want to type in your U.S. telephone number, but your software refuses to let you punctuate it in the conventional manner with a dash between the three-digit prefix and the four-digit exchange-that’s the keyhole problem. This talk, which applies to software written in any language, discusses what “keyholes” are, why they are worth caring about, and suggests ways to design and implement software containing as few keyholes as possible.

Scott Meyers is an independent author and consultant with over three decades of experience in software development practice and research.

His perennially best-selling Effective C++” books (Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL) defined a new genre in technical publishing, and his Effective C++ CD introduced several innovations in the web-based presentation of technical material.

Scott is Consulting Editor for Addison Wesley’s Effective Software Development Series and a member of the technical advisory boards of the online journal, The C++ Source, and Software Development magazine. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Brown University.

Leading Change: Collaboration and Collaborative Leadership

Pollyanna Pixton

Evolutionary Systems

It is no longer enough to respond to change-organizations must lead change or be left behind. Innovation and creativity is essential, as are collaborative leaders to create environments that stimulate powerful ideas and deliver quality products and services.

Pollyanna will discuss how to lead and create collaborative environments where adaptive practices emerge and thrive. Such practices embrace change and deliver the right products and services at the right time. She will address how to integrate business value and ensure quality and marketable results.

Presenting models from her think tank on innovation and leadership, Pollyanna will discuss how collaboration and collaborative leadership delivered the Swiss Electronic Stock Exchange, power grid control systems at Asea Brown Boveri, and rolled out the Homeless Information Management System in Utah.

Pollyanna Pixton is widely recognized for her ability to lead the collaborative efforts of talented people who want to expand what they already do very well to being even better. She works with leaders and teams inside corporations and organizations to improve their productivity and effectiveness to achieve lasting results using collaboration. She founded Evolutionary Systems in 1996, and brings over 35 years of executive and managerial experience from a variety of successful business and information technology ventures to her work as a consultant. As the result of a think tank she formed two years ago to address how to improve innovation in today’s organization, she co-founded and directs the Institute of Collaborative Leadership.

She was primarily responsible for leading the development of the Swiss Electronic Stock Exchange, developing sophisticated control systems for electrical power plants throughout the world, and merging the complex technologies and data systems of large financial institutions. Her background includes leading the development of complex e-commerce projects, real-time applications, positioning systems, and researching computational methods in theoretical physics.

Pixton co-founded the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) and serves on that Executive Board. She is chairing the ADC 2006 Leaderships Summit, and at Agile 2005, she presented a tutorial and workshop on collaborative leadership. In 2004, she chaired the ADC Executive Summit and led the Getting Leaders Onboard workshop at XP Universe with Mary Poppendieck.

Lean Cuisine-How Lean Thinking Bakes In Quality

Jean Tabaka

Rally Software Development

The Lean movement begun in the 1950s when Toyota’s redefinition of automobile production put the entire manufacturing world on its ear. Although the impact Toyota has had on the world automotive market is well-known, what may be less known is the role quality has played in this explosive paradigm shift. “Lean Cuisine” explores the basics of Lean Thinking and brings it to our quality-tuned ears-how customer value has driven quality; how quality has driven software development; and how can we create value and quality by attacking the 7 wastes of Lean Software Development.

Jean Tabaka is an Agile Coach with Rally Software Development in Boulder Colorado. With over 25 years of experience in the software development industry, she has navigated numerous waterfalls in a variety of crafts (government, IT, consulting) and in a variety of roles (programmer, architect, project manager, and methodologist). Her move to agile software development approaches came in the late 90s as a result of studying DSDM in the UK. Since that time, she has become an agile devotee, consulting with teams of all sizes worldwide wishing to derive more value faster through the adoption of agile principles and practices.

Jean is a Certified ScrumMaster, a Certified ScrumMaster Trainer, and a Certified Professional Facilitator. She holds a Masters in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders published in the Addison-Wesley Agile Software Development Series.