Workshops

W1. Writing Quality Requirements

Karl Wiegers

Process Impact

This workshop is intended to help people who perform the requirements analyst role on a software project become more proficient at specifying high-quality requirements. Students will not be expert requirements writers after this workshop-that takes practice and helpful review feedback from others. However, they will have a good sense of what constitutes high-quality requirements of various types, how to write them, and how to review them. Contents include:

• Software requirements refresher, including requirements definitions, characteristics of high-quality requirements, tips for writing good requirements, and how to review requirements.
• The elements of requirements style, including structures for writing functional requirements and guidance on how to avoid ambiguity.
• Review several less-than-perfect requirements from actual specifications to identify problems, using the 10 characteristics of excellent requirements as the goodness criteria. Rewrite the requirements to improve them. Exchange the rewrites with a fellow participant and review each other’s work.
• Brief tutorials and practice sessions to write quality attributes, data definitions, and business rules.
• Overview of use cases, including the components of a use case (preconditions, postconditions, normal flow, alternative flows, exceptions), and the relationship between use cases and functional requirements.
• Practice session to derive functional requirements from a use case.

Karl Wiegers is Principal Consultant with Process Impact, a software process consulting and education company in Portland, Oregon. Previously, he spent 18 years at Eastman Kodak Company, where he held positions as a photographic research scientist, software developer, software manager, and software process and quality improvement leader. Karl received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois.

Karl is the author of the books Software Requirements, 2nd Edition, More About Software Requirements, Peer Reviews in Software, and Creating a Software Engineering Culture. He has also written 160 articles on many aspects of software development and management, chemistry, and military history. Karl has served on the Editorial Board for IEEE Software magazine and as a contributing editor for Software Development magazine. He is a frequent speaker at software conferences and professional society meetings.

W2. Developing Software Testing Courses for Your Staff

Cem Kaner

In this workshop Dr. Kaner will show participants what software testing content is readily available online (including http://www.testingeducation.org/BBST), and how that material can be used to build in-house courses in testing. The workshop includes an extensive introduction to Moodle, a free software course-management system. The session will also cover issues in segmenting material into manageable chunks, creating useful application-of-what-we’re-learning exercises, and how to tell whether the training is working.

Cem Kaner is Professor of Software Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology and the head of Florida Tech’s Center for Software Testing Education Research. He teaches a variety of courses on black box and programmer testing (has written a few books on testing) and is working on creating free web-based courseware that other instructors can use at other schools or at their companies. The goal is to provide the instructional support for broad improvement in the skill of working software testers and other developers who create tests.

W3. Assessing your Test Team Effectiveness, Efficiency, and More

Rex Black

http://www.rexblackconsulting.com

As a test manager, you are probably looking for ways to do better and ways to demonstrate your team’s value and to find ways to improve it. You will learn techniques to assess your team that are driven by insightful questions and careful data analysis. By applying the ideas in this workshop to each of the twelve critical testing processes, you will know where you and your team stand.

This is a hands-on workshop; there is minimal lecture material, and the presenter uses such material primarily to stimulate discussion.

After each process is discussed, attendees work through exercises that estimate performance metrics for their own test teams. After each exercise, attendees have a chance to discuss their results.

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.

W4. A Rapid Introduction to Rapid Testing

Michael Bolton

http://www.developsense.com

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

Rapid Software Testing is a skills-based philosophy and methodology developed by James Bach. This approach allows testers to do excellent work in conditions of uncertainty, insufficient information, and extreme time pressure, in a way that will stand up to scrutiny. Rapid testing finds important bugs quickly, emphasizes thinking, eliminates unnecessary work, right-sizes test documentation, and constantly asks how testers can help to speed the development process by providing timely, valuable information to management.

In this interactive one-day overview, Michael Bolton (the only person other than James Bach who teaches the course) provides a rapid introduction to Rapid Testing. He will highlight the central skills and practices of to the approach; present exercises, puzzles, and games that reinforce the lessons; and welcome challenge, discussion, and debate. Participants may wish to work through the exercises using tools on their own computers; people are encouraged to bring laptops.

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.

W5. Scrum and the Art of Quality Maintenance

Jean Tabaka

Rally Software Development

The Scrum agile software development process is based on Lean Principles of creating value fast. Scrum guides this value approach through self-organizing teams working in 30-day Sprints to produce potentially shippable functionality. In order to deliver in such a disciplined, time-boxed fashion, Scrum teams must embrace team and engineering practices that leave little room for sloppiness or waste.

In this one-day workshop, participants will learn the basic Scrum process, roles, ceremonies, and artifacts.

Armed with this information, participants will learn the role testing and QA play in such a fast-paced environment. Specifically: what is the definition of “Done”; how do we track our progress to “Done”; and how is “Done” ultimately declared from Sprint to Sprint?

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.