Future Forum Events
Forum events take place (usually) on the last Wednesday of April, July and October each year. The January event is the Annual Summit, of course.
Future forum events will take place on the following dates:
27 October 2010
26 January 2011 (Test Management Summit at the IOD)
27 April 2011
27 July 2011
26 October 2011
Details of ALL Previous Forum Events are listed below.
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The Inaugural Meeting of the Test Management Forum
The inaugural meeting took place on Wed 28th January 2004 at the Saint Georges Hotel, London.
Compuware graciously sponsored the event. and with twenty-seven attendees, the meeting was deemed a great success by the delegates.
Two discussions were facilitated by Paul Gerrard:
The forum members agreed to meet again on Wednesday 28th April 2004.
The second meeting of the Forum took place on Wednesday 28th April at the Grange White Hall Hotel, London. We are grateful to IBM Business Consulting Services, who sponsored this event.
Programme Test Management, facilitated by Graham Thomas
notes
Supplier Management, facilitated by Susan Windsor
notes
The Future of Testing Services
Many of us have worked with, for or though Testing Services companies. Historically, these companies have not provided services, but 'bodyshopped' to cover resource shortfalls for client organisations. It is clear that historically, many clients could not accommodate 'managed services' and perhaps, the testing companies found it easier to bodyshop. But it is also true that some testing companies started life as contract agencies and still work to that model. But, what do clients really want? What do testing companies really want to provide? Is the market maturing, opening the door to a range of sophisticated service providers? Or will the market always be dominated by contract agencies?
Facilitated by Paul Gerrard, Gerrard Consulting
Paul has written an article for the BCS 2005 Annual Review which is more broad ranging, but touches upon the Testing Services which you might find interesting. See attachments.
Antony Marcano asks a question on a related topic
here...
Future methodologies, old challenges and the future role of Test Managers
Agile methods promise a lot: more disciplined developers delivering more reliable, test-first developed code into flexible test environments. But it's clear that the Agile approach is a fig leaf for many development groups. Are they doing the same old stuff but saying they are now 'Agile'? It seems that Agile is here to stay, so how should Test Managers deal with the new
methodologies? How should we deal with the disjoint between Agile processes and 'Best Testing Practice'
Facilitated by Graham Dwyer
'Testing Centres of Excellence' - the challenges and rewards
A growing industry trend is to move testing (as well as other disciplines) towards a Centre of Excellence model. Other, more mature industries such as the Aerospace industry have been working with this model for many years. This session will discuss the pros and cons of the Testing C of E. Who has implemented a centralised approach and what were the rewards and challenges? Who
has rejected it and why. For those on the path to a centre of excellence, what are the hurdles? Where do you start? How do you measure success?
Facilitated by Colin Robb, Mercury, now HP
Success with Tools
Nowadays, everyone has experience of implementing and using automated test execution tools. Some organisations have great success with tools, others use them with limited or sporadic success whilst a depressing number of companies get nowhere. The risk of investing in 'shelfware' is making us all wary of embarking on ambitious automation programmes. This session aims to explore the critical risks and success factors of test automation. Do we fail to manage expectations? Does it matter which tool we select? Are cultural issues significant? Are automation frameworks the answer? Bring your experience to the forum and air your views.
Paul introduced the topic by showing a subset of a presentation he did for Eurostar 1998, 'CAST: Past Present and Future'
Facilitated by Paul Gerrard, Gerrard Consulting
Testing as thought leadership... How do we increase the perceived value of testing at board level?
How often is testing viewed as a necessary evil that incurs excessive costs, rather than an activity that adds real value? There are still many organisations who give testing little consideration until development is well advanced, and a lot of others that plan for testing but often reduce the time allocated to compensate for project overruns in design and development. For an industry that analysts state is approaching maturity, there are still many instances of projects failing to deliver quality products. How do we, as Test Managers, raise the profile and understanding of testing at board level so the perceived value of testing is not under estimated within the business.
Facilitated by Danie Jamieson, IS Integration
Some references, provided by members of the forum are included here:
In the opinion of Don Mills, Louise Tamres, 'Quick Start to Quality – Five Important Test Support Practices' addresses several of the issues we talked about today.
Here's the summary from Sticky Minds: 'As testers, we understand the virtues of clear requirements, effective configuration management, software inspections and reviews, project planning, and project tracking. But how does the test group influence an immature organization to improve in these areas? Sometimes, the test group has to use short cuts, partial implementations, and even a clandestine approach to get things done. Practical strategies used at several software organizations have quickly improved product quality by addressing these five critical development practices.'
The Sticky Minds url is www.stickyminds.com/se/S8345.asp
Antony Marcano provided the following references which will also be of interest: Testing, Zen & Positive Forces by Danny Faught
Testing & Codependency by Lee Copeland
Antony has also posted some thoughts on his BLOG here
Non-Functional Testing
In the push for functionality at speed, non-functional testing is often left to the very end of projects. With the criticality to businesses in having fast, reliable, available and secure systems, it is time to review non functional testing. With the changes to development methodologies, including Agile, non functional testing can no longer be considered as something that happens at the end of the testing lifecycle. What can be done and why?
Facilitated by Stevan Zivanovic, Probatur Limited
The Influential Test Manager
So what does make an influential Test Manager? The Oxford Dictionary defines influential as either exerting influence, or has great influence. What value does an influential Test Manager have? Does influence guarantee a successful project?
With your help, during this session we will define what we believe is success in a test project and explore three possible solutions to the question 'What influencing skills does a Test Manager need to engineer the success of a project?'. Are we talking about political skills, technical skills, people skills or a mixture of them all?
Facilitated by Geoff Thompson, Experimentus
The Psychology of Testers
What motivates someone to spend their working life checking what someone else has done?
Why, when we 'know' systems are not ready for live release, do we still get 'ignored'?
What's in it for us?
This session is intended to ask what really motivates testers. Maybe if we can understand what our pay-off is in doing the job, we can communicate that better. If we can communicate better, then surely, we can all do our jobs better, create better systems, and end the week happier.
Facilitated by Roy Dalgleish, British Airways
Testing Outsourced Applications
The outsourcing trend for software development continues apace. How does this affect the way we test those applications? What are the key issues to bear in mind? Do cultural differences have an impact? Does distance affect the test process? Is communication the only issue?
Facilitated by Sarah Saltzman
Testing Metrics
In the 2004 survey of topics to be discussed at the Forum, metrics came top of the list. If testing is a measurement activity, metrics must lie at the heart of what testers do. We are all familiar with estimation, counts of tests passed, failed, incidents raised, resolved and so on. But are the standard metrics we tend to work with right ones? Do we count what is easy to count, rather than what is valuable? Do our stakeholders take these metrics seriously?
This talk focuses on two questions:
Facilitated by Paul, Gerrard, Gerrard Consulting
Acceptance testing does it deliver business value to the client and supplier?
IT solutions often have many system components allied to numerous business processes. The objectives of acceptance testing are often not clearly understood,leading to misunderstandings and issues between suppliers, clients, operations and the business communities. If this is true, are we wasting valuable time in acceptance testing? If we are, how can we improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the acceptance process?
Facilitated by Sam Clarke Principal Consultant of nFocus
The Skill Set of a Test Manager
The ISEB/ISTQB certification scheme does not focus on the particular skill set of a Test Manager. Test Management skills are many and variable: they cover the technical aspects of testing of course, but they also cover broad interpersonal skills and many of the planning, organisational and controlling skills of project managers. This session will brainstorm a set of skills a test manager needs. The skills profile will be used as a straw man to encourage the wider testing community to compile a potential 'syllabus' for Test Management Training, but also for skills assessment. Surely the industry needs this more than ever?
Subsequent to the meeting, Paul conducted a survey of members.
The resulting paper is posted here...
Facilitated by Paul Gerrard, Gerrard Consulting
Quality Street: Software Quality Unwrapped
The newspapers are full of stories of late, over budget IT projects that don’t meet business requirements. With hundreds of IT standards, tens of thousands of qualified testing professionals, a revamped customer focused ISO 9000 and the new CMMI models how can we ever go wrong on an IT project? How do you avoid the hype and identify the practical stuff that will help test managers to influence the quality of the software under test? This session will discuss requirements quality, test team capability and whether offshoring makes a difference.
Facilitated by Stephen Allott, Electromind
Post-Deployment Monitoring - is it part of Test?
OK, testing is done, the users are happy, and we've had the end-of-project party. Are we finished? The 'traditional' development lifecycle ends with delivery, but the business lifecycle is now in full swing. Many of the tools and techniques used to test the system can now be reused to monitor that same system in production. Technically, post-deployment monitoring fits easily into test. But most organisations have operations and support teams who have their own tools and processes. Should testing carry on? Should we leave it to the 'professionals'? Is this a natural extension of test or a prickly political issue?
Facilitated by Paul Gerrard, Gerrard Consulting
Strategic Direction for Functional Test Automation
After many years of buying and trying to use test automation tools for functional testing, we must admit that our industry has totally failed to realise the predicted benefits. In the words of Paul Herzlich, Ovum Software Testing Analyst 'Functional Test Automation is Broken'. Today, only around 20% of functional testing is automated.
Is our dependence on functional testers reducing? The trend seems to be that developers will increasingly take on more unit testing and business analysts are starting to use a new breed of functional test tools – Test Automation Frameworks.
If we can't lead automation, where is Functional Test Automation leading us?
Facilitated by Susan Windsor, Managing Director WMHL Consulting
Test Process Improvement is a Waste of Time
Everyone wants to get better at testing, don't they? Everyone in IT wants to get better at everything, don't they? The usual approach from specialist consultants is to look at process. If we improve our process, we must improve our performance, right? Better, faster, cheaper - in whatever discipline we choose to focus on. Tools can help, training can help, infrastructure can help, but process comes first. But why is this?
The process improvement bandwagon started with Deming and others in the 1940s and 50s. The mantra then was, 'improve your product quality and cost of production by improving your processes based on statistical data'. This mantra works, but it works for manufacturing processes, with very high usage, mainly automated. Few people use production line processes to create software, so why do we delude ourselves that process is so important?
Perhaps it's because process is easy. Processes can be defined, scoped, taught, automated, measured, replaced. But what are the real barriers to improvement? People, culture and organisation. This session will discuss the potential for testing improvement approaches that might work.
Facilitated by Paul Gerrard, Gerrard Consulting
Is Software Change Driving IT Organisational Change?
A 'successful' system or software product ought to last for many years. It might be an operating system, an application package or an internally developed system or web site. But, if the software is to last, it must evolve through its lifespan to keep in step with changing user needs. Whether you call it software evolution, maintenance or change, the hard fact is that the post-deployment cost of a successful system is several times more than its initial development cost.
So much is common knowledge to developers, maintenance programmers and testers of course. But are we any better now at managing software change than ten or twenty years ago? We are all familiar with the problems of changes made in a hurry, with insufficient analysis and inadequate testing. Promoting better change management, impact analysis and regression testing practices is all well and good. But the cost of failure in production may be driving some companies to look at other solutions. Is yours?
Facilitated by Colin Robb, HP
Aligning Development and Testing Lifecycles
The first objective of a test strategy is to align the testing activities with the development activities. It’s obvious really, but sometimes hard to do. In fact, it seems to be getting much harder recently with the advent of iterative and agile development lifecycles – hasn’t it?
Developers change their development approach in order to be more efficient and effective (and ‘up-to-date’). But testers and their approach haven’t kept pace. While the developers have changed their methods, by adopting an iterative or agile approach for example, the test team will probably be used to a more traditional, structured, V-Model approach.
It’s no surprise that testing and development activities aren’t aligned.
This session will take a look at traditional (structured), iterative (RAD) and agile (incremental) development lifecycles and their associated testing lifecycle counterparts.
Facilitated by Graham Thomas, Independent Consultant
Can Running a Test Organisation Like a Business Improve Test Performance and Visibility?
Test and QA managers usually operate within the business with limited influence. They get their mandate from other parts of the business and have to respond after decisions have been made on projects, budgets, resources and requirements.
But could software test and QA offer the business bottom-line financial benefits? Rather than negotiating after the fact and being seen as the bottleneck to delivery, could we take control of our business, make it proactive and transparent? Where could we make a real impact?
Could taking a business-oriented approach help?
Facilitated by Declan Kavanagh, MD, Insight Test Services
Exit, Cry Tears - Dealing with Testing Review Boards
The time that we all dread has come - the testing review meeting. Months have passed since we agreed the exit criteria for this test stage. Back then, we were all optimistic, enthusiastic and willing. But time has passed and some tests haven't. Our business sponsor, once so keen to support the project is now under pressure to kill it. The developers are long gone; only the test manager is left to take the blame.
Is it really as bad as that? Well not usually. But presenting the test evidence to a group of senior managers to achieve sign-off or acceptance is daunting, to say the least. Is there a best practice in this area? What should go in the phase end test report? How do you answer the awkward questions, bound to arise? How and why do exit criteria always seem to be negotiable? Do you take it personally?
What are the challenges in running a testing review meeting?
Paul's slides can be found : PowerPoint or PDF
Facilitated by Paul Gerrard, Principal, Gerrard Consulting
Developing a Global Testing Framework for SAP
Mark's session introduces a proposed testing framework to support global implementations of SAP at BP. The intent of the framework is to provide a basis for testing that is usable across different programmes while balancing the right level of testing vs. project risk to assure a successful go live. This is quite a challenge: Who are the audience - business or IT? What level of detail should it prescribe? How will it be rolled out to the organisation, evolve and be managed?
Facilitated by Mark Smith, FC&A Special Projects Director, BP
The Top-Down View of Estimation
As a Test Manager, you'll be keen to get your 'bottom-up' effort estimates as accurate as possible to support your planning and preparation activities, not to mention getting any budget and staffing allocation agreed! However, there are many other things that can greatly impact your plans. The focus of this session is to look at a checklist of those other factors and share experiences and techniques for taking them into account.
Facilitated by Susan Windsor, Director, WMHL Consulting
How can we industrialise Testing?
Testing factories were prominent in the mid 1990's pre year 2000, but what has happened to them now? Is this practice coming full circle or is there another way?
Sarah Saltzman
The Joy of Automation
BT One IT established an off-shore Test Automation Centre in November 2005. However, we still struggle to attract and develop 'users' of our regression testing service. Barry and Mo will present how they have reached this point working with their off-shore partners in providing a test automation service drawing out some of the successful aspects as well as challenges that persist.
Barry Baker and Mo Shannon of BT
Should Test Managers Get Emotionally Involved?
Yes, you've been there. Is it wrong for us to become emotionally involved or is it human nature?
Paul Gerrard, Principal Gerrard Consulting
Requirement Lifecycle Management, better requirements for testing (without testing doing all the work)
Pushing for testing-friendly requirements in multiple projects by getting involved earlier and on a different level. Discussion on the nature of requirements, examples and ways of relating requirement activities to testing tasks and roles.
Richard Ammerlaan, Chief Testing Officer of Sogeti UK
Test Techniques - Are they of any Practical Use?
Testing techniques are a key part of most certified testing training but testers often find it difficult to apply the techniques in the real world. They tend to rely on domain knowledge and experience when designing tests. Why is this?
Are YOU using techniques? Which ones and in what context?
Stephen Allott, Electromind
Keys to successfully hiring and retaining your testing team
As an NLP Master Practitioner, Jane will explore techniques for recruiting and retaining QA and testing people.
Jane Muller, Pervue Limited
I'm an Agile Test Manager. Do I really exist?
We know what it means to be a Test Manager. We know what it means to be Agile.
David Evans and Ivan Ericsson lead a lighter-hearted debate on the issue.
Ivan Ericsson and David Evans, SQS
The Top 10 tips for putting in place a software test managed service
Customers and buyers have different perceptions and expectations of managed testing services.
If this is the current or starting point in a commercial relationship then there is a lot of work to be done to ensure satisfied customers and suppliers are created.
Declan will introduce ten suggestions for getting the most out of your supplier.
Declan Kavanagh, Insight Test Services
The Eighteenth meeting of the Forum took place on Wednesday 30th April at the Hilton London Metropole 225 Edgware Road, London W2 1JU, UK. This meeting was jointly sponsored by Stage Consultancy and AQASTRA.
The Programme
Glenn Butler: How did we let Testing get into such a lowly position?
Peter Farrell-Vinay: Release Readiness
Susan Windsor: Competency Based Tester Qualifications - The Next Step for the Testing Profession?
Stevan Zivanovic: The Requirements Balance
Downloadable content will be added soon.
The Nineteenth Test Management Forum took place on Wednesday 30th July at the conference centre at Balls's Brothers, Minster Pavement.
The meeting was sponsored by Amsphere and Gerrard Consulting.
The format for this meeting was a little different this time around and consists of two presentations and a workshop/discussion.
| James Whittaker, Microsoft - Testing the Software of Tomorrow Software does not have a stellar reputation for quality. However, software continues to play an increasingly important role in society and the fact that curing cancer and solving global scale problems like world hunger and climate change requires software is not encouraging. How can software testing evolve to face such challenges? This presentations take a peek into the future of software development and envisions testing’s role in making software fundamentally more reliable. James Whittaker discusses three specific technological barriers that must be removed to allow testers to help make the difference between a future in which software works and the current state of the world in which it does not. Here is a video of James giving some interesting background on his activities at Microsoft: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/briankel/James-Whittaker-on-Software-Test... |
| Roger Halton, Programme Manager, Amsphere Management of a High Risk Multi-Vendor Scenario: A Test Strategy Workshop. This workshop will explore the approach required for a Test Strategy in a multi-system multi-vendor scenario using a real-life example. |
| Paul Gerrard, Principal, Gerrard Consulting - The Axioms of Testing Is it possible to define a set of Test Axioms that provide a framework for all software testing? In this respect, an axiom would be an uncontested principle; something self-evidently and so obviously true and not requiring proof. What would such test axioms look like? This talk sets out the case for Test Axioms. The work of practitioners and researchers could be on shaky ground without them. Some applications of the axioms that would appear useful are suggested for future development. This is a work in progress. |
The Twentieth Test Management forum took place on Wednesday 29th October at the conference centre at Balls's Brothers, Minster Pavement.
The meeting was sponsored by:
SOGETI, ELECTROMIND and FACILITA.
We are most grateful to our sponsors.
| 2.00pm | Introductions | ||
| 2.10pm | Three Challenges, Gordon McKeown and Alan Gordon | Test Management and Contracts in Agile Environments, Paul Gerrard | Has outsourcing come of age to help us weather the economic downturn?, Declan Kavanagh |
| 3.45pm | Back From The Grave: Your Worst Performance Testing Nightmares, Panel Session | People Challenges for Test Teams, Steve Allott | Future of testing - in turbulent Times, Susan Windsor |
Materials from the sessions can be downloaded using the links at the bottom of this page
Session A - Top Three Ways Not to do Performance Testing
Gordon McKeown (Facilita) and Alan Gordon (SQS) facilitated a discussion of performance testing disasters and their causes, leading to a suggested list of "what not to do".
Session B - Back From The Grave: Your Worst Performance Testing Nightmares
A panel of esteemed performance testers took questions from, and throw questions at, the audience. Performance testers find themselves in some terrible situations. What was the worst hole you ever found yourself in? How did you get out of it? How do we make sure that these situations never, ever happen again?
TEST MANAGEMENT STREAMS
Session C - Test Management and Contracts in Agile Environments, Paul Gerrard, Principal, Gerrard Consulting
Agile approaches to software development are well-established and the values and principles of the Agile Alliance have proved their worth. However great they are though, they provide little guidance on contracts and test management. This session suggests how contracts are normally used, how they can be aligned with Agile and discusses testing's role in the context of contracts.
Session D - People Challenges for Test Teams, Steve Allott, Principal Consultant, ElectroMind
If you have been involved in a recent software testing project you’ll have felt the pressure no doubt, as time to market and increased application complexity threaten to swamp testers and their managers. Sometimes, when worrying about the many technical challenges, we forget that testing is about more than just browsers, time to first byte and benchmarking.
People are involved too, and in this facilitated workshop you’ll be able to share your experiences with the group and explore the people challenges faced by testers.
Session E - Has outsourcing come of age to help us weather the economic downturn?, Declan Kavanagh, Managing Director, Sogeti Ireland
As a result of the economic downturn substantial cost reductions are the order of the day. Is there an appropriate outsourcing model that can deliver the required cost reductions consistent with acceptable levels of risk? Is a blended solution managed by a strong on-shore partner the answer? If so, how do we do "blend suitability" analysis?
Session F - Future of testing - in turbulent Times, Susan Windsor, WMHL Consulting
We are living through extraordinary times – the financial world is being turned upside down. Everyone is affected. What impact will this have on us? Let’s speculate and try to be prepared.
We’ll capture the key elements of the discussion and publish on the website for wider discussion. Then have an update slot at the TM Summit in January and beyond.
The 23rd Test Management forum took place on Wednesday 29th
April at the conference centre at Balls's Brothers, Minster Pavement.
The meeting was sponsored by our patrons:
HP, SOGETI and SQS UK
We are most grateful to our generous patrons.
| Reducing Waste in the Test cycle, Paul Rolfe, HP An open discussion to share ideas of how to reduce waste in terms of the cost, time and effort involved in the test cycle. Attendees are encouraged to bring along examples and ideas and the format will be informal. |
Agile Development and Test in Practice, John sweet, BSkyB At Sky Network Services agile development methodologies were introduced in January 2006 to build a new broadband provisioning system for the broadband and telephony division of Sky TV. This talk will include a brief introduction to agile methodologies, how the practises and processes were introduced at SNS and how they work today. Although introducing agile methodologies may seem like a long and painful uphill task, this talk will seek to show how, once achieved, the methods work really well to deliver good quality software to challenging timescales in a changing environment at a sustainable pace (i.e. no developer or tester burn out!) |
Designing for Testability - Technical Focus, Adam Knight Two linked sessions addressing the vital topic of designing systems and applications to facilitate effective testing.. |
| Managing Outsourcing - Case Study, Mike Bartley, Independent One of the likely consequences of the current economic climate is that companies will look to reduce their fixed costs through outsourcing. This presentation considers how to set up and manage an outsourced (and offshored) software testing capability to give strategic benefits beyond cost savings. |
Cost-Based Analysis and ROI of Automation, Aidus McVeigh, Sogeti Why is it that every time Automation is implemented; whether it is using Enterprise tools, creating a Unit test Suite or an API Framework, the topic of cost-based analysis & ROI is shunned? We are expected to ‘guarantee’ that Automation will become the silver bullet of Technology and save the day. But how can we do this when so much (if not all) of the benefits are intangible? This session will look at this ongoing struggle, why it exists, how to overcome it and why ROI really is your friend. |
Designing for Testability - Management Focus, Dave Evans, SQS Session two will deal with the management, “political”, organisational and economic dimensions. |
Materials from the sessions can be downloaded using
the links below
| 1.30pm | Registration/Tea/Coffee | |||
| 2.00pm | Introduction | |||
| Room A | Room B | Room C | ||
| 2.15pm |
|
Paul Rolfe/Andreas Golze/Ian Howles, HP: How Testing can make IT Lean Today’s businesses are challenged by intense competition and growing customers demand for more and better services. This imposes on IT organizations the pressure to come up with new solutions in shorter time frames, while maintaining and improving the existing service landscape. To achieve this IT organizations have to improve the communication with the end user and the various stakeholders who facilitate the change and the operation of a growing applications landscape. One way to help solve these issues is to establish an end to end Testing Lifecycle which acts like a sensor in a closed-loop and feeds date into the governance system (Controller) to optimize IT provision. This discussion explores the different perspectives and highlights potential risks and opportunities. |
Jeremy Gidlow, Chris Thompson, Intechnica: Load testing across the Internet The testing of online applications over the internet is a growing market driven by convenience and a number of commercial benefits. This session looks at the benefits and issues associated with Internet load testing and discusses the factors which determine the suitability and success of this testing approach. |
|
| 3.30pm | Tea/Coffee | |||
| Sogeti, The Value of Training in Today's market | Gojko Adzic, Neuri Ltd: Specification workshops: Getting the business and developers to listen to testers
|
Gordon Cruickshank, CEO eoLogic: Can early validation of Software Architecture improve performance and reliability? This session explores new techniques for validating software architectures aimed at complementing and increasing the effectiveness of performance testing. |
||
| 5.15pm | Drinks Reception |
The 24th Test Management forum took place on Wednesday 28th OCTOBER at the conference centre at Balls's Brothers, Minster Pavement.
The meeting was sponsored by our patrons: HP, SOGETI and SQS UK and as usual, FREE to attend. We are most grateful to our generous patrons.
PROGRAMME
Please note - downloads of the session materials are only available if you register and log in.
Tony Simms, Test Manager at the NSPCC: "Oooo those graphs look pretty!" How to manage performance testing when you are not a technical specialist.
Tony is very much a non-technical test manager and was faced with having to scope, procure and manage performance testing for a new multi-channel voice and web-enabled counselling service for children and young people. This session will briefly set out the issues he faced and the course he took before opening up to the floor for discussion.
Susan Windsor, WMHL Consulting Limited
We “battle” to get our message across. We continue to improve our communications skills. We obtain certification for greater credibility. We strive for earlier exposure to stakeholders and management. TESTING is considered a major area for improvement in many organisations, but why is testing still undervalued?
Management's widely held perception is still, "Testing just slows my project down, costs too much money and we still have faults in production!"
Where did this perception and (and others like it) come from? If we can understand that, maybe we’ll be able to better tailor our messages and demonstrate our value.
Julian Brook, SQS. Code Quality – Who’s responsible?
Code Quality Management, sometimes known as static analysis, differs from traditional testing by assessing (static) source code rather than (dynamic) running software. Historically, this has been the province of developer peer reviews and inspections. Today, there are sophisticated objective measures of code quality available. If the Test Manager’s responsibilities are largely the process of testing running software and the quality assurance processes concerning the creation of that software, where exactly does the issue of code quality lie? Is it helpful or even meaningful to assess the quality of source code independently of assessing the running software? What tools and techniques can we use to measure code quality, and by what criteria? How reliable is code quality measurement as an indicator of overall system quality?
Mike Bartley, Test and Verification Solutions: Improving Time-to-Market Through Software Test Automation
Getting test results sooner - how test automation can reduce time to market. A test team should always keep in mind their contribution to the business, and in this session Mike will concentrate on improving time to market through test automation.
Paul Gerrard, Gerrard Consulting: What are you doing? Why are you doing it?
What is testing really about? This session is a workshop that asks you to use critical thinking to reassess the purpose, meaning and consequences of some testing concepts. Three topics will be considered in this session: test design techniques (test models), exit criteria and independence. Are they gospel, flawed, fake or folklore? Bring your own sacred cows for the slaughter.
Biraj Nakarja, Sogeti: Testing Challenges in an Agile Environment
An Agile environment poses many challenges to a testing function compared to the traditional Waterfall model. Biraj Nakarja would like explore this further with particular focus on; The Characteristics of an Agile Tester - does the 'traditional' tester become less influential in Agile?, Agile Testing using Off-Shore Capabilities - does off-shoring in Agile actually save you money in the long run?, Merging Waterfall with Agile on the same project - can this work, or is it a train crash waiting to happen? Biraj would like share his experiences, and find out more about yours, to help answer these Agile questions.
The 25th Test Management forum took place on Wednesday 28th APRIL at the conference centre at Balls's Brothers, Minster Pavement.
The meeting was sponsored by our patrons: SQS UK and Original Software and was as usual FREE to attend.
Downloads of the presenter materials are available at the botom of the page for registered, logged in users.
PROGRAMME
| Designing a killer agile test management system - David Evans, SQS and Gojko Adzic, Neuri Ltd. Join David Evans and Gojko Adzic in an interactive session to design your perfect agile test management system. We will run a variant of the Product Box innovation game to work out together what features the community would like to see in such a tool. While we are doing that, we'll discuss new features and limitations of current tools, the ways teams use them and tips and tricks for successful agile testing. Gojko has written a blog describing the session.
Finding Quality Assurance Harmony in Agile – A Practical Road Map to Success - George Wilson, Original Software
Performance management: from black art to process - Peter Holditch, Dynatrace Software We will be discussing what information needs to be gathered from production, test and even earlier, what tools need to be used – and in which of the dev, test, prod silos they apply, in order to systematically manage this without distracting developers by making them into part time ‘ninja operators’. We will also look at the common bugbears of troubleshooting: reproducing issues in test and effectively narrowing down the root-cause of complex application issues, with a final reflection on how some of these elements might be brought together into systematic processes. Essentially, how can we attempt to put an end to today’s requirement for ad-hoc non-functional wizardry and foster harmony between developers, testers and operators? For those interested, a detailed discussion of dynaTrace’s use of our own technology for continuous performance integration can be found here: http://blog.dynatrace.com/2010/01/27/eating-our-own-dog-food-how-dynatra... There is also an article about “how to get developers to write performance tests” here: http://blog.dynatrace.com/2010/03/11/week-6-how-to-make-developers-write... And finally, an article about evolving functional testing toward validating implementation architecture and performance considerations: http://blog.dynatrace.com/2009/06/24/do-more-with-functional-testing-tak...
Seven Things That You Might Not Know – (But may find really useful) - Graham Thomas, Independent The tools, and their techniques are easy, fun to learn, and very powerful to use. And they will help you to master testing in the industry’s currently very demanding transition from that of a structured V-model history to a leaner, more agile and exploratory approach.
Effective Load Testers. Who are they? How are they created? - Gordon McKeown, Facilita
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If you have a suggestion for a future session topic, or want to facilitate a session for us, please do get in touch.
The 26th Test Management Forum took place on Wednesday 28 July 2010 at the conference centre at Balls's Brothers, Minster Pavement.
The meeting was sponsored by our patrons: SQS UK and Original Software and Tricentis Technology & Consulting and was, as usual, FREE to attend.
PROGRAMME
Susan Windsor, Gerrard Consulting: Getting the best results out of Test Support functions
As Test Managers, we put lots of effort into planning, preparing, executing and reporting our testing. Do we put enough effort into the Test Support functions that may be outside our direct control, but upon which our testing effort is totally dependent? What about Test Environments, test data and tools support, for example? We all know when these are not in place when needed; our testing stalls or our results are invalid. Why don’t we spend more time getting our Test Support requirements correct? Do we get the test environments we deserve as a result?
This session explores what all these Test Support functions are and how we can improve the service we get from our “suppliers”.
Richard Roy, Tricentis: Breaking the mould in Automated Testing
Functional test automation fails due to two problems: The maintenance problem of test scripts/frameworks and the problem of test data. In order to achieve high automation for the functional regression tests both areas, script-maintenance and test data management must be solved. This session will elaborate on how these two seemingly different aspects depend on each other and how some Blue Chip companies have already solved both problems and achieved automation levels beyond 80%.
Jonathan Pearson, Original Software: The Dark Side of Application Quality Management Ten Black Holes to Avoid For Successful Application Delivery
The quality of application delivery is at the heart of many of the challenges faced in IT projects, and this session will review some of the most common pitfalls and pain points that often beset development projects. With the help of Yoda, Obi Wan and others from the Star Wars cast, you will learn how best to avoid these challenges and deliver your projects on time, on budget and most importantly with quality.
James Wilson, Secerno: Why is testing in an Agile with Scrum environment hard? (And what can we do about it?)
James says, "During the last few UKTMF events I have attended Agile with Scrum has come up in a number of presentations and whether people like it or not as a project management methodology it is here to stay. I would like to cover a number of areas that I believe this methodology makes particularly hard for testing teams, including:
Frank Puranik, iTrinegy: SaaS: Should we be worried?
The Cloud, Infrastructure/Software as a Service, remote hosting, data centre consolidation: they all imply applications' operation across a variety networks, some out of our control. Frank Puranik from iTrinegy will discuss the typical issues with external hosting of applications, the implications for system performance and our performance testing approach.
Michael Blatt, SQS: Performance Testing: A Great Leap Forward?
Has the essence of performance testing changed over time? How was performance testing in 1994, as opposed to 2010? What are the implications for the next decade and what do we need to be doing now to prepare? Michael Blatt from SQS will lead the discussion and make his predictions.