Increasing complexity and functionality of digital systems--coupled with time-to-market constraints--pose quality challenges. Strategies often include a mix of new development with the integration of pre-existing components from multiple sources. Ann Miller presents some of the software engineering and software management lessons learned from eight years on a large commercial satellite program, as well as several years on military satellite programs. This presentation focuses on the planned evolution of large-scale systems from the design and build of smaller components based on an end-to-end system backbone.

Today's large-scale enterprise applications are all Web-enabled and complex in nature. Many users experience performance problems from day one. Performance evaluation and measurement via extensive testing is the only practical way to raise and address all issues prior to a successful deployment. Learn how to tackle performance and capacity issues with the appropriate testing strategy and scalable infrastructure/architecture.

Action Word Testing. This concept illuminates testing as an action, a process, an art. Learn how Action Word Testing can be applied to deal with critical test issues such as lack of functional knowledge of a system under test; instability of the design during test development; and automation of 100% of the functional or technical tests. Hans Buwalda uses a financial exchange that's introduced a new electronic trading system to demonstrate Action Word Testing (approximately 15,000 tests). In this example, automation of the entire test was essential, but it was difficult to achieve.

Many testing organizations focus primarily on software executable code, but that's not the only thing you can test. For instance, did you ever consider testing your software requirements? When you test only code, you face some big disadvantages, not to mention that design defects often aren't even fixable because they demand too much effort, too late in the release cycle. In fact, it's difficult to even report some requirements defects since the developers have already committed to the design strategy. But if you test your requirements early in the game, you can discover defects before they're cast into designs and code, consequently saving your organization potentially huge rework costs.