Conference Presentations

Project Management Tips to Improve Test Planning
Slideshow

When done right, testing is more than test plans, test scripts, and executing tests. In fact a test leader should consider testing a sub-project of the larger development project. By applying the same techniques project managers use to plan and manage the overall project, test leaders can...

Ricki Henry, Clark County Nevada
User Stories: From Fuzzy to Razor Sharp
Slideshow

User stories are the basis for products built using agile development. User stories are relatively short, comprised of enough information to start the development process, and designed to initiate further conversation about details. Short doesn’t necessarily mean useful. Ambiguous stories...

Phil Ricci, Agile-Now
Verify Complex Product Migrations with Automation
Slideshow

In the world of agile, automation is king. When faced with testing multiple versions of software, either while migrating or supporting multiple versions in the field, many teams give up, convinced that automation cannot be achieved. Marquis Waller and Jeff Sikkink provide insights into how...

Marquis Waller, Ricoh, and Jeff Sikkink, Ricoh
Measure Customer and Business Feedback to Drive Improvement
Slideshow

Companies often go to great lengths to collect metrics. However, even the most rigorously collected data tends to be ignored, despite the findings and potential for improving practices. Today, one metric that cannot be ignored is customer satisfaction. Customers are more than willing to...

Paul Fratellone, uTest
How Experian Revolutionized Product Strategy and Management with Big Data
Slideshow

Agile discussions often focus on stories, backlogs, development, and testing. At Experian they also brought product strategy management and strategy into the agile fold to ensure their teams were in lock-step with customer requirements and priorities. That resulted in the delivery of...

Jeff Hassemer, Experian
Non-Pathological Software Metrics
Slideshow

As semi-scientific software professionals, we like the idea of measuring our work. In some cases, our bosses like the idea much more than we do. Yet, meaningful software development metrics are notoriously challenging to define, and many people have given up trying because metrics often...

Stephen Frein, Comcast
The Dangers of the Requirements Coverage Metric

When testing a system, one question that always arises is, “How much of the system have we tested?” Coverage is defined as the ratio of “what has been tested” to “what there is to test.” One of the basic coverage metrics is requirements coverage-measuring the percentage of the requirements that have been tested. Unfortunately, the requirements coverage metric comes with some serious difficulties: Requirements are difficult to count; they are ideas, not physical things, and come in different formats, sizes, and quality levels. In addition, making a complete count of “what there is to test” is impossible in today’s hyper-complex systems. The imprecision of this metric makes it unreliable or even undefined and unusable. What is a test manager to do?

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
The Metrics Minefield

In many organizations, management demands measurements to help assess the quality of software products and projects. Are those measurements backed by solid metrics? How do we make sure that our metrics are reliably measuring what they're supposed to? What skills do we need to do this job well? Measurement is the art and science of making reliable and significant observations. Michael Bolton describes some common problems and risks with software measurement, and what we can do to address them. Learn to think critically about numbers, what they appear to measure and how they can be distorted. Improve the quality of the information that we're gathering to understand the relationship between observation, measurement, and metrics. Evaluate your measurements by asking probing questions about their validity.

Michael Bolton, DevelopSense, Inc.
Simple Metrics for Starters

Measurements and metrics are a hot topic again. Theorists often rail against them as meaningless and potentially harmful. Practitioners fear them because they don’t want to be metric-ed out of a job. Managers want them so they can better understand what is happening in the software development lifecycle and try to make their processes more efficient. David Gilbert shares the simple set of measurements and metrics Raymond James has implemented and describes the practical benefits they have gained. By first asking stakeholders what they really wanted to understand and then developing metrics to support their goals, David and his team have made measurement work at their company. They educated the stakeholders on key metrics concepts-first order measures and subjective relativity-and established a common model everyone agreed to follow.

David Gilbert, Raymond James
Talking Quality to Business: Metrics for Improvement

Are your testing and quality assurance activities adding significant value in the eyes of your stakeholders? Do you have difficulty convincing decision-makers that they need to invest more in improving quality? Selecting metrics that stakeholders understand will get your improvement project or program past the pilot phase and reduce the risk of having it stopped in its tracks. Todd Brasel and Kent McDonald show you how to avoid getting bogged down in the minute details of test results reporting and approach quality measurement from a systems perspective. They offer practical lessons about using metrics to promote quality improvement initiatives to upper managers and executives-the people who make the real decisions about quality. Learn about common traps and problems of measurement programs and how to avoid them.

Todd Brasel, Pitney Bowes

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