Analysis

Traditional methods for improving testing include training, hiring, adding new processes, building infrastructure, and buying new tools. But what about increasing the capability of the team? Author Aldous Huxley said, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." The same is true for software teams: It's what we do with our experience that matters. Too often, we don't do much-if anything-to squeeze learning out of our experience. Retrospectives are a way to take the "what happened" during a software project and use it to build understanding. Testing borrows a page from adult learning theory and project reviews to increase team capability through Testing Retrospectives, and determines how to do more of what worked and less of what didn't.

Do you need credible evidence that disciplined document reviews (a.k.a. inspections) can keep total project costs down while helping you meet the schedule and improve quality? The project documentation we actually need should meet predetermined quality criteria, but organizations are often superstitious about writing this documentation-and they let their superstitions inhibit their efforts. This presentation dispels the superstitions and shows you how reinforcements for improving the quality of your software project documentation-such as requirements, design, and test plans/procedures-can occur through disciplined document reviews.

Web server logs contain powerful-but often hidden-information about the performance of your Web application. In this session, you'll learn how easy it is to enlarge your toolkit for Web performance testing. For instance, Web Performance Log Analysis is a new activity that's based on performance information of Web server logs (elapsed time, bandwidth, number of hits, and more). Giuseppe Cassone shows you all the information you can extract from the log (with a focus on performance) and how you can best use it.

Early detection of faults is a cost-effective technique for ensuring quality. The guided inspection technique described in this presentation uses explicit test cases to guide the inspection process rather than leaving the coverage of the model to chance. Learn how this technique systematically determines whether the model is complete, correct, and consistent. Gain an understanding of how to integrate this technique into the typical, iterative, incremental process.