Archived Presentations - 2006

January 2006

  • Topic: “Breaking down the Barriers to Innovation and Efficiency”
  • Description: Learn how to identify the Frameworks™ around you in your work place and how they impact your team interactions – aiding or restraining your team’s successes.
  • Kathryn Freidel is a strategic project manager with over 12 years experience. Her company, CIRCA5000 is to dedicated identifying and neutralizing the many inhibitors of quality throughout organizations allowing individuals to reach a higher level of performance.

February 2006

  • Topic: “Quality First: Agile Attitude”
  • Description: By moving the quality functions of a project all the way up to the specifications phase, bugs can be prevented at the earliest possible moment in a software project. Agile programming, in which the tests are written before any code is typed, produces a working system earlier, using short iterations and frequent testing--preferably automated.
  • Speaker:Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) has been a software professional since 1970 and is founder and president of Object Mentor Inc., in Gurnee, Illinois. Object Mentor, Inc., is an international firm of highly experienced software developers and managers who specialize in helping companies get their projects done. Object Mentor offers process improvement consulting, object-oriented software design consulting, training, and skill development services to major corporations worldwide.
  • Materials: Bob Martin has given permission for his Powerpoint presentation to be posted here.

March 2006

  • Topic: “Finding the Most Useful Books on Testing”
  • Description: A group discussion of the best (and less-than-best) books on software testing the participants have found over the years.
  • Moderator:Tracy Benton is currently testing radiation therapy software at TomoTherapy. In the past she's tested mainframe software at WPS, medical records client-server software at Epic Systems, and web software at Berbee.
  • Materials: We will be offering the book list on this web site soon.

April 2006

  • Topic: “What is an Automated Software Architecture and why do we need one?”
  • Description: Eighty-five percent of all test automation initiatives fail, according to the International Institute for Software Testing. That is a stunning statistic that you cannot afford to ignore. The question is: "How do the 15% that do succeed achieve their goals?"
  • Speaker: Thomas Nelson is a Senior Quality Assurance / Test Automation Specialist for STAMP Technologies LLC, headquartered in Minneapolis MN. Tom has over 10 years experience with automated software testing engagements utilizing a variety of different test automation tools. Tom's experience extends across several different engineering and business development sectors. Tom is one of the owners of STAMP Technologies and has been instrumental in developing the framework for test automation that has proven successful for many clients throughout the country.

May 2006

  • Topic: “Software Voodoo: how to identify and then overcome tribal myths of software organizations”
  • Description: Not long ago a person asked me, “what you are really proposing is software voodoo?” At first I was shocked, but the more I thought about it the more I liked the term “Software Voodoo”. We are often amazed how individuals can ignore “the facts,” but a software organization is really nothing more than a tribe of individuals. Any tribe has a culture rich with rituals, beliefs and most important myths. It is a strong belief in myths that prevent software organizations from adopting scientific methods (quality and metrics programs). In this short talk, I will present some methods on how to identify and then overcome tribal myths. While it is important to have our ideas grounded in statistical methods and practices, understanding a bit of voodoo can be helpful and fun too.
  • Speaker: David Longstreet, a software economist, is an international consultant with clients in every corner of the globe. With over 20 years of IT experience, he has consulted in the USA, Europe, Asia, The Middle East and South Africa. From dog food to aerospace, he has worked with every type of organization.
  • More information about David Longstreet's talk is available at his website.

August 2006

  • Topic: “Lessons We've Learned in Software Testing:” sharing what we know (over pizza)
  • Description: WISQA invites you to have some pizza on us and share your experience in software testing. Have you had a knotty problem that you had to puzzle out? Figured out the best way to convince a manager that adding more people to your project would (or wouldn't!) help? Come to an informal and interactive discussion about the lessons that we have learned during our QA careers. We can all benefit by the trials and errors and the experience of others, so let's share the knowledge with our peers!
  • Speaker: Sally Lefebvre is a long-time member of WISQA and is on our Program committee.
  • A summary of the points raised and discussed during this informative meeting (.PDF file).

September 2006

  • Topic:“Workflow Testing”
  • Description: Some commonly touted benefits of test automation include repeatability, reliability, and increased coverage. Unfortunately, simply automating tests will not guarantee that these benefits will materialize. One of the largest barriers to realizing these benefits is an overwhelming maintenance load driven by the workload needed to keep individual tests useable & accurate, and the inability to reuse automation code throughout the enterprise. So how do you make the most out of your limited testware development resources? How do you utilize and engage your manual testing resources to play a productive role in the creation and maintenance of automated scripts without using the inefficient record and playback practice of building these test scripts? This presentation will touch on the advantages and disadvantages of a workflow modeling methodology and will hopefully provide you a ladder for climbing out of the box built by the Commercial Off-the-shelf (COTS) test automation tools.
  • Speaker: Tim Nelson is a Senior QA Test Automation Engineer. He has over 29 years of IT and programming experience within the test and QA industry. He is now a principle owner in a Software Test and QA consulting firm that is developing a new generation of highly qualified software test and automation specialists. Tim travels throughout the U.S. and abroad presenting classes on testing and Quality Software improvements. He can be reached at tdnelson@stamptech.com.

October 2006

  • Topic:“Skilled Testers and Their Enemies”
  • Description:Good testing is not factory work at all: it is intellectually demanding and fundamentally un-automatable exploratory investigation. It is learnable and teachable. It is a disciplined, systematic process. Good testing makes use of tools, but it cannot be reduced to merely the things tools do.
  • Speaker:James Bach is a co-author of Lessons Learned in Software Testing and is a highly influential thinker on the subject of software quality. One of the supporters of the Context-Driven School of testing, he teaches his students to find flexible techniques that they can tailor to their projects, whether those projects are year-long efforts or quick cycles of release after release. His website is satisfice.com.

November 2006

  • Topic:“Certifications: What Are They and What is Their Value?”
  • Description:In this presentation, our speakers touched on the pluses and minuses of getting a QA Certification. They covered what's available, how you might go about getting (and maintaining) one, and what they mean to employers. You can see the powerpoint presentation they kindly provided us here.
  • Speakers:Laura Widder and Chad LeRoy are local long-time quality assurance professionals with experience with certifications.
 

Home | Top