Webinar Details
John Fodeh, EuroSTAR Programme Chair announces the EuroSTAR
2010 Programme via webinar.
John will bring you through the programme highlights and as well
as giving you an exclusive preview of new innovations in this years
conference programme.
Using a Service Oriented Architecture can bring businesses
considerable benefits, but there is unfortunately one major factor
which seems to get lost in the euphoria surrounding SOA: Test. What
are the risks of not testing SOA systems properly? Can I assume
that re-usable services just need a minimum of functional
testing?
This webinar will take a look at the various issues which
testing needs to consider when SOA architecture is used for
developing large-scale systems. The presentation will point
out the main risk areas for testing and possible mitigation
strategies. As you will see, there is more to testing these systems
than we might initially think.
Key Points:
- There is much more to testing SOA systems than many
stakeholders think
- Non-functional risks are significant cost drivers
- Test managers are faced with significant new challenges
This is not another agile fairytale. I happened to be a tester
in a scrum team that started its first sprint almost two years ago.
We were all agile novices, and - in retrospect - we hit it off
pretty well: we worked iteratively, delivering value at regular
intervals. But after a while reality dawned upon us. For every
agile practice we embraced, there seemed to be another practice
that was carelessly neglected or even abandoned weeks before our
final release.
In the presentation I will describe life as a tester in a team
of agile rookies: the context - a major healthcare IT company - and
what agile did and didn't do for us. I will talk about the
practices we adopted successfully, but also highlight mistakes and
missed opportunities. Was our shot at agile just a lucky shot or
one that proved the value of agile methods?
Key Points:
· A real life case of agile adoption in healthcare
IT
· Hits and misses
· Agile by the book proved to be unrealistic, but even
imperfect agile can make a difference
In this Webinar, Graham Thomas will use his own
practical experience from several large testing programs.
This webinar will illustrate effective techniques for
successful Program Test Management, presented in the form of A
Survival Kit.
Should the Program Test Manager be an über-manager in control of
everything, or is this role more of an aggregation and reporting
function? This presentation will look at the expectations for the
role, and how these can be markedly different
Key Points:
- Effective techniques for successful Program Test
Management
- Lessons learnt from practical experience
- A practical model for Program Test Management
In this Webinar, EuroSTAR 2010 Programme Chair John Fodeh will
discuss his vision for this year's Conference programme - what he
hopes to achieve, explaining in detail the conference theme,
"Sharing the Passion" and importantly outlining what he is looking
for from potential speakers. He will describe what topics are of
particular interest for EuroSTAR 2010 and provide invaluable hints
and tips to prospective speakers.
Key Points:
- An Insight into this year's EuroSTAR theme - "Sharing the
Passion"
- Valuable Hints & Tips on what the Programme chair and
his team are looking for in submissions
- Advice for would be speakers
In this 45 minute webinar Rikard Edgren will discuss
and look at the good ways to enable communication
and what improvements are needed to use test
specifications, that consists mainly of a lot of one-liner test
ideas.
Rikard will also discuss the several benefits: it is pretty
fast to read and review for testers, developers, managers; it is
easy to re-use the essence of other test ideas; it is a way to see
how complete the testing will be: it is a format that allows test
ideas to be formulated with the appropriate granularity.
3 Key Points
- Learn some ways to generate more and better test ideas
- See the power of 'one-liner test' ideas
- See a real example of a test specification
Live News Round Up from EuroSTAR 2009!
Join us live from EuroSTAR 2009 for a round up of highlights
from this years conference. Join EuroSTAR 2009 Programme
Chair, Dorothy Graham and leading names in
testing as they discuss the key issues and
innovations from EuroSTAR 2009!
Find out whats happening as it happens, live from Stockholm!
If you are unable to attend EuroSTAR 2009, tune
into this webinar and discover what has been happening during
the week at Europe's most prestigous software testing event!
Many organisation decide to review their test processes and then
look to improve them, but how many are ever seen as successful and
the improvements get fully implemented. In a lot of cases someone
senior pulls the plug on the work before it is complete. Why,
perhaps because they have stopped seeing any value in the changes.
Or maybe I should ask 'How many have a solution that is seen as
successful by anyone outside of the improvement team?' I met a guy
recently who had been improving his processes for 5 years without
any management buy in or knowledge. He was very pleased as he felt
he had really made a difference, but if no one noticed did he
really do anything of value - it's questionable?
As a person who has managed many process improvement projects I
can safely say that it is a significant risk to put yourself in a
position of championing/managing change without any structure
surrounding where you are, where you want to get to and what the
benefits are. Within Software Testing this seems more apparent than
I have seen in many other IT disciplines. Far too many test
improvement projects fail to deliver any benefit, or at least any
benefit outside of testing, in most instances with better planning
and structure they could have been real successes.
During this webinar I will take you through a structured
approach to Test Process Improvement, providing real case study
evidence of where the approach has shown real value (return on
investment) not only internally to the test team, but also to the
organisation as a whole.
Key points:
- Why change?
- How to justify this to management?
- How to manage the changes?
Test automation is becoming a must for meeting the challenges of
modern software development. We use automation to replace
repetitive and tedious manual testing; ensure the consistency and
repeatability of tests; perform tests that are difficult to run
manually and so on. Yet, many automation initiatives fail to
deliver the desired results and tools often end up as "shelfware".
This webinar will explore the preconditions for successful test
automation and describe some of the typical obstacles. What is
needed in the organisation, what kind of specialized skills we need
as testers and what can we expect in terms of
return-on-investment?
Automation tools can be intrusive - not only to the system being
tested, but also to the team and organisation where they are being
introduced. Unrealistic expectations, inadequate processes and
reluctance to change are typical challenges encountered when
introducing automation. This presentation will also address some of
the typical people issues.
Join John Fodeh in this 45 min webinar as we look into the
prerequisites for test automation and uncover the common pitfalls.
Learn to assess your organisation's readiness for test automation
and how to get more mileage for your automation efforts.
Key points:
- Rationale for test automation
- Guidelines for assessing your readiness for test
automation
- Return on investments
- People issues to watch for
Adopting the Agile/Scrum framework gives software teams a
competitive advantage in delivering high value products to their
customers, but that can only be achieved if that framework is
provisioned with other top quality Agile processes and tools.The
challenge is, even if you pick the right methods, how do you
monitor and drive the key practices in to institutional usage
within your department or company? Now you could use some of the
more heavy process improvement assessment models, but few of those
assessments address the specific methods that make a team
Agile.
In this 45 min webinar, Ray Arell will introduce you to a custom
assessment that he created to assess, monitor, and drive the
agilization of his team. This team agility assessment is broken
into three interdependent areas of measurements around competencies
in skills and methods dealing with customer, team culture, and how
work is performed. Once introduced to the model you may even see
how it can work for you.
Key Points
- Overview of the Team Agility Assessment
- Explore the key areas that make up strong customer
orientation
- Review the agile culture and how you measure it
- Talk about the key agile methods your software engineers use to
get their work done
In this 45 minute webinar, Ian Howles will discuss how to
explore the practical relationships between Testing ROI, Testing
Risk and Testing Maturity. He will be detailing the links between
the three items, the context of each and how they impact each
other. Everyone has heard and understands that early testing is
cost efficient but in order to realise the ROI of early testing the
exercising organisation(s) need to have reached a level of
maturity. There are many complex inter dependencies that are rarely
exposed to ensure that the simple "Test Early, Reduce Costs" mantra
is met.
In the talk Ian will use many such examples as building a shed
on a concrete base is ok but you would not do the same for a
skyscraper! You do not build a house on quicksand, so why apply
test automation to bad testing practices?
Key points
* That there is a direct link and correlation between Process
Maturity and ROI.
* Depending on the maturity of an organisations testing
processes will determine, to an extent, their Risk behaviours.
* The maturity of an organisation's Risk approach directly maps
to ROI.
Many organizations have embraced the concept of risk-based
testing as a way to contain the costs of testing and focus test
efforts on the system areas where undetected bugs could do the most
harm. But too often, there is no substance behind the buzz-phrase,
as testers are left to assess the risks without management and
business support. Most testers are not trained to do this, and they
may not have the detailed domain knowledge to know the true cost of
a defect in the field.
To be an effective strategy, risk-based testing requires both
accurate assessment of system risks and stakeholder buy-in.
In this webinar Fiona outlines a process that has worked in many
leading organizations for conducting a system risk assessment,
asking questions that will help to identify and assess the relative
priority of risks, and ensuring stakeholder ownership of the
result-which will both drive the test strategy and act as important
information for many project decisions. It is a good introduction
to Fiona's tutorial at EuroSTAR 2009, a more intensive interactive
session which will focus specifically on identifying and practicing
the kinds of questions that elicit business risk.
Key Points
* The many dimensions of software risk.
* The varied approached to risk assessment required for different
types of software projects.
* Sample process for conducting a system risk assesment
workshop.
In today's complex web application world, load and performance
tests must go beyond simple HTTP-based pages. The challenges faced
by test managers are now to test complex web applications (like
Oracle Forms, SAP Web, Siebel Web etc.) as well as the latest Rich
Internet Application technologies (like AJAX, FLEX, Silverlight or
GWT).We will provide you with solutions in order to test these web
applications, more productively and more economically to adjust
successfully to the current economic situation. Our presentation
will enable you to know how to overcome today's challenges in order
to respond to business pressure and achieve your goals.
Key Points
* Responding successfully to business pressure.
* Testing increasingly complex web applications.
* How to increase your testing productivity
With 422 submissions to EuroSTAR in 2009, interest in presenting
this year is clearly very high. The high standard of the
submissions meant that there were a lot of excellent presentations
to choose from.
In this webinar, the Programme Chair, Dorothy Graham, outlines
how this year's presentations were selected, and takes you through
the content of this year's programme. There are a few innovations
at this year's conference, but the emphasis is on providing
delegates with solid useful and practical information to do the
best job in testing and test management in the current challenging
times.
Key Points:
- The selection process.
- What's new in 2009.
- The content of the programme.
The theme for the EuroSTAR 2007 was 'Defining the Profession'
and the discussion was 'Are we a profession at all?' Isabel Evans
mentioned during her keynote session that testing is not yet as
professional as we might think. She emphasized the areas of
improvement testers need to go through in order to become a
professional tester. As a result of this, Erik uses every occasion
to ask testers about where they feel testing is at the moment. He
gets many diverse answers, going from "In the starting blocks", to
"We're finally getting some structure in our profession" to "The
future is looking very bright for testers!" Based on all this
information, Erik has started building his own view on 'Where are
we in testing?' And even more important, 'What are some of the
challenges that we are currently facing?'
Key points:
- What stage are we at with Testing?
- What are the main challenges we currently face?
- What is the future direction?
'The Surprising Right Fit for Software Testing' is all about
people. Setting the right team is important - but did you know that
you may be able to find untapped talents outside your team, outside
your company and even as far as at the edge of society. Hear
Thorkil Sonne discuss how testing has given meaning to life for
many people with autism (mostly with Aspergers Syndrome) - and
discuss with Thorkil, how we can make 'Testing for Real' benefit
fragile people, as well as business driven companies.
Key points:
- Adding untapped skilled resources to testing
- Inspiration on how to access untapped talent pools
- There is more to business than just business
The key points covered in this webinar are:
- Agile projects are characterised by massive confirmatory unit
and acceptance tests - testing strategies need to adapt.
- Agile teams are characterised by shared roles - testers need to
adapt.
- Some agile projects are clumsy - when adapting testing to
agility, it is good to recognise characteristic issues.
In this webinar James Whittaker discusses his Keynote session
which will take place on Tuesday, 11th November at EuroSTAR 2008 in
the Hague, Netherlands.
In this webinar Randall Rice discusses his Keynote session which
will take place on Wednesday, 12th November at EuroSTAR 2008 in the
Hague, Netherlands.
Key points:
The presentation will introduce the following:
- Agile test overview
- Different Test Phases, agile terminology
- Where the different types of testing fit into an agile
development lifecycle
- Role of the tester and how it is affected by iterative/agile
approaches
- Test Driven Development (TDD), Automated Unit Testing
- Acceptance testing, testing and the customer/user
- Exploratory testing
Key points:
- Education and experience - how professions define competence
levels
- Qualification - how professions regulate qualification levels
for entry
- Evidence for competence level - how professions regulate
individual career progress.
Key points:
- Even with little or almost no information available, it is
possible to define a global estimate. By asking and answering a few
questions, your estimate becomes more accurate.
- The "average" project is a myth! There are always differences
that influence the required test effort. Learn how to create an
approach for effort estimation that you can tune and that is
reliable, defendable and negotiable.
- It's better to be honest than to admit you did not tell the
whole truth at the start. It's essential for any estimate!
Key points
- What is it that makes a team 'Agile'? - Practices such as Test
Driven Development are a reflection of underlying values and goals.
It's the adoption of these values and goals that allows a team to
gain the greatest benefit from adopting an Agile approach to
software development.
- What are the common 'Gotchas' for testers on Agile teams? - For
example, extraordinarily short iterations producing software with
end-to-end features can catch out many testing teams. This is
especially true if the test team is used to being segregated from
the developers as a separate team and/or rely on large amounts of
manually executed scripted tests.
- What role do testers play and how can you deliver the most
value? - Your primary role is no longer just to inform the project
of how the software doesn't work, but to be a welcomed guide who
helps, before the first line of code is written, to make sure that
the software does work.
Key points
- Hear how lessons learned in past implementations can help you
to avoid the mistakes of the past
- See some examples of real-world ERP failures and lessons
learned
- Hear how the lessons learned provide a framework for future
Test Strategies
Key points
- A balanced view of how to approach test process improvements
contrasting two of the most widely known models, TPI &
TMM.
- Learn some practical testing metrics that can help you monitor
and improve your testing
- How to assess your test team's strengths using SAT/OE
(Organisational Evaluation)