All tutorials count for credit towards CSTP (Certified Software Test Professional) re-certification
All tutorials are from 8:30 - 4:30 PM
Monday, April 3, 2006
M1: Understanding Configuration Management
Barbara Patterson
Introduction:
Never before have the stakes been higher for the IT community; the visibility of projects continues to grow along with the expectation that somehow technology can make a positive impact on the bottom line. As deadlines grow shorter and funds become leaner, IT departments are always looking for tools and techniques which will help them rise to the challenge. “Flavors of the month” come and go, but configuration management has stood the test of time – a proven winner in the development of quality software. Configuration management and requirements gathering are often paired as the “bookends” of an effective quality assurance process. Understand the traditional roles of configuration management in the IT organization and how they contribute to successful development efforts. Learn how risk profiles can be mitigated using effective configuration management. Combine requirements gathering and configuration management to complement existing practices in a powerful way. Learn to use the quality improvement results to obtain partner buy-in and organizational support for these processes. Learn how these practices can work with Agile development. Course Outline/Learning Objectives:
This tutorial will focus on the procedures for Configuration Management. As a participant you will be able to:
- Develop an understanding of the basic concepts of configuration management and how they apply to the software life cycle
- Identify key issues for configuration management such as risk assessment and how to address them
- Prepare a configuration management project charter
- Integrate configuration management into other software quality practices
- Demonstrate a return on investment on configuration management deployment
- Demonstrate improved quality of deployed software using configuration management
Biography:
Barbara Patterson has over 20 years experience in Information Systems. She began work in the large main frame environment as a Systems Analyst, writing requirements and performing user acceptance testing. She later established, then managed the Quality Assurance function at a mid-sized property and casualty insurance company for 7 years. The Change Management function she developed there was recognized in 1992 by QAI (Quality Assurance Institute) as a "Best Practices" operation. This operation supported a development staff of over 200 individuals implementing both package and custom products on a variety of platforms.
Barbara Patterson has over 20 years experience in Information Systems. She began work in the large main frame environment as a Systems Analyst, writing requirements and performing user acceptance testing. She later established, then managed the Quality Assurance function at a mid-sized property and casualty insurance company for 7 years. The Change Management function she developed there was recognized in 1992 by QAI (Quality Assurance Institute) as a "Best Practices" operation. This operation supported a development staff of over 200 individuals implementing both package and custom products on a variety of platforms. |
Barbara
Patterson |
 
M2: Improving Performance through Standards and Processes
Dr. Rebecca Staton-Reinstein
Introduction:
All of the international standards for IT excellence have one area in common: the full definition of all critical processes and the standards that govern them. ISO 9000, Six Sigma, SPICE and the Capability Maturity Model all begin with process and standards definitions. These fundamentals are well understood and have well-tested practices that any IT department can adopt, no matter the economic sector, size or country. Learn the basic steps to establish the Mission Critical Processes and their standards, procedures and guidelines. Learn a simple model to develop and deploy processes and standards. Learn to measure processes to make sure they are meeting standards. Learn to manage the processes and standards day-to-day and optimize them based on analyzing their efficiency and effectiveness. Learn to leverage your improved results.
Learning Objectives:
This tutorial focuses on the procedures for developing and deploying IT standards successfully. As a result of your participation you will be able to:
- Understand the relationship of IT standards to international standards
- Define Mission Critical Processes with internal and external customers
- Use the New Process Development Model to develop and deploy processes and standards, procedures and guidelines
- Measure standards usage, effectiveness and efficiency
- Manage standards usage day-to-day
- Optimize standards
- Plan and deploy a standards program
Biography:
M3: Low Overhead Software Process Improvement Methods
Robin Goldsmith, JD
Introduction:
Software process improvement doesn't have to be synonymous with expensive formalized approaches, such as the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (SEI CMM). This interactive seminar workshop describes it along with seven alternative approaches that can provide significant software productivity and quality improvements without extensive bureaucracy or organization-wide cultural change. Exercises enhance learning by allowing participants to practice applying practical techniques to realistic examples.
Course Outline:
- “REAL” VS. “PRESUMED” PROCESSES
- Common emphasis on good practices
- What a process is and why we care
- Relation between process and results
- The only way to change your results
- Why most process improvements fail
- Distinguishing “real” from “presumed”
- When the real process is not recognized
- Defined and documented processes
- Silos, stovepipes, and smokestacks
- Measuring a process to its full end result
- Real vs. presumed testing process
- Illusion of speeding up the coding
- HIGH-OVERHEAD APPROACHES
- Capability Maturity Models
- Benefits and advantages
- Stepwise vs. continuous models
- Proliferations, e.g., Testing Maturity
- Activity vs. results
- Empirical analysis of actual improvement
- Piece of paper mentality
- Process imposition vs. process improvement
- Role of management styles and practices
- Six Sigma as applied to software
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Identifying appropriate measures
- Religious approaches vs. real improvement
- Management gaps
- IMPROVING THE “REAL” PROCESS
- Key perspective to identify the real process
- Turning inadequacies into virtues
- How to measure a process
- Multivariate process mapping
- Analyzing handoffs and bottlenecks
- Evaluating value added
- Streamlining and eliminating error sources
- Non-operational “soft” components
- Emperor's new clothes risk
- Measuring and improving people processes
- POWERFUL IMPROVEMENT PRACTICES
- Making good practices work
- “They won't let us use this training”
- Measurement and metrics
- Fallacies of on-time and in-budget
- Avoiding main causes of resistance
- Implementing effective metrics baselines
- Reviews and inspections
- Form vs. substance
- Meaningful early involvement
- Proactive Testing™
- Letting testing drive development
- Scaling risk
- REAL, business requirements
- System/software requirements
- Use cases
- Problem Pyramid™ tool
Learning Objectives:
- Recognizing real processes and distinguishing them from presumed processes
- Avoiding common traps that lead to making only illusory improvements
- Ways to analyze and measure processes to identify meaningful improvements
- 7 specific methods for quickly and economically improving software processes
Biography:
Robin Goldsmith is internationally recognized as an authority on business engineering and software acquisition/development quality, testing, and productivity. He is a frequent speaker at leading conferences and formerly International Vice President of the Association for Systems Management. Robin is the author of the book:"Discovering REAL Business Requirements for Software Project Success".
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Robin Goldsmith |
M4: Agile and Software Process Improvement: Where is the Fit?
Alan Koch
Introduction:
How can you keep your SPI initiative on track when the word “Agile” (or “XP” or “Scrum”) keeps coming up?
The answer is that we need not choose one over the other. Even if we must comply with the dictates of the CMMI, we can still capitalize on many Agile practices. Indeed, when we look at the needs of our organization, we are likely to find that we need far more than mere compliance with a model: we need compliance that supports an appropriate amount of agility.
To quote Kent Beck (author of eXtreme Programming Explained ) in his forward to my book, Agile Software Development :
In the end, agility is simply a measure of software development. How agile is yours? … Your software development lives somewhere on the continuum already. You don't get to pick “agile” or “not agile”. The question is, is your agility enough for your organization and if not, what are you going to do about it?
This tutorial will prepare you to capitalize on the practices in the Agile methods to ensure the level of agility you need, even within the constraints of the CMMI®.
“CMMI®” and “Capability Maturity Model Integration” are registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.
Course Outline:
- The Agile Software Development Lifecycle
- Agile vs. Traditional Lifecycle Models
- Agile Project Initiation
- Agile Requirements Development
- Agile Project Planning
- Agile Project Tracking
- Embracing Change
- Agile Design and Re-factoring
- Agile Testing
- Agile Documentation
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the unique aspects of the Agile software development lifecycle
- Determine how various Agile practice will work in your organization:
- Project Initiation, Planning and Tracking
- Requirements Development and Management
- Software Design and Re-factoring
- Testing and Other Quality Control Activities
Biography:
Alan S. Koch, PMP is a speaker and writer on effective Project Management methods. He is a certified Project Management Professional and President of ASK Process, Inc., a training and consulting company that helps companies to improve the return on their software investment by focusing on the quality of both their software products and the processes they use to development them.
Mr. Koch's 29 years in software development include:
- 14 years designing, developing and maintaining software,
- 5+ years in Quality Assurance (including establishing & managing a QA department),
- 8 years in Software Process Improvement and
- 10 years in Management.
Mr. Koch was with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for 13 years where he became familiar with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), earned the authorization to teach the Personal Software Process (PSP) and worked with Watts Humphrey in pilot testing the Team Software Process (TSP).
Mr. Koch:
- Is the author of Agile Software Development: Evaluating the Methods for your Organization , Artech House Book, 2005,
- Is a regular columnist for Project Connections and CM Crossroads
- Has published peer-reviewed articles in the journals, CrossTalk and Software Quality Professional
- Consulted with a variety of software organizations in their process improvement programs
- Has taught hundreds of professionals in numerous organizations and government agencies topics concerning project management, process improvement, and software quality
- Received high praise for his training classes.
- Contributed to the accomplishment of several successful CMM-Based SPI efforts
- Was a team member on several CMM assessments and CMMI appraisals
- Presented at numerous recent software quality and process conferences
- Taught as an adjunct professor of Computer Science
- Mentored students in CMU's Master of Software Engineering (MSE) Program
- Is an SEI-authorized PSP Instructor and TSP Coach candidate
- Is an SEI Transition Partner for the PSP and TSP
- Is a member of the Project Management Institute (PMI)
- Is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), and
- Is a member of the board of National Speakers Association, Pittsburgh Chapter.
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Alan S. Koch
|
M5: The Agile Evolutionary Project Management Process
Tom Gilb "The Agile Evolutionary Project Management Process (‘XE'): A practical and proven way to manage any project with focus on high, immediate, measurable, estimated, continuous, stakeholder-value delivery."
Most people have only learned some form of 'Waterfall' (Grand Design) project management. It is obsolete and dangerous to your project health. Evo is the most successful alternative project management method, if you look at practical experience, and is now a 'mandatory guideline' at DoD. Isn't it about time you learned more about it?
This tutorial will supply the participant with the pragmatics of doing evolutionary project management. The Evo toolkit. How do you specify objectives that you can evolve towards in small steps? How do you specify designs that can be decomposed into smaller delivery steps? How do you specify and control evolutionary stakeholder-value-delivery steps themselves? The toolkit give practical help.
Evo has major impact on the whole way in which software engineering is carried out. All software engineering processes (requirements, design, build, test, and quality control) are suddenly encapsulated into an early and frequent evolutionary result delivery step. If you know what you are doing you will soon produce results for stakeholders. If not, you won't; and must consequently fix your engineering processes and designs.
Outline:
- XE Extreme Evolutionary Project
- Management ('XE')
- the 8 point defined XE process: total project management on a single page process
- quantification of critical requirements
- matching designs quantitatively to the requirements
- tracking stepwise progress weekly towards quantified goals
- the XE Policy
- practical case experiences with the process, 'FIRM ( Norway )' Web Survey Product (with amazing 1500% product improvement results in practice), other cases.
- hints on selling the method to your organization
- The XE tutorial will include:
- Introduction to Planguage as a means of specifying and controlling projects (see book 'Competitive Engineering',
- the impact estimation table (IET) as a project management method
- IET as a tool for estimating costs and learning from feedback about costs
- the IET as a tool for tracking real project progress in meeting real measurable requirements
- the IET as a tool for choosing best designs and eliminating need to implement designs after design goal level is met
- how to specify the critical and key customer qualitative aspects of any product using Scale-defined requirements
- why you should not and need not be driven by function and features (be real customer and stakeholder quality need driven)
- how to use this same method t(eXtreme Evo: XE) to work on the internal qualities ( like maintainability, testability) as well as customer-level qualities
- basic policies to help make this work
- how XE affects the testing and QA processes (such as Inspections and Peers Reviews)
Learning Objectives:
- Become aware of entirely new ideas
- Be able to evaluate if these apply to their work
- Be aware of how to get more detailed information on the subjects
- Enthuse them with the attractiveness of the ideas presented
- Deliver practical tools to do the job
Biography:
Tom Gilb is recognized as one of the earliest pioneers, writing the first books and papers about the Evolutionary Project management subject 30 years ago (Larman and Basili 2003, IEEE Software), and as one of the inspirations for the iterative process used by all Agile methods (Beck, Larman, Highsmith and others).
Not resting on these recognized accomplishments Tom has just advanced the state of the art (making it suitable for large and complex projects too) and simplified it (making it agile), as detailed in his new book “ Competitive Engineering : Requirements Engineering, and Software Engineering Using Planguage". It was published in the US August 2005. Read the Amazon.com reviews.
Tom is primarily a practical person, but has taken a step back to analyze the essential processes that make Evolutionary project management work so well. He can teach you the essential and deep theory that many superficial processes fail to mention.
Find out why Tom's Evo method has been used, on many dozens of product development projects, since 1988 at HP (Corporate Wide), and has been proven by 2 scientific studies (MIT) on the decade-plus of HP project data. Some people have process theories, but Tom has scientifically and practically proven project management processes.
This is your chance to learn directly from the primary source of these ideas. |
Tom Gilb |
M6: Software Quality Assurance Methods and Techniques
Dr. Magdy Hanna
Introduction:
Many software organizations try to achieve software quality by focusing on testing activities that are normally done after the product has been put together by the development team. Every project manager and every test managers know that this is not a very effective way to assure the quality of the application. The reason is that when the testers execute their tests against the application and find bugs, those bug reports go back to the development team, which in turn tries to fix problems under time pressure. And you know the rest of the story: more bugs get created and the cycle continues. More bugs, more bug reports and more bugs. For many years, experts and pioneers in software quality have suggested that software organizations focus more on the front-end of the software lifecycle to build quality into software rather than trying to test for quality at the end. This course covers all quality assurance methods and techniques that aim at achieving this goal of building quality into the software. The course is a must for every project manager, QA manager and test manger. Outline:
- Quality Assurance Vs Quality Control
- Defining processes
- Implementing Quality Assurance
- Developing effective standards
- Inspections and review of artifacts other than code
- Development and Test lifecycles and methodologies
- QA concepts, methods and approaches
- Prominent quality assurance models such as CMM/CMMI, Six Sigma, IEEE standards, TQM, and ISO
- ROI justification for Quality Assurance
- Quality Assurance according to W. Edwards Deming
- Quality Assurance for modern development methodologies: RAD, Agile and eXtreme
- Independent Verification and Validation
Learning Objectives:
Course participants will learn:
- The difference between quality assurance and quality control
- How to effectively plan, execute, and verify plans to deliver quality software
- How to start an effort to implement process improvement even in small projects
- How to select between different quality assurance methods to get the most ROI
- How to implement a cost effective inspection process that works with all types of project and all types of artifacts
Biography:
Dr. Hanna is a recognized educator, speaker and consultant in several areas of software engineering. His distinguished seminars on various topics have been highly rated by software professionals. Dr. Hanna's experience with software goes back to the mid 1970's when he worked as a developer at the NCR center in Cairo , Egypt . Over the last thirty years, Dr. Hanna has worked in all aspects of software projects and processes in all capacities.
Dr. Hanna is the founder, CEO and Chairman of the International Institute for Software Testing, ( www.iist.org ) the leading educational and professional development organization that provides education-based certifications to software test and quality professionals around the world.
Dr. Hanna is the founder and Chairperson of the International Conference on Practical Software Quality and Testing, (www.PSQTconference.com) and founder and Chairperson of the International Conference on Software Process Improvement, (www.icspi.com).
Dr. Hanna Also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Software Test Professionals, a publication of the International Institute for Software Testing, now the Bug Free Zone (www.iist.org/bugfreezone)
As a consultant, Dr. Hanna has helped organizations define and improve their software processes using disciplined software engineering approaches.
As a professor of software Engineering at the University of St. Thomas , he taught graduate courses on several software engineering topics with emphasis on practical software quality techniques.
Dr. Hanna developed new approaches and methods in software engineering including the Software Quality Engineering Methodology (SQEngineer), the Unified Data Model (UDM), and the Data-Driven Object Model (DOM).
Dr. Hanna holds a Ph.D. and a Masters degree in Computer and Information Sciences form the University of Minnesota , a Masters in Operations Research from Cairo University , and B. Sc. in Petroleum Engineering from Suez Canal University , Egypt. |
Dr. Magdy Hanna |
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