Platinum Sponsors
Gold Sponsors
Silver Sponsors
Non-Profit Sponsors
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
The day begins at 8:00 AM with check-in. Coffee, tea and water will be available.
Morning Tutorials begin at 8:30, followed by lunch at 12 noon. The afternoon tutorials begin at 1:00 PM and are followed by a reception dinner at 5 PM.
To choose the track you will be attending please email the registrar at registrar@glsec.org specifying one of these tracks:
- Project Management
- QA/Testing
- Embedded Systems
Management Tutorial
A Project Management Simulation
Understanding the Vortex of Doom and Using Simulation and Systems Dynamics to Explore the Structural Causes of Project Failure
Robert Goatham
Delayed, failed and canceled software projects cost organizations billions of dollars annually. Almost every organization experiences the pain of a troubled project at some point. The fallout in terms of cost, damaged reputation and personal stress levels can be extreme.
This hands-on tutorial examines the dynamics of a project in trouble. Using “Systems Dynamics” and “cause and effect” notation you will create a unified model of the often competing factors that determine project outcomes. The resulting picture will give you a deeper understanding of the mechanics of project failure and arm you with the insight to spot troubles on the horizon and respond accordingly.
Illustrated with a live project simulation game, this tutorial gives you the opportunity to see how the decisions you make at the start of a project affect the outcomes at the end. Condensing a project into a one day simulation allows for rapid feedback which will enrich your mental model of how projects work in the real world.
Who should attend?
Anyone with an active interest in ensuring project success including;
- Project stakeholders
- Project Managers
- Test managers
- Lead architects
- Business analysts
- Development leads
- Software development managers
With 20 plus years in the IT Industry and a broad range of experience in both Project Management and Quality Management, Robert Goatham has long been an advocate for quality. Having been a Senior Project Manager for IBM with responsibility for large scale complex projects and IT Quality Manager for Singapore Airlines, Robert’s insights arise from “in the trenches” experience. As the principle of Calleam Consulting, Robert now specializes in teaching advanced project management concepts. Always pragmatic, Robert’s mix of fundamentals and practical experience leave audiences with new perspectives on key issues affecting the IT Industry.
Testing Tutorial – Morning
Building a Test Strategy
Karen N Johnson
A test strategy is an essential planning document for the software testing of a product release. When a strategy is built as a substantive tool then the strategy becomes the guiding influence for the testing throughout the product release. Knowing how to plan and think strategically is an indispensable skill for test leads and test managers.
This tutorial teaches the elements of building a test strategy. This tutorial answers questions such as: What should a strategy include? How can a strategy be built at the start of a project in such a way that the document is effective throughout the project?
The tutorial uses discussion and exercises to instruct. The instructor will provide practical resources for use both in the class and for future projects. Students will work through case studies and leave the tutorial with examples in hand.
This class is designed for test managers and testers who need to build a test strategy or want to gain insights into how to think strategically.
Learning Objectives
As a result of taking this course, students will be able to:
- List and describe components of a test strategy
- Identify different approaches to risk analysis
- Describe methods for gathering and incorporating input from team members
- Describe how the context of the product and the project influence a test strategy
Students need to bring a laptop computer to class
Karen N. Johnson is a software test consultant in Chicago, Illinois. Karen views software testing as an intellectual challenge and believes in the context-driven school of testing. She has extensive experience in software testing and test management.
Karen teaches a tutorial called SQL for Testers; the class is an introduction to structured queries and is designed specifically for software testers. For more information on SQL for Testers, see http://www.karennjohnson.com
Karen frequently speaks at software testing conferences. She has presented at STPCon, CAST, PNSQC, StarEast, and StarWest. She has also presented at several local quality group meetings such as IQAA, CQAA, and NOSQAA. She publishes articles on software testing and has been published in Better Software, InformIT and StickyMinds.com.
Karen is an executive board member for the Association for Software Testing (AST). She is program co-chair for CAST 2008, the Conference for the Association for Software Testing.
Karen is a hosted software testing expert on Tech Target’s website, searchsoftwarequality.com. For more information about Karen, visit http://www.karennjohnson.com.
Testing Tutorial – Afternoon
Script Recipes for Testers
Adam Goucher
There is only so much information that an application can tell you about it’s quality and overall health using traditional black-box or exploratory techniques. There are also numerous tasks testers need to accomplish which are too time consuming and repetitive to complete by hand. Thankfully, scripting languages exist to help us address these exact problems.
This scripting tutorial will demonstrate a number of helpful scripts that can immediately help testers learn more about their application. Scripts covered could include the following depending on the needs of participants.
- Cross-platform grep
- LOUD (an i18n data creation technique)
- Log file monitoring
- Log file analysis
- Test data generation
- Test oracle creation
In addition to all the scripts being available after the tutorial, participants are encouraged to bring their laptops and scripting problems with them and we will as a group try to solve them.
Embedded Systems Tutorial – Morning
Looking More Closely at Digital Filtering
William (Bill) Young
While many people have done embedded systems development, it tends to lack a specific body of knowledge. Instead, embedded programming is a mix of Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science. One often overlooked area is the need to digitally filter real-world signals before further processing. Most applications benefit from filtering sampled analog data, but surprisingly few people possess the knowledge required to design and efficiently implement digital filters appropriate to their applications. In this 3-hour tutorial, William Young works through some specific constraints and issues in real-time programming and describes a specific solution for filtering and controlling real-world signals on small fixed-point processors. In small teams, the class discusses the solution, finds flaws and suggests improvement.
Bill straddles the embedded software world with one foot firmly in control theory and the other in software development. Since 1994 he’s held engineering posts at industrial robot makers, automotive suppliers, and autonomous robotics startups. In 2006 he struck out on his own, providing control systems design and embedded software development services to clients in the automotive and robotics industries.
Bill is also a co-founder of Idiom Labs, a company obsessed with creating wickedly smart code generation tools for embedded software developers.
Bill lives in the Rochester, Michigan area, with his wife, son, and two dogs. He can be reached at wjyoung@idiomlabs.com
Embedded Systems Tutorial – Afternoon
Embedded Agile Development Techniques
Nancy Van Schooenderwoert
You’re responsible to estimate and deliver embedded software, but long-lead hardware decisions and their related software implications force you to use waterfall style up-front designs. Changing requirements and technical “gotchas”; play havoc with your estimates and you end up overworked and still delivering late. Sound familiar? Agile embedded software teams have shown time and again that it doesn’t have to be this way. What would it take for your team to deliver to their estimate 90% of the time, and only be off by by a small margin the other 10%? What would it take to never have more than 2 or 3 bugs on the bug list? What if 99% of your team’s time went into building new features rather than having over half of it go to debugging and troubleshooting? Find out in this tutorial where we’ll look at what real teams—made up of ordinary developers, not superstars—have done to achieve these results, even in heavily regulated and safety-critical applications.
We will specifically cover these crucial skills, in an embedded context:
- How to estimate in story points and why you should
- How to create a release plan covering many iterations
- Tactics for negotiating with stakeholders when the pressure is on
- How to make sure you always get the time to do it right
- What to do when every bug is blamed on software unless you prove it’s hardware
