Official Conference Opening and Welcome
Geoff Horne - Editor, NZTester Magazine and Conference Chair, Wednesday 12 August 8:45am - 9:00am
Official Conference Opening and Welcome
Geoff Horne - Editor, NZTester Magazine and Conference Chair, Wednesday 12 August 8:45am - 9:00am
Keynote Session 1 - The 2015 Survival Guide - Lessons for Testing in the Wild
Julie Gardiner - Director, Consulting TQA, Hitachi Consulting, UK
Wednesday 12 August 9:00am - 10:00am
When we are in dangerous situations, we need a well-thought-out survival guide to help save ourselves and others.
These lifesaving principles and skills provide the basic necessities for life and help us think straight, navigate safely, signal for help, and avoid unpleasant consequences of interactions with our environment.
Julie Gardiner shares her 2015 Survival Guide for testers and test managers living in today’s challenging business and technical environments.
Topics in her guide include: Turn your job from a daily grind into a passion as life’s too short not to have fun. Demonstrate every day the value of testing, if you aren’t adding value or if others don’t know what you’re accomplishing, you may be toast; Choose your battles, if you try to fight every battle, you will certainly lose often and become frustrated and angry; and most importantly, maintain your integrity at all costs. Otherwise, you won’t be taken seriously and you’ll lose the respect of others. Finally, are you ready for our new role in projects?
Join Julie in this thought-provoking session and take back the important principles, tools, and skills you need to survive and even flourish, as the test professional.
Coffee Break 10:00am - 10:15am
Session 1 -
The Abolition of Testing?
Matt Mansell - Senior Consultant Strategy, Change & Governance, IntegrationQA, NZ
Wednesday 12 August 10:15am - 11:15am
My experience of testing suggests that in many organisations testing is done today much the same way it was done 18 years ago when I first became a test analyst. The classic scenario if developers hurriedly churning out code and tossing it over the fence to the testers is sadly remains all too common. I’ve even seen agile projects where the developers are churning out code and the testers have their own separate test sprints.
Underlying this is a misconception that is generated by the very notion of test as a separate activity. If you carve out a domain and declare that it is something unique people will treat it that way and not always how you want them too. Have you ever heard a developer say: “It’s a tester’s job to find defects”? We are victims of our own success at separating test from development. So much so that now; quality is the testers problem. In this presentation I will make the case that now, more than ever before, the idea of a separate “test” is dead. Modern tools, new processes, maturing capabilities mean that we need to fundamentally rethink the notion of test and of what testers do. Test is dead! Long live test!
Session 2 -
Let The Picture Tell the Story
David Rodriguez - Test Manager, Fujitsu, NZ
Wednesday 12 August 11:15am - 12:15am
You have probably been there. You are parachuted into a project to ‘organise the testing’. There are many hardware components, interfaces and applications. You have to understand how it all fits together and come up with a robust test strategy. All of this will be needed at a relatively early stage in the project - when the design documents are still being created.
You will have meetings with Project Managers, Technical Leads, Business Analysts and Architects to work through the scope. There will be white board sessions to help explain what is required. You may have the luxury of some good diagrams from existing documents – which is fine...well, probably not. But even these diagrams may not be focused on testing.
So what do you do?
Draw diagrams! I’m a big fan of diagrams – a picture paints a 1000 words……
•To help understand what is going on.
•To explain how testing will be approached.
One size does not fit all. We will look at examples using different types of diagrams to explain testing clearly.
Let the picture tell the story.
NZTESTER MAGAZINE © 2015
Session 4 -
TBA
Bryce Day, CEO, Catch Software, NZ
Wednesday 12 August 2:15pm - 3:15pm
Bryce will bring an expose around how a government department deployed testing tools to bring efficiency and economy to its testing processes.
Tools are not of much worth without definition of the process that they’re intended to support. We’ve all seen examples of tools implemented as panaceas to all testing problems, only to end up as exercises in pouring money and resources into a bottomless pit.
In this session, learn how one government department managed to rise above this playing field and turn its tools implementation exercise and subsequent usage into a prime lesson in how it’s done.
Find out how the team went about it, the challenges they faced, how they overcame those challenges and moved onto the next exciting phase of their testing improvement initiatives.
Coffee Break 3:15pm - 3:30pm
Keynote Session 2 - Restore to Factory Settings
Isabel Evans - Independent Consultant, UK
Wednesday 12 August 3:30pm - 4:30pm
Change is hard to start and hard to embed; and problems for a test improvement and change programme may come from several directions. Although people buy into the new methods, and may be using them successfully, when problems occur, it can be easier for people to go back to the old ways than try and hold to the new methods. When things go wrong people and teams will “restore to factory settings” – because old habits die hard.
This presentation is based on my experiences as a practitioner in the last 4 years introducing changes to testing in a software organisation, while working on delivery projects, and managing a team. It is about the practical experience and difficulties of embedding improvement during a difficult time in the marketplace which meant we were asked to improve quality, increase speed to market and reduce costs. I will discuss embedding change in test teams, and the benefits and disadvantages of running change programmes jointly with development teams and business teams.
Panel Discussion - The Floor Is Yours!
Wednesday 12 August 4:30pm - 5:30pm
Our presenters populate the Panel to answer your questions around any subject related to Software Testing. Compering and generally attempting to maintain some semblance of order as these sessions can turn into unparalleled mayhem very quickly, will be Geoff Horne, Conference Chair.
Official Conference Closing
Geoff Horne - Editor, NZTester Magazine and Conference Chair, Wednesday 12 August 5:30pm - 5:45pm
Reception - 5:45pm - 6:45pm All Conference and Dinner attendees are welcome to join us for drinks and hors d’ouevres. Also take the final opportunity to network with peers.
Session 3 -
Dealing With Professional Manipulation
Geoff Horne - Editor, NZTester Magazine, NZ
Wednesday 12 August 1:15pm - 2:15pm
Ever had that sense that someone has manipulated you into making a decision you didn’t really want to make? You know the feeling; you just go to look but end up walking out with arms full of stuff! Then you wonder how that happened.
Professional manipulation happens all the time and we are often unaware that it has taken place. How many times have we as testing professionals been guided, persuaded and generally cajoled into making a call on testing before we’re ready to or when knowing full well that issues exist. Then when we push back its seems like the whole world is against us.
Professional manipulation can have a sinister edge; once someone believes they have an upper hand over you, life can get pretty dour. In this session, we’ll learn how to spot such practices, how to weed out and deal with a manipulator then put in place strategies that will help you put up a ‘force field’ around yourself to make you manipulator-proof!
Lunch Break 12:15pm - 1:15pm Good time for networking!
Conference Dinner - 7:00pm - late All Conference attendees and partners are invited to join us for the Conference Dinner (separate registration and fee applicable). Non-Conference participants are also welcome to join us for this evening of relaxation after what will no doubt be a busy few days.