Workshops

W1. Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) in Practice

Elisabeth Hendrickson

In Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD), the whole team collaborates on defining acceptance tests as a part of the requirements process. Those tests become part of the definition of “done” for a given feature or story. The implementation team then automates those tests by writing code to wire the natural language tests to the software during development. The result: the acceptance tests become executable requirements.
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This one-day workshop covers the whole ATDD cycle, including discussing the new feature or story, distilling acceptance criteria into acceptance tests, developing the feature and automating the acceptance tests, and demonstrating the resulting feature to the business stakeholder(s) responsible for accepting it. ATDD works best when the team has adopted one of the many available Agile-friendly test automation frameworks such as FIT/Fitnesse, Concordian, Cucumber, etc. This workshop demonstrates one such tool: Robot Framework.
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Elisabeth Hendrickson is a consultant specializing in Agile Testing. She started in the software industry in 1984 and has held positions as a Tester, Test Manager, Test Automation Manager, and Quality Engineering Director. Elisabeth founded Quality Tree Software, Inc. in 1997 to provide training and consulting in software quality and testing. She’s written numerous articles and is a frequently invited speaker at major conferences. In 2003, she became involved with the Agile community. These days Elisabeth splits her time between teaching, speaking, writing, and working on Agile teams with test-infected programmers who value her obsession with testing.

W3. Transparent Decisions: Managing the Project Portfolio

Johanna Rothman

Have you ever been told to multitask — working on so many projects simultaneously you don’t know where to start or what to do next? On the other hand, have you ever felt so pressured by your organization that you asked your staff to multitask?
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Multitasking happens when leaders don’t set direction for themselves and other people. A major decision leaders make are about which projects people work on in what order — the project portfolio. These decisions determine your results — how effective and productive you and your group are.
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In this workshop, we will discuss what a portfolio is, what it looks like, what it doesn’t look like, and we’ll explore how to make successful collaborative decisions about it. We’ll explore how to make decisions, the boundaries of what you can decide, and how to portray and publish those decisions.
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Johanna Rothman helps leaders solve problems and seize opportunities. She consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She enables managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management.
Johanna publishes The Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter and podcast, and writes two blogs: Managing Product Development and Hiring Technical People. She is the author of several books: Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish Projects; Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management(winner of the 2008 Jolt Productivity award); Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People; and Corrective Action for the Software Industry (with Denise Robitaille).

W4. Exploratory Testing Explained

James Bach

Exploratory testing is an approach to testing that emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of the tester to continually optimize the value of his work. It is the process of three mutually supportive activities done in parallel: learning, test design, and test execution. With skill and practice, exploratory testers typically uncover an order of magnitude more problems than the same amount of effort spent on procedurally scripted testing. All testers conduct exploratory testing in one way or another, but few know how to do it systematically to obtain the greatest benefits. Even fewer can articulate the process.
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James Bach looks at specific heuristics and techniques of exploratory testing to help you get the most from this highly productive approach. James will focus on the skills and dynamics of exploratory testing, and how it can be combined with scripted approaches.
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James Bach has been a test manager or consulting tester since Apple lured him from a programming career in 1987. He spent about 10 years in Silicon Valley before going independent and traveling the world teaching rapid software testing skills. James passion is to teach testers to think, which is why he strongly opposes thoughtless programs such as ISTQB tester certification (and every other certification program currently out there). He is the author of Lessons Learned in Software Testing, and a new book: Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar, which describes his approach to self-education.

W5. What to Performance Test — Choose Wisely

Scott Barber

A tenet of software testing is that we can’t test everything — at least not with the time and resources available to us. This tenet is especially true when talking about software performance testing. To performance test everything, one would have to not only conduct all of the functional tests under a variety of system and load conditions, plus an entire battery of tests that wouldn’t be part of functional testing, but do so with fewer resources in less time.
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Since performance testing everything is clearly not a reasonable option, how can we reduce the number of tests and remain confident that we are testing the most important, most likely to add value, and most relevant aspects of the system? The answer is that we need to be able to choose our performance tests wisely, adapt quickly to the results of our tests and the modifications our developers make, and ensure that we capture the right information from our tests the first time.
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In this workshop Scott Barber shares his favorite approaches, experiences, tips and tricks related to choosing performance tests wisely — many of which you should be able to implement immediately.

Scott Barber is the Chief Technologist of PerfTestPlus, Executive Director of the Association for Software Testing, Co-Founder of the Workshop on Performance and Reliability and co-author of the Microsoft patterns & practices book Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications. Scott thinks of himself as a tester and trainer of testers who has a passion for testing software system performance. In additional to performance testing, he is particularly well versed in developing customized testing methodologies, embedded systems testing, testing biometric identification and personal security systems, group facilitation and authoring instructional materials. Scott is an international keynote speaker and author of over 100 articles on software testing. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, American MENSA, the Context-Driven School of Software Testing and is a signatory to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

W6. SQL for Testers, Part II

Karen Johnson

This is the advanced version of the basic SQL for Testers workshop, designed for testers who want to know more about SQL and specifically want to be able to write complex queries including joins, subqueries and unions. Participants will learn how to use several SQL functions to aggregate and sort result sets. The workshop includes an overview of indexes, views and stored procedures. This workshop assumes the participant has a fundamental knowledge of databases and SQL queries.

This is an exercise-intensive workshop, so please bring a laptop.

Learning objectives: After completing this workshop, testers will:

• Write complex SQL queries, including joins and unions
• Learn how to use SQL functions
• Gain an introduction to stored procedures
• Learn how to use views
• Learn about indexes and how to look for performance bottlenecks

Although the workshop is vendor neutral, MySQL is used for the exercises. You are welcome to bring your installed SQL Server, Sybase, or Oracle databases to the session.

Karen Johnson is an independent software test consultant. Karen has been involved in software testing for more than two decades. Karen has extensive test management experience. Her work often focuses on strategic planning. Most recently, her focus has been on developing a sense of community for software testers working in the area of regulated software testing. Karen is a frequently invited speaker at major conferences and has published numerous articles and recorded webcasts on software testing. She blogs about her experiences with software testing http://www.karennjohnson.com
Karen is the co-founder of the WREST workshop http://www.wrestworkshop.com/Home.html. She is currently writing a chapter for the tentatively titled Beautiful Testing, an O’Reilly imprint, available in late in 2009.