HOME | PROGRAM | SEPTEMBER 23 SESSION | CSTE PREP | PRICING & REGISTRATION | HOTEL | SPEAKER BIOS


Tuesday, September 22, 2009

8:00 AM - 9:00 AM
 Registration & Continental Breakfast
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Project Management
Test Automation
Process Improvement
Best Practices - PM & Testing
1/2 Day Session
1/2 Day Session
1/2 Day Session
1/2 Day Session

BREAK:
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Brad Eichstadt
RSM McGladrey

Is the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) and How Can My Company Best Use It?
Learning how the PMBOK® Guide is organized and what it contains.   Understand the possible scenarios of how the PMBOK® Guide can be used at your company. Complete, as a class exercise, applying scenario planning to real life.  In small groups select one attendee’s company that wants to use PMBOK® Guide and determine how to apply one of the scenarios discussed. Have a fun, interactive chance to share PMBOK experience/guidelines with fellow professionals.  This presentation is based on the new Version 4 of the PMBOK.
Carol Dekkers
Quality Plus Technologies

Scope Management for QA Professionals and Other Adults
With the Standish group's 2009 CHAOS report proclaiming ICT project success on less than one-third of projects, QA professionals are in a unique position to gain control of the situation.  The most important concepts to emerge in this area in the last decade were southernSCOPE in Victoria, Australia, and northernSCOPE™ in Finland.  NorthernSCOPE™ is a comprehensive approach to program scope management, and is supported by positive industry results, and a certification program for scope managers.  NorthernSCOPE™ addresses over half of the top ten reasons of project failure and through its concept, ICT project managers can learn and embrace proven approaches that measure the size of software projects, streamline the requirements articulation and management, and impose solid change management controls, to keep projects on time and on budget.  Scope management is not rocket science, however, with 2/3 of the world's ICT projects deemed as failures, it is apparent that managing scope is not a natural byproduct of project management. Learn approaches and tips used in Europe, Australia, and North America that have dramatically increased the success on ICT projects by trained scope managers.
William Rinko-Gay
Spherion

Writing Testable Requirements
We will discuss the definition of a requirement and how to know whether a requirement is testable.  We will explore some SDLCs and the role of a Test and QA organization within those SDLCs.  We will focus on the activity of ensuring that requirements are testable.  We will have exercises on evaluating requirements, breaking them down into functional elements, and verifying they are testable.  Finally, we will look at some Agile methods and the analogous process in an Agile process.

In this session we will:
  • Review the concepts involved in testable requirements
  • Review the types of requirement
  • Lay out a Test and QA role in standard SDLCs based on Waterfall and iterative methodologies
  • Review functional decomposition of requirements
  • Validating testability of requirements
  • Learn to exercise our role in Agile processes
George Jackelen
SCI

Realistic Project Estimation
One of the hardest and most feared aspects of project management, especially for technical people, is estimating project cost. One problem is that even though a budget is an cost estimate, upon contract award the budget becomes a measure of your expenses and something you and others are graded on.  The purpose of this presentation is to provide management and technical assistance.  This includes, for example, where you can find assistance, past experiences and some things you can do during project execution to reduce and track costs.

Objectives:
  • Reduce the fear people have when they must prepare and/or implement a budget
  • Provide examples of how to create a budget
  • Show what items must be determined to create a budget
  • Present tools and techniques to reduce costs, thus helping you stay within budget
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Lunch, Networking, & Keynote Address

Project Management in Economically Tight Times - Tips from the Trenches of Government, Commercial IT, and Software Development Projects

Jonathan D. Addelston
UpStart Systems, LLC

Project Management should always be a professional discipline.  In tight economic times, the discipline becomes more important, as a means to achieve customer satisfaction and required product and service quality results.  This talk will describe the attributes of tight economic times which impinge on and constrain project management.  It will identify how the key processes, measurements, and techniques of project management should be tailored to address those constraints.

To engage the lunchtime audience, the talk will provide provocative examples from discipline areas such as project planning, requirements management, quality measurement, risk management, status reporting, mid-course corrections, and product delivery.  Finally,  it will provide some outspoken and frank tips and recommendations for project managers, so they can survive and thrive in this environment.
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Project Management
Test Automation
Process Improvement
Best Practices - PM & Testing
1/2 Day Session
1/2 Day Session
1/2 Day Session
1/2 Day Session

BREAK:
2:45 PM - 3:15 PM
Lauren Greinke
Spring Oak Consulting, LLC

Earned Value Management (EVMS) “Lite”
This presentation will discuss:
  1. Earned Value Management Defined - An OBJECTIVE performance indicator
  2. ANSI 748-B Reviewed
  3. Traditional Project Reporting vs. Earned Value Analysis
  4. Why is Earned Value Important?
  5. How to apply Earned Value Management to a project
  6. Calculate variances and performance indices
  7. Analyze cost and schedule trends
  8. Formulate predictions on future cost and schedule performance
  9. Employing Earned Value techniques for performance management
  10. Performance and Quality Management
  11. Resources

Andrew Pollner and Ed Reynolds
ALP International Corporation

Test Automation Implementation and Strategies
Organizations continuously look for ways in which to reduce the time and effort required to test software applications. While automation offers great promise, many organizations invest heavily in tools with little to show. You will have the understanding of what automated testing means, what aspects of the testing process can be automated, and what implementation strategies will ensure successful deployment and continued use. You will learn how to automate test management and reporting, functionality and regression tests, load and performance tests, and application and environment monitoring.
Sean Barnum
Mitre

Having a Defined Target for Software Security Testing
Most organizations want assurance that their software has been tested for known security issues. Government, in conjunction with industry and academia are working together to make this more economical and effective. In addition to the obvious relevance to software development groups, acquisition groups in large government and private organizations are also moving to require that this types of testing be part of contracts. The capabilities for evaluating code, design, and architecture are maturing, however, there are currently no standards defining these types of capabilities and how to evaluate them. This presentation will discuss the ongoing industry activities with DHS, NSA, NIST, and the DoD aimed at this lack of defined standards that have, until now, left open the question of which technique, service or tool is most appropriate for particular jobs and how effective they are at performing them.
 Nixon Augustin
Brocade Communications

Multi-client testing using Open Source - STAF (Software Test Automation Framework)
This presentation talks about an actual test automation done at Brocade Communications' Files Business Unit (BU) to address the following challenges.
  1. 100% Automation
  2. Test execution on hundreds of clients
  3. Mixed OS environment (Windows, Linux and future possibility of other UNIX platforms)
  4. Totally different kind of applications in a single framework (Mix of CLI and GUI)
  5. Proactive system monitoring and reporting for events such as crash, memory leak etc.
  6. Extensive debugging and Consolidated log collection to a single location
  7. Time pressure - shorter time to develop
  8. Scalable - new test case and hardware resource can be added easily

The heart of this test automation is the open source framework STAF.  The STAF is an open source, multi-platform, multi-language framework designed around the idea of reusable components, called services (such as process invocation, resource management, logging, and monitoring).

This presentation also includes a short hands-on tutorial on STAF.
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Conference Wrap Up
Speaker Panel - Questions & Answers

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