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What are today's primary challenges as seen by our software quality and testing leaders? What will the future hold for software development and testing?

Join four recognized authors and leaders across the business, academic, and government sectors as they look at the impacts of globalization and mitigating risks surrounding quality software strategies and testing practices both now and in the future.

    1. Improve the Power of Your Tests with Risk-Based Test Design
    2. Software Quality Practices over the Next Ten Years
    3. The Challenges of Quality Management in a Global Software Company
    4. Security-Enhanced Quality Assurance:  Mitigating Risks to the Enterprise
Wednesday, April 30th  8:30 a.m.

Improve the Power of Your Tests with Risk-Based Test Design

Cem Kaner, JD, PhD
Professor of Software Engineering, Florida Institute of Technology

Cem Kaner is Professor of Software Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology and Director of its Center for Software Testing Education & Research (CSTER).  Cem's core test-related interests focus on the cognitive skills of software testers, application of high-volume test automation techniques on hard to reproduce failures, and more effective ways to train software testers.  CSTER is also funded to research the teaching of the law and ethics of software engineering, including work on malpractice, whistle blowing, and commercial contracts.  Before joining Florida Tech, Cem worked in Silicon Valley for 17 years as a software developer, manager, consultant, and attorney.  He is the senior author of three books, Testing Computer Software, Lessons Learned in Software Testing, and Bad Software: What to Do When Software Fails.  Cem's doctoral research was in psychophysics, the measurement and mathematical modeling of human sensory/perceptual experience. His legal work focuses on the law of software quality.

Risk-based test management evaluates each area of a product and allocates higher testing budgets for areas of greater risk. Once you have the budget, how should you spend it?  Risk-based test design, on the other hand, is based on the idea that every test presents the program with an opportunity to fail. The first core task of risk-based test design is to imagine ways the program can fail. The second task is to design tests that are effective triggers for those failures. The most powerful tests are the ones that maximize a program's opportunity to fail. 

In this keynote, Cem will survey techniques for stretching your failure-related imagination, such as using guideword heuristics (as is commonly done in Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, for example) to quickly gain and apply knowledge about:

  • The type of application.
  • The environment and programming language.
  • The project's management, development, and support history.

Cem will also examine ways of turning ideas about potential failure into tests, ranging from quicktests (straightforward applications of a theory of error, such as Whittaker's standard attacks) through tests that are more tightly customized to the specific concern.  Join Cem and learn how to plan to - make it fail.

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Wednesday, April 30th 10:15 a.m.

Software Quality Practices over the Next Ten Years

Sam Guckenheimer
Group Product Planner, Microsoft Corporation

Sam Guckenheimer is a noted authority on software testing and the author of Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.  He has 25 years experience as an architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager, and general manager in the software industry in the US and Europe.  Currently, Sam is the Group Product Planner for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.  In this capacity, he acts as chief customer advocate, responsible for the end-to-end external design of the next releases of these products.  Prior to joining Microsoft in 2003, Sam was Director of Product Line Strategy at Rational Software Corporation, now the Rational Division of IBM.  He holds five patents on software lifecycle tools.  A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Sam has guest lectured at Florida Tech, MIT, Harvard, and Yale.  Sam is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University. 

In his keynote presentation, Sam will tackle some of the big questions for the next decade.

  • How will the competencies, tools, and practices of test, development, architecture, business analysis, and operations change in the next ten years?
  • How will we reconcile business agility with increasing compliance and privacy requirements? 
  • How will demographic and economic shifts influence the practices we use and the teams we work on? 
  • How will we look at our software portfolios and make decisions to make, buy, or extend existing assets? 
  • What will be the impact on testers?

Sam will share both his personal thinking and Microsoft's views on these questions.  He will discuss the implications for our field and the product implications for vendors such as Microsoft.

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Thursday, May 1st  8:30 a.m.

The Challenges of Quality Management in a Global Software Company

Guenther Limboeck
Vice President Global Quality Governance, SAP AG

SAP AG is the world's largest business software company and the third-largest software supplier overall.  The company, headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, employs more than 39,000 people in over 50 countries and serves more than 41,000 customers worldwide.  SAP maintains eight software development labs around the globe including facilities in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. 

Guenther Limboeck is Vice President of Global Quality Governance at SAP AG.  He is responsible for the definition of SAP quality goals and strategy, as well as for the maintenance of the ISO 9001 certificate for SAP product development.  Guenther joined SAP in 1989, as a consultant for logistic applications working on national and international software implementation projects for SAP R/2 and SAP R/3.  In 1997, he assumed responsibility for the quality management of SAP R/3 SD.  Beginning in 2000, Guenther took on a number of different positions in development and quality management encompassing the areas of CRM, SCM, and ERP before assuming his current role in 2005. Guenther holds a degree as high school teacher for Mathematics and Sports from the University of Braunschweig, Germany.

Ensuring software quality in today's dynamic and complex development environment is full of challenge.  Agile methods, service-oriented architectures, and the increasing importance of non-functional requirements, such as expanded security concerns, have intensified the quality discussion.  The current industrialization of software development fosters the importance of software metrics and the usage of Six Sigma methodologies in software development.  Guenther will describe the SAP Software Quality Model and its impact on SAP's quality strategy.  He will also provide an outlook of the SAP quality strategy until 2010.  Join Guenther as he explains:

  • How the different aspects of quality, along with different project methodologies, are covered using a common process framework
  • How agile methods are incorporated into the software development life-cycle
  • What the implications of SAP Enterprise SOA are for QA
  • The quality measurement system for SAP standard software
  • How Six Sigma methods can be used in software development
  • How compliance to non-functional requirements is ensured
Friday, May 2nd  8:30 a.m.

Security-Enhanced Quality Assurance:  Mitigating Risks to the Enterprise

Joe Jarzombek
Director for Software Assurance, National Cyber Security Division
U.S. Department of Homeland Security

The National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security works collaboratively with public, private, and international entities to secure cyberspace and America's cyber assets.  As one of the overarching objectives to protect the cyber infrastructure, NCSD has implemented a cyber-risk management program for the protection of critical infrastructure. 

In his role as Director for Software Assurance, Joe leads government interagency efforts with industry, academia, and standards organizations to shift the security paradigm away from patch management by addressing security needs in work force education and training, more comprehensive diagnostic capabilities, and security-enhanced development and acquisition practices.

In his keynote presentation, Joe will speak to the relevance of software security assurance in reducing organizational risk exposure.  With today's global IT software supply chain, project management and quality assurance processes must explicitly address security risks posed by exploitable software.  Traditionally, these disciplines have not clearly and directly focused on software security risks that can be passed from projects to the organization.  Software security assurance processes and practices span development and acquisition and can be used to enhance project management and quality assurance activities.  Joe will explain the critical need for incorporating practices, processes, and principles used to build security into every phase of the software lifecycle.  He will discuss free resources that are now available to assist project and quality assurance personnel in managing contracted, outsourcing, and development activities.

Joe served in the U.S. Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel in program management.  After retiring from the Air Force, he worked in the cyber security industry as vice president for product and process engineering.  Joe also served in two software-related positions within the Office of the Secretary of Defense prior to accepting his current DHS position.


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