King & John Streets
Toronto, Ontario

Register here:
http://www.cipstoronto.ca/activities/event_info1.php?392

Description:
Development is late again, and the project manager is telling you, “Test faster!”. Or maybe someone is trying to cut the amount of testing so they can meet an unrealistic project release date. You know that that testing takes as long as it takes. The elapsed time for testing will ultimately be decided, not merely by the number of hours you schedule for the test team, but by the quality of the system you get to test, the development team’s turnaround time for bug fixes, and your stakeholders’ appetite for risk. It’s the whole endgame that matters: the interplay of tests, builds, bug fixes, and retests plus regression tests. But even experienced project managers can fall into the trap of planning only for testing—forgetting to take the rest of the endgame into account. In this interactive session, Fiona Charles will show testers and project managers how to build a credible case for the amount of testing time you need by using a combination of planning heuristics to model a plan for the endgame. Modeling the endgame will help drive out an end date that the project has a reasonable chance of achieving. This is the date when you expect all the tests to be passed and all the critical bugs to be fixed and retested. It will give you an argument that will make it hard for project managers and others to argue that you need less time to test, and make it easier for you to argue for more time if your planning assumptions turn out to be wrong.

Speaker:
Fiona Charles is the president of Quality Intelligence Inc., a Toronto-based company offering test project management and consulting. With over 25 years experience in software development and integration projects, she has managed testing and consulted on testing on many projects. Fiona specializes in test program management on multi-project programs, and in managing large-scale systems integration tests for clients in retail, banking, financial services, and telecommunications. Fiona is on the board of the Toronto Association for Systems and Software Quality, and is co-founder and organizer of the Toronto Workshop for Software Testing, an annual invitational conference for senior test practitioners. She is a frequent contributor to stickyminds.com and Better Software magazine, and presents regularly at conferences.

Official Website: http://www.cipstoronto.ca/activities/event_info1.php?392

Added by Jeff Knechtel on November 11, 2007