Past Sessions
Here are summaries of past SQNZ Members' Sessions. Presentation materials are available for download in most cases.
Contents:
Christo presented a methodical approach to dealing with the reality that there is never enough time for testing, particularly with the number of combinations made possible by moder user interfaces. He showed that when considering testing combinations, the greatest yield in bugs found will come from a technique called Pairwise Testing: testing pairs of combinations. He looked at how Pairwise Testing can be used in both System Testing and Unit Testing.
Furthermore, he presented the use of orthogonal arrays to assist in implementing this technique: orthoganal arrays being a mathematical construct that can be used to optimise the selection of pairs to test.
Christo Bence hails from Johannesburg, South Africa where he has been working as a test manager/consultant for the past 8 years. He started his IT career as a C programmer for a large financial institution's research and development division. He holds an ISEB Practitioner certification in software testing as well as a BSc Computer Science degree. For the last year Christo was also the principle trainer for a software training house, presenting the ISEB Practitioner and ISTQB Foundation courses. He is currently based in Wellington, New Zealand.
John's presentation provided a comprehensive and valuable guide to several of the open source tools available to the developer for managing software quality. In addition, he also covered the areas in which automated metrics and testing can be applied, some of which would have been new to many of the audience. For example, while many of the attendees might have been familiar with automated unit testing with JUnit, few would have been as familiar with the area of test coverage.
John discussed how quality metrics work best as a team learning tool, and poorly as a measure of individual performance. He described how these tools can be used to reduce bugs, speed up delivery, improve the quality of a project, and hone a team's skills.
The tools covered included Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs, Crap4j, Cobertura and Selenium.
About the Presenter
John is a freelance consultant specialising in Enterprise Java, Web Development, and Open Source technologies, currently based in Wellington, New Zealand. Well known in the Java community for his many published articles, John helps organisations to optimize their Java development processes and infrastructures and provides training and mentoring in open source technologies, SDLC tools, and agile development processes. John is also the principal trainer of the Java Power Tools bootcamp, a 4-day workshop covering open source tools that can improve developer productivity in all areas of the software development lifecycle (see http://www.wakaleo.com)
Jan's session had his audience thinking and re-thinking over some of the ideas and approaches to which they had become accustomed over the years. His focused yet collaborative approach invited contributions from the audience, as did the chocolate fish he hurled around the room.
One theme throughout the talk was that of defining quality. But rather than disappear down the same rabbit-hole that Robert M. Pirsig did in Zen and the Art of Mototcycle Maintenance, he kept the notion of quality focused and relevant to a the delivery of software application development projects; reducing quality to a question of scope.
With a wealth of examples from his experience as a project manager and a developer, he outlined an approach to setting up and running a project with clear, concise and measurable requirements to "capture quality" without "over-cooking requirements". He also offered some tips for recognising and avoiding some of the slippage-inducing pitfalls lurking in some some common ways of expressing requirements.
Another theme was that of requirements traceability, and Jan presented some practical recommendations for improving the traceability of requirements down to the code level. The payback from this approach being the improvement of one's ability to assess the impact of change on the project's cost and timeline, and to maintain one's view of the requirements during the ongoing maintenance of the application.
About the Presenter:
Jan Wijninckx (pronounced Yan Vaynings) is a specialist in program / project management, and methodologies. His consulting company SmartMatix (formerly Spade) has developed a range of industry standards-based process libraries and simple tools to ease IT and project management.
Jan's key work experiences include setting up and running the program office for the Telecom NZ next generation network, the project office for NZ Post, and a range of hands-on CMMI implementations. His 25 year career spans from developer, technical lead, architect, consultant, project manager, to program-office manager. He has a keen interest and extensive hands-on expertise in areas such as productivity improvement, quality, earned value, and software metrics.
Yolanda's excellent presentation addressed the planning and active management of quality throughout a project's life cycle: building quality in rather than adding it at the end. She covered the entire lifecycle well, giving pragmatic high-level approaches and ideas for managing quality at each stage.
The talk opened with a discussion of what quality is in terms of the outcomes we want to see. It then moved through an approach for such things as work breakdown, an iterative approach to delivery, organising the team and engaging with the business. Following that were a series of techniques and tips for managing the quality of output through the planning, requirements definition, architecture and design, coding, testing, integration, implementation and deployment stages of the project.
After the formal presentation, Yolanda led a workshop discussion which allowed the audience to compare their experiences of techniques and practices that had either helped or hindered the delivery of quality in their projects.
The slides for this presentation are well worth reading and coming back to again as a high level reference.
This presentation examined the reasons to start measuring software process and presented some practices for data collection. The position of measurement in the Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model was discussed. Concepts such as the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle and Goal-Question-Metric were covered as well as measuring size, effort and anomalies.
Ed also spent some time discussing approaches to implementing a process for collecting and using metrics, with reference to the project in which he is currently involved. See the handout material for a more details outline and some references.
Edward Sargisson is a Consultant for IBM New Zealand. He has a conjoint BSc/BCom from the University of Auckland in Computer Science and Operations Management.
In this talk Mark examined some of the classic failings inherent in a process approach to managing projects and the development life cycle, and argued that what is really required is to be able to capture reusable practices, share ideas and to be able to aquire knowledge as and when required.
He further argued that there are actually two levels of 'reusable practices' - those which are documentary and those which are 'codified' and are often called patterns, and that it is the underlying flexibility of process to permit 'practices' and governance over those 'practices' which are key focuses.
Mark gave an example of a method for capturing and sharing this information using .Net tools.
Since 2004 Mark Carroll has been the Architect for Microsoft's Developer and Platform Strategy group here in New Zealand. He has been in the IT industry for over 30 Years working first as a developer, then as a development team leader followed by ten years in a mix of Project Managing, Architect and Technology directional lead roles. During the last ten years he was also Secretary then President of Software Quality New Zealand and still serves on the committee of Software Quality New Zealand as immediate Past President.
Marien's talk looked behind the scenes at the role of the IT Project Manager, and in particular how the work they do (or should do) supports and enables quality throughout project teams and development activities. It was aimed at IT Professionals who may aften find themselves feeling that project managers and project management activities just "get in the way of doing the real work", though some of the project managers in the audience would have picked up some useful hints on communicating with their teams.
The talk inspired some contructive discussion afterwards.
Marien de Wilde has managed projects across the software development lifecycle, working for IBM New Zealand Ltd where he was twice recognized for Project Management Excellence, and more recently as an independent consultant. He is a certified Project Management Professional.
Use Cases are a popular technique for requirements gathering, analysis and management in modern software development environments.
This session was a very practical look at building a typical use case, its component parts and their purpose, and how it drives the software development process. For anyone not familiar with use cases it was a valuable introduction. And for the rest, it was a chance to reflect on and discuss what makes a "good" use case, particularly from a testing perspective.
Craig McLean is a Senior Consultant with Equinox Ltd, specializing in business modeling and requirements analysis. He has played a major role in developing the Equinox suite of Business Analysis training courses, and is a sought-after trainer in this area.
There was a good turn-out for this talk. Douglas gave an introduction to the basics concerning SOA, specifically, what it is and why you would want to create one. He looked at the SOA architectural model, and at methods that might be used to develop an SOA. He concluded with some thoughts on how moving to an SOA style of implementation may challenge some existing models of software quality and testing.
Questions prompted some additional discussion of the reusable building-block approach at the heart of SOA, and the practical work needed to implement an SOA. There was some interest in discussing the analogy one could make between object oriented design and SOA.
Douglas Keel is an I/T Architect working for IBM NZ in the Global Business Services division, where he is responsible for the design, development and overall technical ownership of solutions to meet client requirements. During his many years of experience in the information technology field he has developed a broad base of knowledge across a range of systems, tools, methods, application frameworks, and hardware and software platforms, and has achieved IT Architect certification with both IBM and TOGAF.
His recent focus of activities has been with the development of architectures based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles, and the adoption of Enterprise Architecture frameworks and methods.
This talk was very well attended. It pitched at a general and non-technical level, and drew on Owen's experience in Testing and Quality Assurance. He discussed:
- The meaning of quality
- it means different things to different people - Types of testing
- and how the size of change and the amount of testing are not necessarily related - Managing changing requirements (scope creep)
- assessing the impact on testing for every change
- Test data and environment management
- getting it right from the start
- Fault recording
- Test and management tools
- Test approach options
Owen also shared some horror stories and subsequent lessons learnt from his extensive experience in NZ and Saudi Arabia.
This session discussed some of the particular software quality issues involved in implementing package solutions, using as a case study my involvment in a team which implemented an electronic records management package for a UK government department. I discussed quality aspects of the whole life cycle from analysis of requirements, through package selection, customisation and configuration, to testing, data migration and ongoing maintenance. There was considerable discussion by attendees of similar experiences.
I concluded by recapping some recommendations to improve the quality of package selection and implementation:
- Some independent knowledge of the type of package, if its new to your organisation, will help to focus on important requirements, to assist in package selection.
- Be as thorough as possible in package evaluation look at it in operation, explore possible weaknesses, talk to users without the vendor present.
- Deal honestly with expectations of people in your organisation about what the package will be able to do, the implementation effort required (e.g. learning curve, data migration) and that they may have to amend their business processes to fit the package, not the other way round.
- Identify what reference data you will need to develop, and allow time to do this.
- Check software versions which one the RFP replies were based on, which you evaluated, which you'll be testing, whether a new version is about to be released.
- Make sure you allow time to prepare the test environment including a quick initial test to check any configuration and time to fix any configuration problems detected.
- Allow for testing new releases too, including testing for scalability if you now have a lot of live data that needs to be dealt with.
David presented an approach to performance improvement based on a holistic, value-chain philosphy that provides more rapid, focused, balanced and hence long lasting benefits to the business than an approached based on certification against a model.
David leads Borland's Process Optimization Services in the region.
The international standards committee ISO/IEC JTC1 SC32 Data Management and Interchange produces "standards for data management within and among local and distributed information systems environments". (see www.jtc1sc32.org) It has 4 working groups:
- WG1 e-Business - Open electronic data interchange standards (... to support electronic commerce, electronic administration, electronic business, ...)
- WG2 Metadata - specification and management of metadata including Metadata Registries
- WG3 Database Languages
- WG4 SQL Multimedia and Application Packages
Two of these groups, WG3 and WG4, met in Wellington from 28 November to 9 December 2005. Members of these groups presented at two special SQNZ members' sessions.
Quite often, security considerations are left until late in the design process of a project. In this talk, Andy made the point that to be effective, security must be designed in from the start, and that architects, designers, programmers and senior management must treat a security breach as something that will happen. But more that that, to remain secure, and organisation must incorporate security concerns into its day-to-day business.
Andy and Mark demonstrated some typical hacking techniques (such as SQL injection and wireless network cracking), as well as some of the tools and resources used by the hacker community to detect vulnerabilities and share information about them.
Andy also outlined ways in which staff can unwittingly expose their organisations to attack by not considering security at all times when design and configuration descisions are being made. He then outlined an approach to designing software to resist hacking from the requirements phase onwards, and for keeping the organisation aware of security issues.
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Jeremy and Mark discussed the relatively recent emergence of tools, patterns and frameworks to support and improve software development methodologies. They explored the idea of moving a state where many have been realised through sometimes disparate tools and technologies, towards a notion of a "software factory", where they become integrated into shared frameworks, further streamlining the process of building great software while realising the goal of more success for less effort.
Jeremy Boyd and Mark Orange are two leading solutions architects with Intergen. They have a pragmatic approach to software development based on a mix of formal and agile methods. Both have been in leading roles in several large projects where stakeholders have required a clear SDLC based approach coupled with often tight delivery time frames.
Configuration Management. Many people have heard of it. Some even know what it is, or at least think they do. The fact is that CM means different things to different people. Martin's presentation proposed that CM is basically about making software better, suggesting some key practices that can be easily implemented to provide tangible business benefits. He also identified some more complex development scenarios and demonstrated how well-designed processes combined with an appropriate level of automation can support them - without necessarily requiring a high-end commercial CM tool.
Martin White has spent six years developing, implementing, documenting and supporting advanced Configuration Management practices for a variety of software development firms in the UK and New Zealand. This specialisation has given him a unusual appreciation of well-designed development processes and the benefits they can provide. Before leaving the UK in early 2005 Martin was a member of the British Computer Society CM Specialist Group, and is an IBM Certified Administrator.
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Design Patterns are a way of capturing and communicating about recurring problems and solutions in software design. A design pattern consists of a problem in a context, and a solution with consequences. Appropriate use of design patterns can make software more clear and communicable, as well as increasing flexibility.
This talk reviewed key ideas in Design Patterns, and examined their relevance and use in enterprise systems. Examples from a major recent project were given as a short case study.
John Hurst is an independent consultant/developer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He works for companies in New Zealand and Australia, providing mostly Java design, development and training. He is also experienced in a number of other platforms dating back to the 1980s. John recently worked on a major system for a New Zealand power company, in which he designed and implemented the data access layer, domain model, and web-service interface. He's currently working on a new system for an Australian power company.
Adrian explained how to use the available IT/Software process standards to control and improve the use of information technology for design, developing, integrating, operating, managing or using software.
Adrian reviewed the IT/Software problems documented in the 1995/1996 NZOQ sessions to establish what have been solved and what remain, and used these as background to evaluate improvement over the past 10 years, and as the basis for understanding the usefulness of the various IT Software process standards. These standards include SPICE, CMM, CMMI, ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 90003, BS 15000, system and software life-cycle processes.
Adrian Price has been associated with software for over 33 years and has extensive experience in software development, management, quality and training. For the last 23 years Adrian has been focused on software quality with much of his spare time spent teaching people and organisations about software quality. He has been involved in helping to make software quality standards available and applicable to New Zealanders, by his involvement in the international standards committees ISO TC176 (quality) and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC7 (software) and the joint New Zealand and Australian standards committees.
In this session, Mark presented a "bird's eye view" of software quality. He covered some of the wider 'scoping' areas and cornerstones around software quality as well as providing a definition of Software Quality. Many of the sessions we run at SQNZ drill down into specific aspects or areas for those interested in software quality specifically or the development and maintenance of software in general. This session was an overview and a reminder of the wider view of software quality as well as an intorduction for those with little idea about the motivations behind the Software Quality movement.
As well as presenting on the wider aspects of software quality, Mark also described various references and sources of information which attendees could use to obtain more detail or 'drill down' into areas of specific interest to them.
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Open source software (OSS) has become a hot topic in the last few years, but is still a bit of a mystery to some. There are many questions that potential users of OSS might have: How can I trust something I don't pay for? How do I know the code has been tested and is high quality? What kind of person writes software for free? This talk discussed these and other questions, and reassured us that OSS isn't that scary after all.
Carl presented on the role of formal software test training, aiding in the development of the test organisation and its members. His talk was based on his experience of putting his Software Quality Assurance Team through the ISEB Foundation Course in Software Testing while he was working in the UK.
An intersting general discussion followed Carl's talk, which was well attended.
This session applied some critical thinking around the achieving the right level of process in software development.
There are some people who strongly believe that full software development processes are a waste of time, development is a form of art and requires complete artistic freedom. Other people believe that a well defined software development process is absolutely essential no matter the scale or scope of the project. Who is right and who is wrong? Of course, both camps are wrong. There is a happy equilibrium in between which shifts towards one or the other side depending on the characteristics of each project.
The session covered the essentials of the RUP (Rational Unified Process), XP (eXtreme Programming) and Scrum, and how to combine the best techniques of each into something what would fit your specific project.
BPEL is a Language for Business Process Execution defining how to combine web services to implement business processes. UML is an Object Management Group standard providing a visual notation for modelling complex systems. UML is independent of the target language and raises the level of abstraction enabling developers to increase productivity, quality and encapsulates the underlying change in technology.
This session was a follow-up on the February 2003 session about the views of system architecture and highlights the benefits of the current Model Driven Architecture initiative of the Object Management Group. The presentation defined BPEL and UML and proposed a UML profile, which maps BPEL concepts to UML.
While Solutions Architects and development teams move with the times and embrace Contemporary Application Development what is happening to Testing Teams and the techniques that they utilise? What new challenges are being encountered? What new skills are required?
Contemporary Application Development should be complemented by Contemporary Application Testing. This session looked at Contemporary Application Development, identifies the challenges that this presents to Testing Teams and recommends some techniques that can help to overcome these challenges.
Pete is a Director and the Systems Integration and Testing Practice Manager at AMR & Associates, a Wellington-based IT consulting company.
This presentation focused on the sometimes arduous, often downright confusing, process of choosing application development technologies that can enable the organisations' Application Architecture development strategies to add value both now and in the future.
Software Application Development Technologies are the tools of our trade. As tradesmen we always want the best tools to work with. But, do they add value?
Adding value means either introducing new functionality that the business can leverage to meet its stated outcomes or reducing the costs required for it to meet its existing obligations.
In this session Mark discussed three questions for the investigation of Application architecture development technologies. These are:
- What could be considered to be critical attributes and characteristics of an Application development Tool (Critical Success Factors)
- How can we identify potentially beneficial Application development technologies
- How can we identify current but potentially redundant application development related technologies
When you ask any 10 people to define Quality, at least half of them will refer to the performance of the product in question. If the performance of a system is so obviously important to us, we must build it into our systems. In this session, Richard shared with us some war stories from projects he was involved with as well as a number of hints and tips to "architect for performance".
Richard has over 21 years experience in the information technology industry, across a broad range of business, application and technical areas. At Equinox, Richard has developed specialist capability in software testing. This includes developing and implementing complex integration, load and regression test strategies for client server and Internet based applications.
In the seventies there was a huge movement towards a thing called Management By Objectives (MBO) that shook up slow stodgy boardrooms and entrenched middle management. History now tells us that MBO did two things, firstly it changed the fundamental way that managers think to this day and secondly it created a short-term focus that in some extreme cases stripped capabilities that supported core competence.
XP programming can be seen in a similar light, it attempts cut to the core of what is required to produce good solutions that are customer driven and focused. XP developers sometimes describe themselves as anarchists conjuring up an image that they are out to destroy things. In reality the only things they want to destroy are the things that they believe stand in the way of good software development. Those things that they wish to remove can sometimes include approaches and methodologies that our members hold dear. BUT......... at the end of the day we all want the same thing - satisfied customers..
Bryan certainly delivered a thought-provoking talk. But you had to be there to catch it: there are no presentation materials to post here.
Writing effective Object orientated code to meet real business solutions can be difficult but the potential rewards in terms of maintainability and reuse have been consistently proven. Technical issues including patterns, object composition versus object inheritance, tool limitations need to be weighed up when aligning 'objects' to Business Unit processes or repetitive problems that require solving. There are a number of factors that always need to be assessed then balanced when building or extending existing applications using OO approaches.
UML is gaining a reputation for being a practical modelling tool that allows developers to balance these factors up front and go on to produce better quality solutions in terms of functionality, lower cost and reliability. Despite its success UML is often misunderstood or unknown in areas where it could be making a valuable contribution.
The purpose of this session was to supply an introduction to UML and outline its likley benefits to organisations that are maintaining / developing software applications.
Can an Enterprise architecture provide better direction for developers and testers future planning efforts or is it simply more hype designed to sell services? Evidence is starting to build that Enterprise architectures can deliver on their promised 'better blueprint' benefits.
Mark Carroll is an experienced software developer (twenty years) who is conversant in both Lotus Notes and Microsoft development technologies. He is a member of the Statistics New Zealand Application Architectural team, the Microsoft sponsored New Zealand Enterprise Architects Council, President of SQNZ and secretary of GOVIS.
IT Specialist, IBM NZ Ltd.
With the shift to internet-based applications and all it's trappings: Web Services, Portals, pervasive computing, interoperability, etc., the need for designing systems around the use of components is greater than ever. This is particularly true in the case of infrastructure.
Does this sound obvious? It would appear that it is not. While you read this, vast numbers of programmers are busily solving problems that have been solved before. At the same time, they are extending project end dates and painting their applications into architectural corners.
This talk presented some thoughts on why this happens and why it shouldn't. It also looked at where you would typically deploy components in a web application.
Jim Walmsley is an IT Specialist with IBM New Zealand. His 17 years of experience at IBM have included mainframe systems, third generation programming languages and more recently, the transition to object oriented programming, component development and web development.
Decision Tables can be used as a technique for software testing. It is a tool to structure any kind of logic and can therefore be used in many different application areas, not just testing, but also for structuring the logic of your code and during other phases of the development life cycle.
Although many people know about decision tables, they are often considered inappropriate as they can yield an unmanageable number of combinations. Marien explained what decision tables are and give a practical step by step approach on how to create them. At the end there was small training exercise during which everyone had a go at creating a decision table.
Marien de Wilde is an experienced Project Manager with IBM New Zealand. He is a certified PMP and has an extensive experience in software development tools and techniques with emphasis on Quality Assurance and testing.
Software testing is one of the tools available for the delivery of quality software.
Mike discussed why it's necessary, why it's evil and what you can do about it.
What is the difference between ineffective and effective testing? How can we provide the best testing "bang for the buck"? What is context-driven testing? This session will be a provocative look at testing from the perspective that "good software testing is a challenging intellectual process".
Mike Osborne is an independent consultant, and is well known to many of you as a prominent member of the software development community. He has worked in a variety of roles in the industry, acquiring a reputation as a man with a passion for software quality. He has served as President and Vice-president of SQNZ.
"Test a little, code a little..."
Every programmer knows they should write tests for their code. Few do. The universal response to "Why not?" is "I'm in too much of a hurry." This quickly becomes a vicious circle - the more pressure you feel, the fewer tests you write. The fewer tests you write, the less productive you are and the less stable your code becomes. The less productive and accurate you are, the more pressure you feel.
This session described the JUnit framework, and how it makes it easier
to write test cases and take some of the pressure out of development. JUnit
introduces a simple philosophy: first write your test cases, then develop
the code necessary to make them work. The talk described how this philosophy
can be implemented in practice, and be used in unit testing, integration
testing and regression testing, along with some practical examples.
Colin Sharples joined IBM Global Services in June 2001, as an I/T Architect in the Business Innovation Services Group with a special interest in Java technologies. Colin has more than 4 years experience with a number of Java technologies, including Servlets/JSPs, EJBs, JMS, JDBC, RMI and GUI design (Swing/Java2D), and is a Sun Certified Java Programmer.
The business community in general is more aware of the benefits of effective
and efficient test practices throughout the Software Delivery Life Cycle.
However, with technology constantly advancing, we need to draw on previous
experience, our own and others, to deliver a quality product in the shorter
time frames demanded by the business. No matter how much is written on best
practices and processes, in any profession, when the rubber meets the road
practical decisions are needed to meet the deliverables in the allowed timeframes.
Vonnie shared her experiences in planning and conducting the test component
of these web projects carried out in the customers' home turf.
Vonnie came to IBM with twelve years IT experience with Telecom NZ Ltd, covering a variety of roles ranging from entrant level trainee programmer, business analysis and support, to Project Development Manager. Prior to this Vonnie had twelve years service in the New Zealand Army. Since joining the IBM team in August 1999, Vonnie has been engaged as the Test Manager for web development projects on two customer sites - one an Internet Banking solution, and the other a utilities company.
Every time some new technology and business models comes around, traditional
quality practices and processes are thrown out of the window under the motto
of 'We do not need this as we operate differently and can't afford to be
slowed down by those old processes'. We find that this move is often accepted
by management and later regretted.
Over three separate SQNZ sessions we tried to find out what is different about e-business projects (and portals in specific), what some recent experiences are and how we can learn from them:
Why e-business projects are different.
What is a portal and what is the "stuff" needed to realise "Portal Nirvana"?
What works and what does not; lessons learned; horror stories, port-holes.
This presentation covered some the lessons learned from implementing e-business projects, provided some suggestions based on these lessons learned, and looked at whether there are any differences for e-business projects compared with traditional projects.
This talk explored the software development life cycle from a tester's point of view and defined important interim milestones to help ensure shipping dates are met.