The 3rd Annual Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) 2008

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 14-16, 2008

Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing

Keynote Presentations by Gerald M. Weinberg,

Cem Kaner, Robert Sabourin, and Brian Fisher

Tutorials by Gerald M. Weinberg, Scott Barber, Hung Nguyen, and Julian Harty

The Association for Software Testing is pleased to announce its third annual conference (CAST 2008), to be held July 14-16. The meeting will be held in Toronto, Canada, a city which features enormous diversity in culture, businesses, educational institutions, and the arts. Toronto is the perfect location for a conference on this year’s theme: "Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing".

You can view the most recent brochure here, and you can see the conference program here.

In this month's installment of "Peak Performance" I discuss the frequently erroneous and often grandiose titles software testers have on their business cards or in their e-mail SIGs. Identity crisis or delusions of grandeur?

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Scott Barber

President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Vice President & Executive Director, Association for Software Testing

www.perftestplus.com

www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org

"If you can see it in your mind...

     you will find it in your life."

Scott Barber has teamed up with Rosie Sherry of DrivenQA to bring PTSS Training to Brighton & Hove, UK.

Sign-up now for Performance Testing for Managers or Performance Testing for Software Systems; A Heuristic Approach.

This morning I arrived in Brazil. For the next 2 weeks I’ll be doing some consulting, some training, and speaking at 3 conferences spanning Brazil and Uruguay.

The first is Performance Summit 2008 hosted by Dell Brazil. The local organization team, including my friends and top-notch performance testers Carlos Panato and Walter Munstock, have already gone well out of their way to make me feel at home. Thanks guys!

WOPR10: Call For Proposals (CFP)

Theme: How can we teach performance testing?

Every aspect of performance testing from problem awareness to systematic modeling, performance testing experiments, result analysis to problem reporting and getting the darn system actually working involves a rich an complex set of interrelated skills coupled with a blend of detailed technical knowledge and rich context sensitivity.  What are these skills?  How can we teach them?

WOPR10 will explore the topic of teaching performance testing with seasoned professionals and expert performance testers as well as teachers and instructional designers.

See the complete CFP on the WOPR Web Page

Experimental Methods in Teaching Performance Testing (Pre-WOPR Event)

In the past year, the number of publications and training courses available related to testing the performance of software systems has increased dramatically.  Over the last 7 or so years, most training courses related to performance testing that were not tool focused have fizzled out quickly after the initial buzz.  The primary reason for this is what is known in academia as “the transfer problem”, meaning that what students learn in the courses, they are unable to use/apply when they get back to the office.  One of the keys to minimizing the transfer problem is through relevant, engaging exercises during class.

Developing relevant, engaging exercises for performance testing skills is particularly difficult to do for the following reasons:

• It is both time and cost prohibitive to develop and deliver “project like” exercises.
• When teaching a public class, instructors cannot assume that students will be comfortable enough with the tools used in the exercises to be successful (unless the instructor additionally trains the use of the tool)
• Web-based exercises transfer exceptionally poorly to students who test anything other than websites.
• Exercises that are not web-based are completely rejected by (usually the majority of) students who performance test web-based applications.
• What we are trying to teach are complex, multi-disciplinary, cognitive skills.

That said, this is not an impossible problem, simply a hard one.

Immediately prior to WOPR10, I (Scott Barber) will be hosting a workshop designed to explore the challenge of addressing the transfer problem through innovative and/or experimental, classroom based, exercises related to performance testing.

See the complete announcement on the WOPR website

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

The 3rd Annual Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) 2008

http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/CAST2008

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 14-16, 2008

Beyond the Boundaries:  Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing

Keynote Presentation by Gerald M. Weinberg

The Association for Software Testing is pleased to announce its third annual conference (CAST 2008), to be held July 14-16.  The meeting will be held in Toronto, Canada, a city which features enormous diversity in culture, businesses, educational institutions, and the arts.  Toronto is the perfect location for a conference on this year’s theme: "Beyond the Boundaries:  Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing".

December Issue of the Association for Software Testing Newsletter Now Available

I am proud to have my newest article published in the AST Newsletter, now titled Sapient Testing Magazine. You can download the December issue of Sapient Testing Magazine here.

Some time back, I blogged about a book I’d been significantly contributing to being available as a free .pdf download. (see the entry here)

Well, the book quietly appeared in “dead tree format” (as Stuart Moncrieff put it in his blog post about the book) a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been getting light heartedly scolded by some of my friends and readers for not making a big announcement, so here’s my “big announcement.”

Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

by: J.D. Meier, Scott Barber, Carlos Farre, Prashant Bansode, and Dennis Rea is now available on Amazon.