Tuesday, December 11, 2007
2:30 pm - 5:00 pm
JW Marriott Buckhead
3300 Lenox Road
Atlanta, GA 30326
Phone 1-404-262-8689
http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/atljw-jw-marriott-hotel-buckhead-atlanta/
Global Moderator
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Michael Cooper Global Director of Quality Assurance Fair Isaac Corporation QLE Awards 2007 Judge, QLE Practitioner Awards 2006 Winner Biography > |
Accurately Communicating IT Quality Assurance at the Executive Level
Topic Three: The Role of the User Experience in IT Quality Assurance |
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Guest Moderators
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Steve Manila Chief Knowledge Engineer Inherit, LLC Biography > |
Topic Four: Best Practices with Structured Requirements |
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Diane Walker, CSQA, CSTE, CSQE Quality Assurance Manager IPS-Sendero QLE Awards 2007 Judge Biography > |
Topic One: Realizing Real Business Value with a Testing Center of Excellence |
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Jeff Watson Implementation Program Manager ADP Comprehensive Outsourcing Services Biography > |
Topic Two: Maximizing your IT Quality Assurance Program with Outsourced and Distributed Teams |
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Global Topic:
Accurately Communicating IT Quality Assurance at the Executive Level
Led by: Michael Cooper, Global Director of Quality Assurance, Fair Isaac Corporation
Michael Cooper, Global Director of Quality Assurance and User Experience at Fair Isaac Corporation (FIC) will kick-off the Executive Forum by sharing a few of his award-winning, proven techniques for successfully leading a team of Internationally distributed Software Quality Assurance Professionals.
He will focus on one of his keys to success - Providing meaningful and accurate information about IT Quality.
In this session, Michael will demonstrate how he has significantly improved Quality improvement at the enterprise level by:
- Effectively communicating and implementing an Enterprise Vision for Quality Assurance
- Empowering Senior Executives to make informed, tactical, operational, and strategic decisions
- Building strong Executive support for Quality
- Effectively delivering both good and bad news at the executive level
Following Michael's presentation, attendees will participate in interesting and relevant interactive roundtable discussions, led by special guest moderators.
Topic One: Realizing Real Business Value with a Testing Center of Excellence
In today's world of global transformation, corporations are faced with the tough goals of generating exponential growth and maintaining high profitability in order to stay ahead of the competition. Cascading the goals to the external and internal IT organization, technology owners need to develop and enhance applications at a rapid rate while at the same time, reduce the cost of development and maintain high quality standards. These pressures have resulted in numerous operational challenges for IT organizations, such as shorter development cycles, compressed implementation timelines, globally distributed teams, limited resource availability, and limited subject matter expertise, all impacting their ability to deliver high quality solutions.
To address these operational challenges and to maximize the technology investments, many enterprises are setting up Testing Centers of Excellence to accommodate their testing needs and to continually improve their IT operations.
Discuss the following with your peers:
- Establishing a framework of your strategic assets - process, people and technology
- How a testing organization can engage and deliver highly efficient testing services to the larger enterprise
- Importance of establishing goals, well-defined processes, a governance mechanism, multi-disciplined skill sets, and common tools and technology
- How to incrementally change an organization that aligns to the long-term strategy versus a big bang approach
- Benefits and cost savings of having a Testing Center of Excellence
Topic Two:
Maximizing your IT Quality Assurance Program with Outsourced and Distributed Teams
Competitive pressures have pushed many organizations to outsource their IT and software development and testing services around the globe. While the motivations behind this trend can vary depending on the organization, the primary motivation is simple: cost savings.
The attraction of low-cost, high-quality labor is just too tempting to resist for many organizations. Add to that the ever-increasing expectations businesses place on software to achieve business goals. To that end, outsourcing also offers the lure of building and maintaining a greater number of applications for the same budget dollars.
Software development is a very complex practice. It involves not just technical skills, but a general understanding of business priorities and the ability to balance the tradeoffs that continuously occur in development around spend, scope, quality and schedule when those business priorities shift. Giving another party control of one of your business's most important assets and trusting that they can manage its complexity and deliver a quality product, is an important issue. It is an issue that requires some serious planning and consideration.
Discuss the following with your peers:
- Pros and Cons of outsourcing IT quality assurance
- Getting results out of a geographically distributed and/or outsourced IT Quality Assurance Team
- Types of projects that are ideal for this approach
- Types of organizations and questions to ask before hiring an outsourcing partner or service provider
Topic Three:
The Role of the User Experience in IT Quality Assurance
The incorporation of strong QA and usability testing into the enhancement phase is critical to ensuring a solid accessible design for a website, application or product. User-centered design and quality assurance testing can easily save the average company tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars due to improved productivity, fewer help-desk calls, and less rework. It is also possible to obtain a return based on improved branding and increased goodwill, because the application is appealing and functional. Tracking web experiences can perform ROI calculations as well as demonstrate the benefit of integrating usability and quality assurance into the design process.
While it's true that user-centered design and quality assurance may add some time to the development process, those that employ this practice believe that they ultimately gain time due to improved productivity, fewer customer service calls, less rework, and less time spent designing unused features. Depending on how much user feedback and documentation is required in a project, user-centered design methods and quality assurance testing could add as little as several days to the design process or as many as several months.
Discuss the following with your peers:
- Pros and cons of incorporating Usability (User Experience) into IT Quality Assurance
- How to seize the entire experience into account up front, from the moment you conceive the application
- Ensure that your release criteria include specific performance and reliability metrics that you can measure often during and after development.
- Discuss the importance of knowing the customer and what inspires their experience
- Engineering quality web experiences into your product
Topic Four:
Best Practices with Structured Requirements
It is widely reported that poor requirements management accounts is the primary reason for software project failures. The main cause is the gap between what the business team wants, how it communicates, and what IT understands and delivers. No matter how good a project development environment is, if the requirements captured in the first place are inaccurate or incomplete, then the project is destined to fail. The same fate awaits project plans that are structured around passive and immeasurable module and task definitions business-defined goals.
The challenge with a software project is that the end result is, essentially, invisible. It is not like building a house, where design anomalies are often clearly visible. Communication in technical projects can be problematic, both between the customer/user and the business analyst and between the business analyst and the development/QA team. As a result, there is often inaccurate or poor understanding of the project scope amongst stakeholders. Project estimation relies on "gut feel" and there is often an overreliance on particular technical people. Similarly, project progress cannot be measured easily or accurately due to inaccessible or overly technical milestones. This increased risk to the project often results in cost overruns, late delivery or, worst of all, outright failure to deliver the system required.
A structured approach to requirements capture and management resolves these problems and is the only way all stakeholders can be confident that all requirements have been understood and incorporated into the project plan.
Discuss the following with your peers:
- Why traditional requirements are not enough and how the impact of structured requirements can ensure completeness, communicability and depth in a way that traditional or flat requirements cannot
- How and why to use plain language so everyone can understand, offering a common way for all members of the project team to communicate about what the system must do
- How structured requirements can enable full traceability throughout the life cycle because they form the core of the project planning process, connecting the project plan with business objectives.
- Key advantages and benefits for project stakeholders
- Testing and validation techniques