Speakers
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Lee Copeland Software Quality Engineering (SQE), USA lcopeland@SQE.com

Lee Copeland has over thirty years experience as an information systems professional. He has held a number of technical and managerial positions with commercial and non-profit organizations in the areas of applications development, software testing, and software development process improvement.

As a consultant with Software Quality Engineering, Lee has developed and taught numerous training courses focusing on software development and testing based on his extensive experience. In addition, he provides consulting services to SQE’s clients.

He is a well-known and highly regarded speaker at software conferences both in the United States and internationally. He currently serves as Program Chair for the STAR testing conferences. Lee is the author of A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design, a compendium of the most effective methods of test case design.

Workshop A1:(Note: This workshop comprises of two topics)
The Banana Principle for Testers: Knowing When to Stop Testing

In his classic book, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, Jerry Weinberg introduces us to the “Banana Principle.” A little boy comes home from school and his mother asks, “What did you learn in school today?” The boy responds, “Today we learned how to spell ‘banana’ but we didn’t learn when to stop.” As skilled software testers we know how to design effective and efficient test cases, but how do we know when to stop? How do we know we have done enough testing? Join Lee for a discussion of five approaches to decide when to stop testing: coverage goals, defect discovery rate, marginal cost, team consensus, and the boss says “Ship it.” And remember, bananas are fat-free, sodium-free, cholesterol-free, contain eight amino acids, and are an excellent source of vitamins B6 and C, and potassium.

All I Really Need to Know about Software Testing I Learned in Kindergarten

In 1986, Robert Fulghum published a book, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. It contains some wonderful ideas and sold millions of copies. Lee discusses how those ideas might apply to us as software testers. Some of the advice includes share everything, play fair, don’t hit people, put things back where you found them, live a balanced life, and other ideas from Fulghum adapted to software testing.

Workshop A2: Black Box Test Design Techniques

Once test plans are written, test teams formed, and test tools selected, it is time to create test cases. However, testing all system execution paths and data combinations is impossible. Good test design is about wisely choosing an appropriate subset of all possible tests. Lee describes a selection of black box techniques that will make your test designs more effective and efficient. These techniques include equivalence class and boundary value testing, the use of decision tables and state-transition diagrams to identify test cases, and the application of the all-pairs selection method to significantly reduce the number of test cases to be created and executed while still finding a significantly large proportion of defects. In addition to these formal “scientific” test design approaches, Lee also illustrates the “art” of test case design through exploratory testing.

Expert Panel Session: Mind The Gap