Speakers
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Rob Sabourin President, Amibug.com rsabourin@amibug.com

Robert Sabourin, P. Eng., has more than twenty-five years of management experience leading teams of software development professionals. A well-respected member of the software engineering community, Robert has managed, trained, mentored, and coached hundreds of top professionals in the field. He frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization. Robert wrote I am a Bug!, the popular software testing children’s book; works as an adjunct professor of software engineering at McGill University; and serves as the principle consultant (and president/janitor) of AmiBug.Com, Inc. Contact Robert at rsabourin@amibug.com.

Workshop B1: Testing Under Pressure: Five Key Principles
A cast-in-concrete delivery date looms on your project’s horizon. You have precious little time remaining, and the development team keeps delivering incomplete builds of unstable code. Is this a “death march” project, or can the testing team do something useful, or perhaps even save the day? Robert Sabourin describes his experiences when testing in outrageously turbulent projects sharing five key principles for dealing with the testing time crunch. Rob provides rich examples and case studies illustrating how these principles can be used when testing under pressure. Rob shows how to “triage” testing focus and bug priorities; how to widen the testing net with a rich “variety” of ideas; how to build a dynamic “heap” of tests; how to always know the “last best build”; and how to actively monitor business, technological, and organizational “context” drivers. If you are looking for effective testing strategies when time is running out, development is late, and change is rampant, this session is for you.

Workshop B2: Using Visual Models for Test Case Design
Designing test cases is a fundamental skill that all testers should master. Rob Sabourin shares graphical techniques he has employed to design powerful test cases that will surface important bugs quickly. These skills can be used in exploratory, agile, or engineered contexts—anytime you are having problems designing a test. Rob illustrates how you can use Mindmaps to visualize test designs and better understand variables being tested, one-at-a-time and in complex combinations with other variables. He presents the Application-Input-Memory (AIM) heuristic through a series of interactive exercises. We’ll use a widely available free, open-source tool called FreeMind to help implement great test cases and focus our testing on what matters to quickly isolate critical bugs. If you are new to testing, these techniques will remove some of the mystery of good test case design. If you’re a veteran tester, these techniques will sharpen your skills and give you some new test design approaches.

Expert Panel Session: Mind The Gap