GTAC 2007: Adam Porter & Atif Memon – Skoll DCQAS

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007.

Adam Porter & Atif Memon – Skoll DCQAS
Software engineers increasingly emphasize agility and flexibility in their designs and development approaches. They increasingly use distributed development teams, rely on component assembly and deployment rather than green field code writing, rapidly evolve the system through incremental development and frequent updating, and use flexible product designs supporting extensive end-user customization. While agility and flexibility have many benefits, they also create an enormous number of potential system configurations built from rapidly changing component implementations. Since today’s quality assurance (QA) techniques do not scale to handle highly configurable systems, we are developing and validating novel software QA processes and tools that leverage the extensive computing resources of user and developer communities in a distributed, continuous manner to significantly improve software quality.

Adam Porter
Adam A. Porter is a professor with the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland and is the Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He is a winner of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence in the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and served previously on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. He is a senior member of both the IEEE and ACM. His current research interests include empirical methods for identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in industrial development processes, experimental evaluation of fundamental software engineering hypotheses, and development of tools that demonstrably improve the software development process.

Atif Memon
Atif M. Memon is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland. He received his BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991, 1995, and 2001 respectively. He was awarded a Gold Medal in BS. He was awarded Fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation for his Ph.D. research. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2005. His research interests include program testing, software engineering, artificial intelligence, plan generation, reverse engineering, and program structures. He is the inventor of the GUITAR model-based testing software. He serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability (STVR), the Open Software Engineering Journal (OSE), and the Canadian Journal of Pure and Applied Sciences (CJPAS).

GTAC 2007: Gregory Fresnais – Worksuite Manager

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007

Gregory Fresnais – Worksuite Manager
Spirent Communications has developed a new technology — Spirent WorkSuiteManager (WSM) – that offers the ability to automate performance tests and make decisions before the end of those ones. This allows QA engineers to quickly move to the next set of tests based on real-time analysis of the results. The Spirent WorkSuiteManager (WSM) was originally developed for the company’s internal QA department to reduce time to delivery of new releases. It has also proven beneficial for our customers who optimized productivity to validate their own releases of network equipment, servers and new services, interactive and dynamic websites and/or complete network infrastructures.

GTAC 2007: Heusser & McMillan – Interaction Based Testing

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007

Matt Heusser & Sean McMillan – Interaction Based Testing
In the world of developer-facing automated tests, IBT is arguably one of the most controversial topics. One side claims that “pure” unit testing is a way to ensure that code behaves as specified, providing design and maintenance benefits as well. Another group claims that IBT is a great way to generate code bloat and test things that do not need to be tested. Matt and Sean will try to go beyond the clichés and hype of “Mock Always” verses “Mock Never.” Instead, they’ll strive to find the appropriate places to use IBT, and pass on some tools to help you with your ultimate decision. Along the way, they will cover some common mistakes, anti-patterns, and things to consider.

GTAC 2007: Simon Stewart – Web Driver

The 2nd Annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in our New York office on August 23 and 24, 2007

Simon Stewart – Web Driver
Faster than a speeding bullet! Easier to maintain than something that’s really easy to maintain! Reliable! That’s what we want from our tests, but how do we get there? This presentation covers key strategies and patterns for writing test suites using WebDriver, a developer focused tool for web application testing similar in spirit to Selenium RC. We’ll cover why it was written, the problems it addresses and how to integrate it into your projects and testing process.

Simon Stewart lives in London and works as a developer for ThoughtWorks, specialising in Agile development and Test Driven Development. His Open Source contributions include the original integration of WebWork and Spring as well as WebDriver. He enjoys writing better software and beer, sometimes at the same time.

Jeff Skoll: Making movies that make change

http://www.ted.com Film producer Jeff Skoll (An Inconvenient Truth) talks about his film company, Participant Productions, and the people who’ve inspired him to do good.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes — including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10