STANZ 2011 Day 2 Review

Day 2 of STANZ 2011 in Melbourne, here are my notes from the sessions.

The Future of Quality

Goranka Bjedov from Facebook gave this somewhat controversial talk first up, the slides and videos are available here.

value of quality is lower than the price of quality – quality is dead
you may get a quality product (sometimes) but you always get an expensive product
quality matters for human life, security and money
systems are designed for redundancy these days so most of the time nothing will go wrong
people value free over quality
we live in a world where quality doesn’t matter, we are used to things failing
restructure what you are doing – don’t focus on catching big bugs, but focus on productivity testing, reduce the cost of development and speed it up
it is cheaper to fix a bug when the customer finds it now we are moving to the cloud
organisations are now paying people to find security bugs, people will test for free for a free device, some companies will offer jobs if you find a bug
need to start communicating value of work in a language people understand – how much did we save?

Jan Jaap Cannegieter presented this session.

TMMi – maturity framework for testing, public domain, find out how mature your test processes are
CMMi only has 5 pages on testing
TMMi has 5 levels – initial > managed > defined > management and measurement > optimization
start at level 2 when assessing
results from some TMMi quick scan assessments in 20 organisations – test reporting 30%, test planning 41%, test monitoring 47%, test design 60%, test environment 59%
test design is probably high because it can be influenced within the testing team, whereas planning and reporting, etc.. require people outside of your team
testing teams are in a cave, need to get out of the cave and use the rest of the organisation
stakeholder definition – the most important people at the BBQ – the hold the power, they have mindset and ambition
it’s all political – politics is a way of life – you need to get in front of the leaders and stakeholders and have political skills

Thomas Hadorn from Tricentis gave this very vendor driven presentation.

Gartner believe model driven testing will become dominant in next 5 years
capture/replay is too fragile, develop/replay test frameworks are too costly because they need to be programmatically extended
model driven only one type of test – no scripts to maintain

I presented this session with Adrian Smith from Ennova and Dallas Thorneycroft from Suncorp. The slides are available in a separate post.

Goranka Bjedov from Facebook led this hands on workshop.

Amongst other exercises, she introduced the game of Set.

card has characteristics – colour (purple, green, red), pattern (full, empty, striped), shape (oval, diamond, squiggle)
when a characteristic matches or is different on all 3 sets you have a match
very hard to get a set
deal 12 cards
makes testing fun

She also introduced the dice game and auction game using decks of cards.