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.

From STANZ 2011

• 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?

Test Process Improvement: Testers Get Out Of Your Cave!

Jan Jaap Cannegieter presented this session.

From STANZ 2011

• 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

Why Model-Driven Testing is of Great Relevance to Test Managers and Test Analysts

Thomas Hadorn from Tricentis gave this very vendor driven presentation.

From STANZ 2011

• 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

The Future Tester At Suncorp: A Journey of Building Quality In Through Agile

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

From STANZ 2011

From STANZ 2011

From STANZ 2011

Testing Skills : How To Find and Develop Skilled Testers

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.