Archived Presentations - 2009

January 2009

• Topic: WISQA open Board Meeting

Details:
The first Board meeting for 2009 - board appointments and planning for 2009.

February 2009

• Topic: Learn to "SOAR" with your career
• Speaker: Laura Hufschmidt

Details:
Laura's technique for improving your interviewing skills - "SOAR" (Situation, Objective, Action and Result). The technique is similar to the CAR technique of Susan Mathews and others, but she excels at critiquing and interview preparation from an employer's perspective. She forces people to write out their "SOAR" stories and then to improve them.

Presentation slides: Learn to SOAR with your career

March 2009

• Topic: Improving your processes using Lean Six Sigma Philosophy
• Speaker: Kevin Parker

Details:
Basic principles of Lean Six Sigma and how this paradigm-shifting approach can be used to improve the processes you interact with every day via an interactive exercise.

April 2009

• Topic: "Get Your Users "IN" the Doghouse and Keep Yourself Out - Defining Nonfunctional Requirements"
• Speaker: Roxanne Miller, CBAP, President of Requirements Quest

Details:
The day of the big move is upon you. The semi-truck stuffed with all of your personal furnishings pulls up to your new home. The moving crew gets to work at once, and swiftly begins unloading and carrying your things through the front door. Suddenly the harmonious dance that the crew performs comes to a screeching halt. As eyes roam back and forth from the front door to your magnificent grand piano, your heart nearly stops as you realize that the piano is not going to fit. What are you going to do? Functionally, the home builder constructed a beautiful home. However, somehow this nonfunctional detail was missed. Does this scenario sound familiar to any of the missed requirements on your projects lately? Do performance requirements such as response time, throughput, capacity, and availability get missed? What about flexibility requirements such as scalability, multi-lingual, installability, and extendability? Roxanne Miller will reveal "patterns" of nonfunctional requirements that can reduce the possibility of missed requirements that cause project rework. Come and find out what you've been missing. Learning Objectives (at the end of the session, participants will be able to):

1. Recognize the difference between functional and nonfunctional requirements.
2. Understand various categories of nonfunctional requirements.
3. Discover the simplicity of this frequently misunderstood and overlooked requirement type.

May 2009

• Topic: “ER - STAT, A case study in getting more from your existing systems.”
• Speaker: Mary Lou Schroeder, BA, MBA, CLT (HEW)

Details:
So you’ve done your part. You tested the system. It was defect free. Now management is telling you the system doesn’t work as well as they had hoped and therefore you may be laid off. What can you do?

Sometimes doing your job isn’t enough. Many successful systems just need a little “tweaking.” As testers you are front and center with the knowledge and insights that management needs.

June 2009

• Topic: Trials and Tribulations in the world of Test Environments
• Speaker: Wendy Dickson, Mary Drucker and Theresa Klindt

Details:
Wendy, Mary and Theresa will provide an overview of the mainframe test environment structure at American Family Insurance. They will share how the mainframe and distributed platforms fit together and how batch test streams are run to maintain data integrity in the test regions. In addition to the overview, they will share some of the difficulties they face within their current test environments including having more projects than test environments, limited governance over when changes are made or who "pays" for the updates as well as coordinating data loads and refreshes in between projects.

August 2009

• Topic: WISQA general meeting - Open Discussion

September 2009

• Topic: New Approaches for Testing Composite and SOA Applications
• Speaker: Andy Nguyen, iTKO

Details:
iTKO helps customers optimize their software test and delivery lifecycle for greater quality and agility in an environment of constant change.

iTKO provides test, validation, and virtualization solutions optimized for distributed, multi-tier applications that leverage SOA, BPM, cloud computing, integration suites, and ESBs. iTKO's award winning LISA product suite can dramatically lower quality assurance costs, shorten release cycles, reduce risks, and eliminate critical development and testing constraints by virtualizing IT resources to provide on-demand accessibility and capacity for teams across the software lifecycle.