Choosing the Best of the Plan-Driven and Agile Development Methods

Date/Time: Wednesday, September 17 2008, 9am-12.30pm

Venue: Radisson SAS Hotel, The Gasworks, Belfast

Talks

1. Choosing the Best of the Plan-Driven and Agile Development Methods

Speaker:

Lee Copeland

Lee Copeland has more than thirty-five years of experience as a consultant, instructor, author, and information systems professional. He has held a number of technical and managerial positions with commercial and non-profit organizations in the areas of applications development, software testing, and software development process improvement. Lee frequently speaks at software conferences both in the United States and internationally and currently serves as Program Chair for the Better Software Conference & Expo and the STAR testing conferences. Lee is the author of A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design, a compendium of the most effective methods of test case design.

Summary:

We seem to be under a curse in our profession. Although not cast by a witch or a wizard, the curse affects us just the same. It is the curse of “either/or”—the curse that we must choose either “this” or “that” but we cannot choose parts of both. Nowhere is this more evident than in today’s struggle between the adherents of the traditional “plan-driven” and newer “Agile” approaches to software development. What most overlook is that both groups want to achieve exactly the same goal: quality software that meets customer needs within the constraints of time, budget, staff, and technology. They differ only on the strategies to achieve this goal. For example, both groups agree that system requirements must be understood; their differences lie in questions of “how much of what to do and when to do it.” Lee Copeland offers insights and suggestions on the methods and approaches that will be most valued on your project—control vs. flexibility, individual contribution vs. process guidance, and contractual specificationvs. adaptable delivery. Find out which of the plan-driven and Agile processes will work best in your organization and in your project’s context.

Testing Hyper-Complex Systems: What can we know? What can we claim?

Throughout history, humans have built systems of dramatically increasing complexity. In simpler systems, defects at the micro level are mitigated by the macro level structure. In complex systems, failures at the micro level cannot be compensated for at a higher level, often with catastrophic results. Now we are building hyper-complex computer systems, so complex that faults can create totally unpredictable behaviors. For example, systems based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model can be dynamically composed of reusable services of unknown quality, created by multiple organizations and communicating through many technologies across the unpredictable Internet. Lee Copeland explains that claims about quality require knowledge of test “coverage,” an unknowable quantity in hyper-complex systems. Are testers now going beyond our limits to provide useful information about the quality of systems to our clients? Join Lee for a look at your testing future as he describes new approaches needed to measure test coverage in these complex systems and lead your organization to better quality—despite the challenges.