Paul is the Technical Director and a principal consultant for Systeme Evolutif. He has conducted consultancy and training assignments in all aspects of Software Testing and Quality Assurance. Previously, he has worked as a developer, designer, project manager and consultant for small and large developments. Paul has engineering degrees from the Universities of Oxford and London, is Co-Programme Chair for the BCS SIG in Software Testing, a member of the BCS Software Component Test Standard Committee and Founding Chair of the IS Examination Board (ISEB) Certification Board for a Tester Qualification whose aim is to establish a certification scheme for testing professionals and training organisations. He is a regular keynote speaker at both development and testing seminars and conferences in Europe, US and Australia, and won the "Best Presentation" award at EuroSTAR '95 and "Best Presentation of 2002" award for the BCS SIGIST. Paul's book, Risk-Based E-Business Testing, written with Neil Thompson, is the first book focusing on risk-based test approaches and aimed at E-Business.

In 2002, Paul coined the term Project Intelligence (PI) to represent the information required to make critical project decisions. This talk introduces the PI Framework as an approach to intelligence gathering and reporting throughout a project's lifecycle and beyond. The PI Framework comprises several established techniques including Results-Based Management, Results Chains, Benefits Realisation Management, Goal-Based, Risk-Based, and Coverage-Based Testing.

Why do so many projects fail? One common view is that one can trace all project failures to poor decision making. Bad decisions are made, decisions are made too late or are not made at all. If we believe that decision makers are generally competent, it is probably the information that the decisions are based on that is the major cause. However, the framework used to make those decisions is often suspect. Project plans provide the context for decision making, but how often do we find that plans and reality diverge? The plan is a model of the project; the real project involved people, organisation, project goals and risk. How often does an inaccurate irrelevant GANTT chart force a rash decision to be made?

Tom Gilb is a freelance consultant, teacher, methods creator, and author, serving clients in UK, Europe, India, China, Japan, and the US. He wrote "Principles of Software Engineering Management" (1988, now in 19th printing) and is principal author of "Software Inspection" (1993, now in 12th printing).
He specializes in software quality quantification, design for quality and cost, quality requirements, and management for competitiveness, productivity, and predictability (technical, project, and corporate).

He wrote "Software Metrics" (1976) which coined the term, and officially (via Radice, IBM) laid the basis for much of CMM Level Four. He lives in Norway and London. His most recent papers, book manuscripts and slides are available on www.Gilb.com.

His most recent book is: "Competitive Engineering: A Handbook For Systems Engineering, Requirements Engineering, and Software Engineering Using Planguage" (2005) is based on well-defined terms, processes and specification standards. It will help at all CMM(I) levels and beyond.

"Testers Rights: What Test should demand from others, and why?" (Keynote: Eurostar Conference, Amsterdam, December, 2003 ). Tom will also provide an outline of his Agile Inspections method.

Talk Outline: Testers should not be debuggers. Testers should not get bad work dumped on them. Even if you don't believe we should be kind to testers; the entire project will take less time, and have more quality, if we do not mistreat the test function. We must not leave testers to compensate for our bad development processes. To clarify this position I offer a Testers Bill of Rights.