Please mark your diary for the upcoming SoftTest Ireland AGM and networking session which takes place in the Holiday Inn, Pearse St, Dublin on Tuesday 7th October at 6pm! This will be the final event of SoftTest Ireland's first year. It has proved to be a resounding sucess with membership growing steadily.

All members are encouraged to participate in the AGM where a new committee will be elected.

Registration opens at 5.30pm and the event will be followed by a drinks and networking reception at 8pm. The event is FREE to members of SoftTest Ireland and €50 for non-members. Please register in advance by completing the form (27K .doc) and sending it to tracy at testingconferences dot com or calling (091) 514472.

Stephen Keenaghan is a Senior Test Engineer with Motorola Ireland based in Blackrock, Cork. He has extensive test experience and previously worked on Vital Embedded Systems for Railway & Transportation projects in Canada, USA and the UK. He returned to Ireland in 2000 and is involved is the testing of the 'Operation & Maintenance Centre - Radio' for GSM networks and is the technical lead for the Software Reliability Engineering team of Motorola in Ireland.

This presentation describes the processes Motorola used to adapt Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) to a GUI-based network management system. This system is used for the operations and maintenance of GSM mobile telephone networks. The objectives were to formally quantify customer usage of the software in the field, to increase test effectiveness, and to establish an accurate pre-release software quality indicator through the use of failure intensity modelling. It describes a novel use of the capture and playback tools to automatically generate operational profiles on a GUI system, and on the process model developed to adapt and implement SRE. It describes the application, with minimal overhead, of the operational profiles to the existing test process and practical lessons learned as a result of the experience.

Vernon Everett has worked for 14 years in the IT industry. He was educated in South Africa (Diploma in Datametrics from University of South Africa.) His past work experience includes, development, systems support, system administration, Oracle DBA, UAT, and most recently, test automation. Vernon is currently working for Sun Microsystems in patch testing and has also worked in South Africa and Malaysia.

Sun Tzu was a Chinese strategist around 400BC. He wrote the first known analysis of warfare, entitled 'The Art of War'. This work and the strategy it contains was used by Chairman Mao and the red army help defeat Chiang-Kai-Shek and create what is now communist China. The strategies outlined in the work are so relevant to today's modern world, that the book is required reading for most business degrees in Japan. In this talk, we will dip into some of the verses contained in The Art of War, and examine how the war strategies of 400BC are applicable to modern software testing.