2009/2010 Event Details

The following is a listing of the events for the 2009/2010 season including presentation abstracts, speaker biographies, and additional event details. Please see the 2009/2010 Season page for the details on the theme, schedule, location and sponsor(s).

Season Events by Month
September 2009
September 15, 2009
Continuous Improvement - From Incremental Changes to Monumental Leaps
Lynn McKee, Quality Perspectives

Continuous improvement can range from the achievement of pragmatic, incremental change to widespread and radical transformation with contrasting degrees of success. Perceptions often vary on what it is, who does it, where to begin, how extensive it should be, how to measure progress, etc. Continuous improvement practices can be applied to achieve organizational, departmental, inter departmental, project team, functional team and individual improvement goals. It can be challenging to define and successfully achieve a continuous improvement initiative as a result of numerous pitfalls that can arise such as a lack of clarity of the goal, too large of scope, or insufficient management support. Even within organizations with well intentioned objectives for excellence, individuals or teams often become overburdened with the task at hand and time allocated for reflection and improvement is lost. In other cases, continuous improvement is viewed as an external entity that will bring much needed change, and individuals do not recognize the key role they play in the identification and implementation of change.

This presentation will look at the potential to identify, influence and implement continuous improvement initiatives regardless of your experience level or role and the importance of developing an effective and adaptive roadmap to achieving improvement goals.

Lynn McKee is an independent consultant with 14 years experience in the IT industry and a passion for designing and implementing high value, adaptable and scalable Quality Assurance & Testing programs. Working with small to enterprise scale companies, Lynn has a proven ability to establish and lead high performing teams within agile and traditional software development methodologies. She is an active member of Calgary Software Quality Discussion Group, ASQ, AST and the Agile Alliance and holds Scrum Master, Software Quality Assurance, Software Testing and Project Management certifications. You can find Lynn online at www.qualityperspectives.ca.

Presentation Materials: PDF Icon

Meeting Sponsors: Integritas Solutions and P2 Energy Solutions

Location: 2nd floor XCHANGE Conference Center, Standard Life Building at 5th Ave and 6th St S.W (accessible by +15)

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director

October 2009
October 20, 2009
Reinvigorate Your Retrospectives
Jennitta Andrea, The Andrea Group

You know you should be performing regular retrospectives, but you can't convince management or the team that it's a worthwhile investment of time ... Your team has been performing retrospectives every iteration, and they have become monotonous and have stopped producing valuable insights ... You've heard about retrospectives, but don't even know how to get started ...

The difference between a retrospective that is considered dull and worthless and a retrospective that produces team bonding and valuable insignts is in the planning and preparation. All effective retrospectives share a common structure: safety, review history, insight mining, prioritization, and concrete action planning. Explore the different ways that iteration and milestone retrospectives fill in this structure based on the type of learning that we need to draw out of the team at a particular point in the project. Variations on the activities that fill in the structure are described and experienced first hand.

Jennitta Andrea has been a multi-faceted, hands-on practitioner (analyst, tester, developer, manager) and coach on over a dozen different types of agile projects since 2000. Naturally a keen observer of teams and processes, Jennitta has published many experience-based papers for conferences and software journals, and delivers practical, simulation-based tutorials and in-house training covering: agile requirements, agile testing, process adaptation, automated examples, and project retrospectives. Jennitta's ongoing work has culminated in international recognition as a thought leader in the area of agile requirements and automated examples. She is very active in the agile community: serving three terms on the Agile Alliance Board of Directors, director of the Agile Alliance Functional Test Tool Program to advance the state of the art of automated functional test tools, member of the Advisory Board of IEEE Software, and member on many conference committees. Jennitta founded The Andrea Group in 2007 where she remains actively engaged on agile projects as a hands-on practitioner and coach, and continues to bridge theory and practice in her writing and teaching. www.theandreagroup.ca

Meeting Sponsors: Integritas Solutions and P2 Energy Solutions

Location: 2nd floor XCHANGE Conference Center, Standard Life Building at 5th Ave and 6th St S.W (accessible by +15)

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director

November 2009
November 17, 2009
Lessons Learned Implementing Agile
Janet Gregory, DragonFire Inc.

Many teams have tried to implement agile software practices and failed. When you read about it, It sounds so easy. What happened?

Janet Gregory will share some of the lessons she has learned when working with teams that help agile teams be successful. She will talk about what to avoid, what is critical, and some basic practices that can make the difference between success and failure. One example of a critical practice is using the whole team approach, and what happens when your team keeps your test team separate.

Janet Gregory is the co-author, with Lisa Crispin, of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Agile Testers and Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2009). Based in Calgary, she specializes in helping teams build quality system, and her greatest passion is promoting agile quality processes. Over the past ten years, she has helped to introduce development agile practices into companies as tester or coach, and has successfully transitioned several traditional test teams into the agile world. Her focus is working with the business users and testers to understand their role in agile projects, and offers agile testing courses to agile teams. Janet is a frequent speaker at agile and testing software conferences in North America and Europe. She's a regular contributor to the North American agile testing community. www.janetgregory.ca        www.agiletesters.ca

Presentation Materials: PDF Icon

Meeting Sponsors: Integritas Solutions and P2 Energy Solutions

Location: 2nd floor XCHANGE Conference Center, Standard Life Building at 5th Ave and 6th St S.W (accessible by +15)

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director

December 2009
December 15, 2009
Lessons Learned in Building a Learning Organization
Michelle Dunn

In today's economic climate, many companies are cutting their costs by eliminating their training budgets. However, employees are expected to keep their skills up to date and gain new knowledge while embracing change. So what is the answer to this catch 22?

Instead of waiting for the training money to start flowing again, take this opportunity to create a learning environment in your workplace. This presentation will explore ways to create an environment where people are free to grow, explore, be challenged and love it.

Michelle will provide numerous career enhancing things to do to create a learning environment that cost almost nothing in monetary terms.Michelle will share some of the lessons she has learned when developing learning environments. She will give pointers about what to avoid, what is critical, and some basic practices that can make the difference between success and failure.

Michelle Dunn, a QA/QC expert, has spent more than 14 years in software testing and quality assurance within numerous sectors including Oil & Gas, Telecommunications, Transportation, Financial, Government, Commercial/Product, and custom In-house software applications. Michelle's passion is creating first-in-class Test teams. She has spent her extensive and varied career implementing quality practices from the ground up that create dynamic, successful and highly effective Test teams. Michelle is a champion of IT process improvement and ensures that quality practices continually meet and exceed business and company needs. Michelle has a degree in Applied Math, a Project Management Certificate, an ITIL Certificate, a Pragmatic Marketing Certificate and is a Certified Software Test Engineer (CSTE) from QAI (active since 2000).

Presentation Materials: PDF Icon

Meeting Sponsors: Integritas Solutions and P2 Energy Solutions

Location: 2nd floor XCHANGE Conference Center, Standard Life Building at 5th Ave and 6th St S.W (accessible by +15)

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director

January 2010
January 19, 2010
Lessons Learned from Test Automation
David Cranstone & Peter Chau, Shaw Communications

With test automation we never really stop learning. In this session Peter and David share their insights into implementing test automation in several different organizations - examining what has worked and just as importantly what has not. Topics covered will include:

  • Test automation strategies
  • Avoiding common pitfalls
  • Selecting the right tools - open source or commercial
  • Structuring test automation within an existing test team
  • Collaborating with developers

These ideas will help you introduce test automation into your organization, reinvigorate ailing test automation projects, and magnify the benefits of test automation. Although ideas cannot be discussed in great detail due to time restrictions, there will be enough information for you to understand and then apply.

David Cranstone is the quality assurance practice lead at Shaw. He has nearly 10 years experience in test automation and has consulted in various organizations on software testing and development in industries as diverse as defence, oil and gas, banking and telecommunications.

Peter Chau is the test automation architect at Shaw. In his current role, he works with project teams to design and incorporate automation ensuring software reliability and successfulness. Peter has worked in numerous industries including online financial, banking, and telecommunications where he has been applying test automation practices.

Presentation Materials: PDF Icon

Meeting Sponsors: Integritas Solutions and P2 Energy Solutions

Location: 2nd floor XCHANGE Conference Center, Standard Life Building at 5th Ave and 6th St S.W (accessible by +15)

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director

January 28, 2010
11th Annual SQDG Networking Event

Image for January 28, 2010 Networking Event

February 2010
February 16, 2010
Lessons Learned Using Metrics - Are your Metrics Dumb or Smart?
Mike Griffiths

Collecting and reporting effective metrics can be a tricky business. Einstein captured it well when he noted "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted".

Software projects have a history of measuring irrelevant and even counter-productive progress tracking metrics. The "Hawthorne Effect" should teach us that we will influence what we measure, yet companies continue to overtly track things like hours worked and lines of code written, unaware that they send the message of valuing long hours over results, and discourage simplifications and healthy refactoring. Quite often the metrics we want to track are intangible and subjective and so people tend to shy away from them.

More fundamentally, why are we even tracking these metrics? Is it to report on what has already occurred or help steer our future course? Often an imperfect view of the future is more useful than a perfect view of the past. In the real world, rear-view mirrors are much smaller than windshields for good reason, yet the accuracy of hind-sight and our attraction to certainty often creates too much of an emphasis on lagging, already occurred measurements compared to leading metrics. So we get fancy graphs of project spend and defect rates, but no better insights into what we should be doing differently in order to meet our goal.

In this presentation Mike will review many common project metrics and explain why they are largely misguided and counter productive. An alternative set of "Design Factory" metrics will be presented that are "simple and relevant to the true project goal", these metrics leverage the Hawthorne effect and focus on leading metrics to support smarter decision making.

Mike Griffiths is a project manager, consultant and trainer specializing in effective project management. Mike was involved in the creation of DSDM in 1994 and has been using agile methods (Scrum, FDD, XP and DSDM) for the last 16 years. He is active in both the agile project management community and traditional PMI-based circles. He served on the board of the Agile Alliance and the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), he was a contributing reviewer to the PMBOK v3 Guide and is a trainer for the PMI SeminarsWorld program. He maintains the award winning leadership and agile project management blog at www.LeadingAnswers.com.

Meeting Sponsors: Integritas Solutions and P2 Energy Solutions

Location: 2nd floor XCHANGE Conference Center, Standard Life Building at 5th Ave and 6th St S.W (accessible by +15)

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director

March 2010
March 16, 2010
Lessons Learned in Hiring QA Professionals
Sabina Fabbian

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs...

How many interviews have you gone on, where the job you were interviewed for, was not what you applied for, and possibly, not the one you were hired for?

OR...

How many interviews have you conducted where the person on the Resume doesn't match up to the person you are interviewing?

What Happened?

In this presentation, Sabina will share her lessons learned as both an interviewer and an interviewee for QA Professionals; having reviewed over hundreds of QA Profressional's resumes (from across the country & south of the border), and conducted almost as many interviews, she will share her learnings from both sides of the fence.

  • As an Interviewer; strategies for hiring the 'BEST' person for the job
  • As an Interviewee, strategies for getting the JOB you want.

Sabina Fabbian is a QA/QC expert with over 14 years experience in software testing and quality assurance within numerous sectors including Oil and Gas, Telecommunications, Health Care, Government, Financials, Commercial/Product and custom in-house software applications. Sabina's experience ranges from Software Testing, Test Automation, Team Lead and Management, QA/QC Process Implementation and Improvement as well as Change Management. Sabina has worked with all SDLC's; Waterfall, Iterative and Agile as well as multiple technologies, platforms and applications including Client/Server, Web-based, ERP's, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence. Sabina is a highly motivated advocate for quality assurance; her passion is understanding company's business practices and culture in the realm of IT and offering streamlined BEST Practices for Software QA/QC. By marring the needs of the people with those of the product, she articulates and delivers the right process/practice for the right environment.

Presentation Materials: PDF Icon

Meeting Sponsors: Integritas Solutions and P2 Energy Solutions

Location: 2nd floor XCHANGE Conference Center, Standard Life Building at 5th Ave and 6th St S.W (accessible by +15)

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director

April 2010
April 20, 2010
Lessons Learned in QA Management
Karen Price

Karen Price's two decades of management experience have been in a diverse range of companies each focusing on IT and Quality Assurance. While these companies have included start-ups like Aventail, the large ERP vendor People Soft and industry leaders like Intuit, her management skills and dedication to quality have always been her main passions. Her work has included major software conversions, ERP implementations, continual process improvement, quality auditing, project management, system software development lifecycles and maintenance, and compliance projects such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and Financial Services Authority (FSA) in Great Britain.

As a manager of both projects and products, Karen has achieved success through team building and leadership. Coaching and mentoring hundreds of software professionals in Canada and the U.S., she has always maintained her dedication and commitment to quality. This has been amply demonstrated in her roles as a QA Manager and a proponent, early adopter, and practitioner of agile principles and practices.

The great and wise W. Edwards Deming said, "Does experience help? NO! Not if we are doing the wrong things." Over 20 years in IT and software development and 15+ years in a management role have resulted in a myriad of lessons learned. Here are some examples.

Karen Price is currently contracting in the Calgary area providing quality management services for a major natural gas company.

Presentation Materials: PDF Icon

Meeting Sponsors: Integritas Solutions and P2 Energy Solutions

Location: 2nd floor XCHANGE Conference Center, Standard Life Building at 5th Ave and 6th St S.W (accessible by +15)

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director

May 2010
May 12, 2010
A Lap Around the Testing Capabilities of Visual Studio 2010
Aaron Kowal, MS Developer Solutions Technical Specialist

Testing tools and Rich Developer-Tester Interaction with Visual Studio 2010. Learn about the new testing tools in Visual Studio 2010 and how the generalist tester is now brought into the full Microsoft ALM platform. The new Test Professional product is a purpose built tool for test professionals to plan, execute and manage testing of your web, Windows Forms or WFP application. See how the rich defect reporting including IntelliTrace and other information about the execution and system under test helps eliminate the "I can't reproduce the bug" response from development. Test Lab Management can also assist in streamlining the setup and teardown of test labs for test.

Aaron Kowall is the Application Lifecycle Management Practice Leader for Imaginet Resources Corp. Aaron has 20 years of experience in custom software development. Aaron's focus is optimizing software delivery teams through agile and lean processes and effective use of team collaboration tools. Aaron has been helping both large and small organizations adopt Microsoft ALM tools including Team Foundation Server since the original betas of VSTS in 2005. His expertise has earned him a Team System MVP award. Aaron Kowall's Blog

Meeting Sponsors: Calgary .NET Usergroup, Microsoft and Inteqna

Location: Inteqna 5th floor training room at their offices at 715 - 5th Ave SW

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director

May 2010
May 18, 2010
Cutting the Mustard - Lessons Learned in Striving to Become a Superstar Tester
Nancy Kelln, Unimagined Testing

As IT professionals we strive to deliver quality projects to our business stakeholders and end users. We focus on improving our project delivery by examining our development processes, encouraging continuous learning of team members, and spending time on project retrospectives to look for areas of improvement. Sometimes as we strive to improve things external to us we find that we cannot always effect change.

There is something we do have control and the ability to change, ourselves. I have found that as I continually strive to become a superstar tester, I am continuously challenging myself to grow. This presentation will examine what it means to "Cut the Mustard" and will challenge attendees to cut the mustard in their own ways. By using the same continuous improvement skills we often focus externally, we can refocus that energy inwards on ourselves and redefine our own excellence. Leveraging our role in the industry of software quality and focusing first on ensuring quality within ourselves and all we do, we can effect positive change and transformation within the teams we work with.

Key Points of the Presentation include:

  • Examining traits of superstar testers and what it means to "Cut the Mustard";
  • How the essence of continuous improvement can be leveraged for self-improvement;
  • Analyzing the pathways for growth;
  • Sharing inspirational stories of incremental to monumental team transformations by individuals through their actions.

Nancy Kelln is an independent consultant with 12 years of diverse experience within the IT industry. Nancy is motivated by working with teams who are implementing or enhancing their testing practices; providing adaptive testing approaches in both agile and traditional testing teams. She has coached test teams in various environments and facilitated numerous local and international workshops and presentations. She is an active member of the Calgary Software Quality Discussion Group, Association for Software Testing and the Scrum Alliance and has co-founded the Calgary Perspectives on Software Testing Workshop (POST) with Lynn McKee. Nancy has also been published in the Software Test and Performance Magazine. You can reach Nancy online at www.unimaginedtesting.ca.

Meeting Sponsors: Integritas Solutions and P2 Energy Solutions

Location: 2nd floor XCHANGE Conference Center, Standard Life Building at 5th Ave and 6th St S.W (accessible by +15)

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director

June 2010
June 10, 2010
Testers: Get Out of the Quality Assurance Business
Michael Bolton, DevelopSense

It's time for our craft to grow up. Whatever the organizational structure of our development shops, it's time for us testers to get out of the Quality Assurance business.

If you're a tester, you're typically not allowed to change the source code. You can't control the scope of the product. You don't have authority over the budget, staffing, schedule, customer relationships, market placement, or the development model. So how, exactly, can testers assure quality?

Michael Bolton argues that testers cannot assure quality, nor should they try to do it. Decisions about quality and how to assure it are in the hands of those with the authority to make such decisions--the programmers who write the code, and the managers who run the project. Testing is not confirmation, verification, and validation of what we already know or hope to be true. Instead, testing is focused far more on exploration, discovery, investigation, and learning. In this view, when we're doing our best work, we're providing valuable, timely information about the actual state of the product and the project. We don't own quality; we're helping the people who are responsible for quality and the things that influence it.

It's time for our craft to grow up. Whatever the organizational structure of our development shops, it's time for us testers to get out of the Quality Assurance business.

Michael Bolton helps people solve testing problems that they didn't realize they could solve. He has been teaching software testing on five continents for ten years. Since 2006, he has been a co-author (with senior author James Bach) of Rapid Software Testing, a course that presents a methodology and mindset for testing software expertly in uncertain conditions and under extreme time pressure. He has been Program Chair for the Toronto Association of System and Software Quality, and Conference Chair (in 2008) for the Association of Software Testing. He wrote a column in Better Software Magazine for four years, and very sporadically produces his own newsletter.

Michael lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and two children. He can be reached at mb@developsense.com, or through his Web site, www.developsense.com.

Meeting Sponsors: Integritas Solutions and Nexen

Location: 2nd floor XCHANGE Conference Center, Standard Life Building at 5th Ave and 6th St S.W (accessible by +15)

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, doors open at 11:30 am

Additional Details: Refreshments and light lunch are provided

RSVP: Register in advance via email to the Communications Director