The Learning Experience, Nov 13th — 17th, London
Join us at the Learning Experience!
The week, hosted by Insight Test Services in association with Gerrard Consulting, will feature an appetising menu of 19 courses and workshops in one location led by internationally recognised industry experts. Pick and choose the topics to suit your needs. Attend a half-day course or come for the week, the choice is yours, the program is totally flexible.
Check out the menu!
Half-Day Program Topics
Metrics in Action (Monday 13th, Presenter Fran O’Hara)
This workshop outlines industry best practice in setting up and running an effective Metrics programme.
Risk Based Testing (Monday 13th, Presenter Ken Brennock)
Risk management and practical risk assessment, measurement and reduction techniques for risk-based testing.
Hands-on Exploratory Testing (Monday 13th, Presenter Paul Gerrard)
Learn how Exploratory Testing can be used effectively in almost all environments. Bring a wireless laptop.
Agile Testing (Wednesday 15th, Presenter Ken Brennock)
Apply agile testing concepts to improve software quality in the context of your environment.
Outsourcing Testing (Friday 17th, Presenter Susan Windsor)
Understand the challenges of outsourced testing and types of testing best suited to outsourcing or off shoring.
Security Testing (Friday 17th, Presenter Fabien Casteran)
Acquire the knowledge, insight and intuition testers must develop to find and recognise security vulnerabilities.
Risk Management (Friday 17th, Presenter Fran O’Hara)
A practical and effective approach to proactively managing risk; incorporating risk identification, mitigation, monitoring and reporting is presented.
One-Day Program Topics
Test Management (Tuesday 14th, Presenter Ken Brennock)
Acquire the skills to plan and track testing activities to meet budget, quality and risk objectives.
Web Technology for Testers: Testing Beneath the GUI (Tuesday 14 th, Presenter Paul Gerrard)
Learn what's underneath the Web GUI, and use free tools to automate web testing. Bring a wireless laptop.
Test Process Improvement (Tuesday 14th, Presenter Fran O’Hara)
Get more from your process improvement efforts, delivering measurable results to your business.
Improving Quality of Use through Usability Testing (Wednesday 15th, Presenter Pat Fehin)
Learn the skills to conduct usability evaluation and testing as an integral part of the development cycle.
Peer Reviews – how to radically improve your results (Wednesday 15th, Presenter Fran O’Hara)
The workshop will present practical, efficient and effective approaches to address the common pitfalls of reviews.
Project Management for Testers (Wednesday 15 th, Presenter Paul Gerrard)
A project survival guide - understand the organisational, personal and political dynamics of project management.
User Acceptance Testing (Thursday 16 th, Presenter Ken Brennock)
Implement the essential disciplines of UAT management including prioritisation, estimation and control.
Successful Software Improvement (Thursday 16th, Presenters Susan Windsor & Paul Gerrard)
Learn how to improve your software development capability through organisational, people and process change.
Supplier Quality Management (Thursday 16th, Presenter Fran O’Hara)
Best practice throughout the supplier management lifecycle incorporating selection, planning, monitoring and control.
Requirements Engineering (Thursday 16th, Presenter Mike Russell)
Learn how to create and maintain high quality user and system requirements and validate that the requirements define the system that the customer needs.
Three-Day Program Topics
ISTQB Foundation in Software Testing (Tuesday 14th –Thursday 16th, Presenter Pat Mullarkey)
This comprehensive introduction to software testing provides you with the knowledge and expertise to undertake the ISTQB examination for the Foundation Certificate offered at the end of the third day.
SEI Accredited CMMI Introduction (Tuesday 14th –Thursday 16th, Presenter Winifred Menezes)
This course introduces students to the CMMI model: its history; fundamental concepts; maturity levels, capability levels structure and content; application and use.
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Metrics in Action
The importance of measurement in software development and test has never been greater. Key stakeholders such as customers and management are demanding greater quantitative information on projects, processes and products.
This workshop outlines industry best practice in setting up and running and effective Metrics programme to support stakeholder information needs. Examples and exercises will show how to
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define metrics objectives,
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select and specify metrics clearly and
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collect and analyse measurements.
The workshop addresses measurement in software/systems development with a particular emphasis on Quality and Test. Typical pitfalls (such as people issues, poor data quality, etc.) and how to avoid them will be discussed. Sample metrics and useful templates for specifying metrics and their collection will be provided.
Risk based Testing
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Do your testers always need more time to finish?
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Are you confident your testers focus on what is important?
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When the time comes to release, do you know whether you've done enough testing?
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Practical risk assessment, measurement and reduction techniques for Risk-Based Testing
In the last decade, Risk Management has emerged as an essential discipline that helps managers to keep their projects on track. By anticipating problems, risks can be monitored and controlled before they become disasters.
Risk management methods tend to emphasise project and process risks. Planning and estimation problems, resource constraints, scheduling issues, external dependencies, and contractual obligations are the most visible risks to management and because they are relatively small in number can be managed at the project level. Product risk is another matter. With current methods, the sheer number of ways a product can fail makes product risk impossible to manage, except at an abstract level.
Testing reduces risk by detecting software faults and that is of course essential. Testing can also reduce risk by preventing software faults, if we test early project deliverables as well as the software. Front-loaded testing techniques mean that "testing throughout the lifecycle" can be practiced to good effect and not just preached as a consultant's mantra.
This tutorial introduces risk management for testers and gives attendees insights into how risk can be used to define test objectives, scale the testing according to risk and assess the risk of release, when the go-live deadline approaches.
Hands-on Exploratory Testing
Some testers love the spontaneity, creativity and flexibility of exploratory testing. Others hate it because it is unsystematic, unplanned, undocumented and an excuse for sloppy work. Find out for yourself what all the fuss is about in this half-day session and learn how ET can be used to good effect in almost all environments. Bring a wireless laptop.
Agile Testing
While agile has provided the solutions for many software development problems, it is not a silver bullet and has still to over-come issues that more traditional project development lifecycles handle. Testing is an important part of how agile succeeds. This presentation asks the question; can more traditional development lifecycles adopt these testing activities, to improve the quality of software in context of your environment or business domain?
Outsourcing Testing
Although the trend to outsource testing has been increasing over the past years and is predicted to continue, the speed is slowing down. Have you considered why this is the case? This session will give you an appreciation of the challenges to outsourced testing, a view of how to manage the challenges and a walk through of an approach to what types of testing are best suited to either outsourcing or off shoring.
Security Testing
What is it that differentiates security bugs from run-of-the-mill functional bugs? What knowledge, insight and intuition must testers develop in order to train themselves to find and recognise security vulnerabilities?
You will analyse security vulnerabilities to understand each bug in the context of its underlying causal faults, its failure symptoms and the best method to discover its existence. As a result you will develop an understanding how security bugs come into being, how to look for vulnerabilities' telltale signature and how to go about finding vulnerabilities in the first place.
You will learn many new and novel ways to force software applications (of whatever variety) to fail in ways that are exploitable by hackers.
Risk Management
Proactive management of risk is a high value activity and a key success factor in development/test projects. This seminar presents a practical and effective approach to managing risk and includes practices and techniques to support
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risk identification, analysis and prioritisation
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risk mitigation and associated techniques
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risk monitoring, communication and reporting.
Relevant standards will be provided and risk templates and checklists will be provided.
Test Management
Testing is a crucial process which takes a significant percentage of the project (figures of 30%-60% are often quoted). Effective management of a project's testing activities and effective improvement of the overall testing process are therefore of significant concern. This workshop highlights the key activities and concerns with test planning, tracking and control. Specific guidance on how to improve your testing process is given and an overview of the Testing Maturity Model is also provided.
This workshop will provide participants with the knowledge and skills to successfully plan and track testing activities to meet objectives in terms of time, budget, quality, and risk. Also provide specific guidance on how to successfully improve the testing process.
Web Technology for Testers: Testing Beneath the GUI
This session provides an accessible introduction to web application architecture. The test applications used in the Exploratory Session will be "deconstructed" to illustrate the underlying technologies. Use the free Webdriver tool to capture web form definitions and automate transactions for yourself. Bring a wireless laptop and take home your own working copy of the automation tool.
Test Process Improvement
Do you want to get more out of your process improvement efforts? Are you interested in using models like TPI, TMMi, CMMI but even more interested in delivering measurable results to your business such as time and cost reductions and quality improvements? Do you want to learn a proven way to do process improvement that will get senior management commitment AND buy-in from project practitioners. This workshop will provide you with:
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a comparative analysis of TPI, TMMi and CMMI
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a proven agile approach to align and prioritise process improvement efforts with measurable business goals and project needs for maximum buy-in and benefit
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practical techniques to rapidly define lightweight processes in a workshop setting
Case studies, examples and templates will be provided and exercises will be used throughout.
Improving Quality of Use through Usability Testing
This course will provide students with an opportunity to understand the key aspects of product usability. How to plan and run usability tests at various stages within the software development cycle. Practical exercises will be used throughout the course to help students apply some of the usability testing methods.
Peer Reviews – how to radically improve your results
We all know document and code reviews are supposed to be a great way to find major problems/defects early in the lifecycle. Reviews should improve product quality and help reduce timescales and rework costs as well as being a good way to learn and build capability in teams. Most of us are doing reviews in some form or another so everything is OK, right? WRONG! Most peer reviews are poorly planned and managed and are not delivering anything near their effectiveness potential.
This workshop will take all the industry reported pitfalls as well as participants issues with reviews and practice an approach to peer reviews that
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addresses issues such as poor buy-in from reviewers, poor planning, lack of preparation, inefficient meetings, etc.
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is practical, efficient and, most importantly, effective (finds a high percentage of major faults)
A light weight definition of the peer review process with supporting templates and review checklists will be provided.
Project Management for Testers
Ever thought what it's like to be a Project Manager? Why do Project Managers behave the way they do? This session will focus on the organisational, personal and political aspects of the project management discipline. It will give you an appreciation of project dynamics that will help you as a tester, a developer, an analyst, a user - a software project survival guide for practitioners.
User Acceptance Testing
User acceptance testing is normally the final stage of testing performed on a system and for many organisations it is the only form of testing they will do. It is usually planned to be a formality - a final confidence building step for the users. It can however, become an exercise fraught with problems.
Users are best placed to ensure that the testing is rigorous and covers the most important areas. However, users are rarely expert in testing, developing a test strategy and plan, designing test specification, test preparation and are often unable to execute comprehensive tests effectively without support.
Upon completion of this course you will be able to:
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Understand the relationship between testing and development and how important acceptance testing is
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Define the fundamental principles of testing and overall test process.
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Plan, prepare and execute acceptance tests.
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Effectively implement the essential disciplines of test management including prioritisation, estimation and control of the testing.
Successful Software Improvement
Whether you’ve tried to improve testing but found it difficult to implement change, or are considering embarking on a programme of activity to improve testing, this session will give you guidance on how to be successful. The key to successful improvement considers not purely process, but also the organisation and people. Typically process is the key focus, because the others are too difficult. Attend this session to find out how to include organisation and people in your improvement programme in a pragmatic and effective way.
Supplier Quality Management
With the steady increase in outsourced development and test (as well as commercial off-the-shelf products acquisition), the effective selection and management of suppliers has never been more important. This workshop will combine presentation with exercise in best practices for the typical supplier management lifecycle. This includes supplier selection, planning and monitoring/control of suppliers through to acceptance and transitioning of supplied products/deliverables. Particular attention will be paid to quality related aspects of supplier management including:
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selection criteria
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integrated planning and risk management
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development of an integrated test strategy in conjunction with supplier (in the case of outsourced bespoke development)
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technical review and monitoring
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acceptance process
A sample supplier management process will be provided with supporting templates and checklists.
Requirements Engineering
The goal of Requirements Engineering (RE) is to create and maintain high quality user and system requirements. The RE activities involved include determining whether the system meets the business needs, discovering and analysing requirements, specification of the requirements in a standard format, and validating that the requirements define the system that the customer needs. This course covers the concepts of user and system requirements, the differences between functional and non-functional requirements, the RE activities and their interactions, requirements elicitation and analysis techniques, use of requirement reviews, and the need for Requirements Management.
ISTQB Foundation in Software Testing
The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) role is to support a single, universally accepted, international qualification scheme, aimed at software and system testing professionals.
Those attending the 3-day course will learn:
- The fundamental principles of Software Testing
- How testing fits into the development lifecycle
- The importance of test process, objectives, techniques and tools
- Essential functional and non-functional test methods
- Basic test design and measurement techniques
- Fundamental test management principles
- How to select and implement tools effectively
The ISTQB Foundation certificate is awarded to all those who successfully complete a one-hour, multiple choice examination. The examination is externally set and invigilated by ISEB and will be offered on the third day.
SEI Accredited CMMI Introduction
This three-day course introduces systems and software engineering managers and practitioners, appraisal team members, and engineering process group (e.g., SEPG, EPG) members to fundamental concepts of the Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI®). CMMI models provide a roadmap for organizations wishing to improve their ability to develop and maintain quality products and services. CMMI models are an integration of best practices from proven process improvement models, including the CMM® for Software, EIA 731, and the Integrated Product Management CMM. The models describe an evolutionary but structured improvement roadmap from ad-hoc, unpredictable to disciplined and continuously improving processes. At each step on the roadmap the essential elements for effective practices are described.
The course is composed of lectures and class exercises with ample opportunity for participant questions and discussions. After attending the course, participants will be able to understand how CMMI models can apply to their organization's process improvement program. The course covers the background to the focus on process as well as the rationale for process improvement as a means to shorten development cycle times, improve quality and reduce costs. The major part of the course will be spent on the goals and expected practices of the process areas in the CMMI.
Successful completion of this course is a prerequisite for Intermediate Concepts of CMMI, SCAMPI Lead Appraiser Training, and CMMI Instructor Training. Successful completion of the course requires active participation and attendance throughout the full three days.
Software quality and qualityqualityqualityqualityqualitytestingg services provider UK and Ireland Insight Test Services, with offices in the UK and Ireland, is one of Europe largest full-service suppliers of specialist software quality assurance and test services.