Timetable SoftEd Fusion 2012

Agile teams require a backlog of ready work to support their development efforts. In Agile literature this is accomplished by the "Product Owner". An omniscient all powerful Product Owner who can provide a perfectly ready backlog to the development team every sprint. In reality, the Product Owner construct doesn't work outside of small projects. Maintaining a valid ready backlog is a difficult problem that most organisations don't perform effectively.

We will discuss the principles of Lightweight Documentation, Stimulating Collaboration, Establishing Shared Context, Limiting WIP and Continuous Feasibility. We will frame the system using an integrated set of backlogs used to establish a cohesive requirements from Articulating Strategy, through Coordinating Planning, to Enabling Execution.

Then we will build upon this framework - expanding upon the techniques included in the Agile Extension to the BABOK® - to build artifacts and ceremonies that implement this system of Analysis. In Articulating Strategy we will practice techniques to See the Whole, Think as a Customer, and Determine What's Valuable. In Coordinating Planning we practice techniques to Explore Options and Understand What is Doable. In Enabling Execution we will demonstrate Getting Real Using Examples and Agile Modeling. We will show how this model complements and integrates into a comprehensive Testing Frame. Finally, we will explore how the Long-lived artifacts from this approach help to build a community of understanding to accelerate quality and speed over time.

The BABOK is the International Institute of Business Analysis “Business Analysis Body of Knowledge®”. See http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/Home/IIBA_Website/home.aspx for more details.

Dennis has worked with Lean and Agile concepts for years and is a certified Project Management Professional, OPM3 Certified Consultant, ScrumMaster and Kanban Coach. He is a Core Team Member of the IIBA's Agile Extension to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge and a Board Member of the PMI Agile Virtual Community. He has written a lot on the topic of Enterprise Analysis and has been published in the Harvard Business Review. >>>

As a test manager/leader, do you feel you're a lone voice for quality on projects, often swimming against the tide? Join Julie Gardiner as she provides a unique framework of "quick-wins" for test managers and team leaders who need to show the value of testing on projects. Providing a foundation for testing through well-defined policy statements, which are agreed to and sanctioned by senior management, is a major step on the way to success. Julie provides examples of these documents you can use.

One of the key objectives of testing is to provide timely, relevant information to stakeholders. Julie will challenge your current progress reports - probably full of lots of difficult-to-understand numbers - and asks you to replace the reports with a custom Test Manager's Dashboard containing a series of graphs and charts with clear visual displays.

Your dashboard needs to report quality and progress status that is accurate, useful, easily understood, predictive, and relevant. She will share eight powerful monitoring and predicting techniques. Control actions can then be applied to avoid project failures. Learn to correlate and interpret the various types of dashboard data to reveal the complete picture of the project and test progress. By creating a Test Manager's Dashboard, you will provide significant long term benefits to both the test team and the organisation - and make your job easier and more fulfilling.

Showing key stakeholders that testing adds value can be a difficult task since testing doesn't produce anything tangible on a project. This misperception must be addressed and Julie demonstrates three objective measures showing how testing adds value. Receive a set of spreadsheets and utilities to support your activities as effective test managers.

Julie has done lots of consulting and training over her twenty years' experience in the testing world. She has even been a marker for the ISEB Practitioner certification. She has used lots of software development methodologies, from Waterfall to Agile, and is a Certified ScrumMaster. Her specialities include usability testing, agile testing, test management and people issues >>>

9:00-10:10
Thursday 13 September

Fusion Opening Keynote Address: On Systems Thinking

Emma believes that most people already do 'Think in Systems' but are not aware of the rich language and methodologies that are available to help them do this more effectively. She believes that Systems Thinking should be considered a core skill for the Fusion audience.

During this opening keynote, Emma will start from a definition of Systems Thinking and then set out the 'stall' of some of the main methodologies in that field. Then she will present her argument that Development Managers, Business Analysts, Enterprise Architects, Systems Testers - indeed anyone involved in major IT or other transformational change - has a duty of care to have at least an awareness of the way in which Systems Thinking could improve their effectiveness as practitioners. She will illustrate her argument with examples.

To close, Emma will invite questions from the audience and will be looking to co-create, there and then, new, practical ideas that participants can take away immediately to apply to their work challenges.

Emma helps organisations revolutionise customer experience, put joy back into work and do what matters. She gave the keynote at the IIBA® Business Analysis Conference 2011 (London) and is really looking forward to sharing her thoughts about the importance of Systems Thinking as a key discipline for the Fusion attendees to have in their toolkit. >>>

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10:30-11:30
Thursday 13 September

Enterprise Analysis: Fuelling the Agile Enterprise

Enterprise Analysis is defined in the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®) as identifying a business need, refining and clarifying the definition of that need, and defining a solution scope that can feasibly be implemented by the business.

This implies that the business need is knowable, that the solution scope can be determined by a liaison and that we can determine upfront what can feasibility be implemented by the business. The pace of necessary change in most businesses is outpacing our current mode of planning, communications and decision making.

The current approach to Enterprise Analysis is inadequate as it doesn't support implementation of emerging solutions to rapidly evolving strategies. Therefore, businesses are failing to execute the strategies required to succeed. Organisations must be able to maintain focus and alignment on what is the 'next most important thing' so they can run Lean. They have to be tempo driven and reflective to provide for flexibility so they can be Adaptive within evolving strategies. And they have to establish communities of shared understanding with appropriate insight to be Agile in execution as solutions emerge.

Enterprise Analysis is the fuel of this organisation - and it becomes about creating relevant context and engaging stakeholders in defining and delivering solutions that enable the organisation to achieve its goals.

Dennis will present an Enterprise Analysis model that connects Strategy to Execution in a Lean, Adaptive, and Agile way.

The BABOK is the International Institute of Business Analysis “Business Analysis Body of Knowledge®”. Click here for more details.

Dennis has worked with Lean and Agile concepts for years and is a certified Project Management Professional, OPM3 Certified Consultant, ScrumMaster and Kanban Coach. He is a Core Team Member of the IIBA's Agile Extension to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge and a Board Member of the PMI Agile Virtual Community. He has written a lot on the topic of Enterprise Analysis and has been published in the Harvard Business Review. >>>

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10:30-11:30
Thursday 13 September

The 2012 Survival Guide: Lessons for Every Tester

When we are in dangerous situations, we need a well-thought-out survival guide to help save ourselves and others. These lifesaving principles and skills provide the basic necessities for life and help us think straight, navigate safely, signal for help and avoid unpleasant consequences of interactions with our environment.

Julie shares her 2012 Survival Guide for testers and test managers living in today's challenging business and technical environments. Topics in her guide include:

• Turn your job from a daily grind into a passion - life's too short not to have fun
• Demonstrate every day the value of testing - if you aren't adding value or if others don't know what you're accomplishing, you may be toast
• Choose your battles - if you try to fight every battle, you will certainly lose often, and become frustrated and angry
• Make important expectations part of your schedule estimates and commitments - your performance relies on good requirements, working code, and a decent test environment
• Most importantly, maintain your integrity at all costs - otherwise, you won't be taken seriously and you'll lose the respect of others.

Join Julie in this thought-provoking session and take back the important principles, tools and skills you need to survive - and even flourish - as a test professional.

Julie has done lots of consulting and training over her twenty years' experience in the testing world. She has even been a marker for the ISEB Practitioner certification. She has used lots of software development methodologies, from Waterfall to Agile, and is a Certified ScrumMaster. Her specialities include usability testing, agile testing, test management and people issues >>>

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10:30-11:30
Thursday 13 September

Testing Upside Down: Customer Focused Test Design

Test design is the core of what testers do. We design and execute tests to understand the software we're testing, and to identify risks and issues in that software. Good test design comes from skilled testers using a toolbox of test ideas drawn from presentations, articles, books, and hands-on experience with test design. Great testers have great test designs because they have a generous test design toolbox.

A significant drawback of the test design ideas used by many testers is the heavy emphasis on functional testing of the software. While functional testing is a critical aspect of software testing, many test design ideas fail to include high-priority plans for testing areas such as performance, reliability, or security. Test teams frequently delegate these testing areas to specialists, and ignore the importance of early testing. Furthermore, when testers manage to design and run tests for these areas, the testing often occurs late in the product cycle, when it may be too late to fix these types of bugs.

The solution is Customer Focused Test Design. This test design approach includes an emphasis on testing end-to-end scenarios, real-time customer feedback, future customer trends and, most importantly, a flip of emphasis away from functional tests and towards tests that affect the customer perception of quality early in the product cycle.

This entertaining discussion will include concepts, examples, and stories - along with tips any test team can apply to their own product.

Alan has been involved in software testing and quality with Microsoft since 1995. Currently he is working on the Office Communicator team and Xbox. He was the lead author on the book How We Test Software at Microsoft and contributed chapters to the books Beautiful Testing - Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software (Adam Goucher/Tim Riley), Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation (Dorothy Graham/Mark Fewster) and wrote the foreword to Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design (James Whittaker) >>>

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11:35-12:20
Thursday 13 September

Taking the Joyful Leap: Experiences Committing to Agile Methodologies

Melody will discuss how a large global enterprise has made the commitment to move their software development teams away from a predictive project management approach to Agile Methodologies, the plans they have put in place to support this commitment and how these plans have been implemented.

Drawing on her experiences working with the Schneider teams in Australia and India, and with the global change team based in Grenoble (France) she discusses the challenges they have experienced, the benefits they have received and the practical steps they have taken to adapt the Agile practices to the Schneider Electric environment where many of their projects are subject to legislative compliance requirements and many of their systems include hardware development components.

Melody is a member of Schneider Electric's Internal Change Group who are responsible for implementing Agile methods across the entire Schneider Electric software development organisation, some 2500 people across fifty locations worldwide. Melody works primarilly with teams in Australia and India working with developing Manufacturing Execution and Energy Management Software >>>

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11:35-12:20
Thursday 13 September

Enterprise Analysis

Details to be announced

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11:35-12:20
Thursday 13 September

BA Competency

Details to be announced

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11:35-12:20
Thursday 13 September

Seek(ing) Adventures in Agile Testing - A Testers Experience Transitioning to Agile

Even though it is widely known that Agile is "nothing new" there still seem to be a lot of misconceptions and misgivings around it. 12 months ago Seek began the transition from a Waterfall development environment to Agile. Throughout this process Rob has challenged, and been challenged by, some of these fallacies and by working closely with members from all corners of the business is working towards defining what testing is at an "Agile" Seek.

It's far too easy to get stuck in the "this is the way it's always been done" mentality, not accepting any change, not taking any risks until you have all the answers.

By taking you through an end to end process from "The Wall" to Production, Rob will address the management of changing the Test Strategy and the roles & responsibilities in an Agile environment, encouraging people to try new ways of doing things that may or may not be better, evolving an approach to testing that maximises coverage, minimises risk and reduces any duplication of effort while maintaining, and measuring, a high level of Quality.

Rob has has played an integral part in defining Seek's Test Strategy in their transition from Waterfall to Agile development working closely with representatives from all spectrums of the business. >>>

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11:35-12:20
Thursday 13 September

Performance Testing in a Mobile World

Details to be announced

Stuart is a performance test consultant based in Melbourne, with JDS Australia. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Systems Engineering (hons), and is a Mercury Certified Product Consultant and Certified Instructor >>>

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1:15-2:00
Thursday 13 September

Project Governance

Details to be announced

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2:05-2:50
Thursday 13 September

Agile Secruity

Details to be announced

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2:55-3:40
Thursday 13 September

Agile and the Business

Details to be announced

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1:15-3:45
Thursday 13 September
2.5hr Workshop

Jumpstart the Agile Enterprise: Using the Agile Enterprise Competency Model to Establish a Transformation Road-map

Introducing Agile into an organisation is more than just running a few developers through a training. Training developers only addresses a part of the organisation. Transformation requires aligning the organisational structure to be congruent with Agile execution. Also training only addresses one part of the adoption and transformation cycle. Transformation also requires addressing cultural obstacles that conflict with the new ways of working. Structure and culture need to exist where Agile practices can flourish and grow and produce the business outcomes we all hope for. The impact of these structural and cultural changes can be wide ranging - and if not handled effectively, can actually reduce the organisations ability to deliver value.

This workshop introduces a competency framework for assessing your organisation to create an adoption and transformation road-map. This road-map will help you pragmatically and safely introduce Agile methods to your enterprise. Then we will explore the three primary dimensions of adoption and transformation: competency, tempo and scale that will assist in guiding your adoption and transformation road-map and change management strategy.

Dennis has worked with Lean and Agile concepts for years and is a certified Project Management Professional, OPM3 Certified Consultant, ScrumMaster and Kanban Coach. He is a Core Team Member of the IIBA's Agile Extension to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge and a Board Member of the PMI Agile Virtual Community. He has written a lot on the topic of Enterprise Analysis and has been published in the Harvard Business Review. >>>

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1:15-3:45
Thursday 13 September
2.5hr Workshop

Beginning with the End in Mind: Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) in Practice

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey names "Begin with the End in Mind" as the second of the seven habits. This habit applies not just to individuals, but also to software development teams. In Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD), the team focuses on eliciting expectations and examples from the product owner or business analyst during requirements discussions. The whole team then collaborates to distil these into acceptance tests that define the essence of "Done."

Modern testing frameworks such as Cucumber, Robot Framework, and FitNesse enable the team to express the tests in natural language while connecting them to automation code. The result is that the acceptance tests are automated while the software is being developed, not after. That means they become executable requirements that guide development from the very beginning.

In this demonstration-based session, Elisabeth uses ATDD to implement a feature in a sample application, live, with acceptance criteria coming from the audience. Along the way, she gives an overview of the ATDD cycle and how it fits with other Agile development and testing practices including TDD, Continuous Integration, and Exploratory Testing.

Elisabeth is one of the leaders in Acceptance Test Driven Development and collaborative practices. She can be found teaching, writing and speaking about testing as well as working in Extreme Programming teams. She's worked for start-ups and multi-national software vendors. She's spoken at conferences in the U.S., Sweden, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand. She founded Quality Tree Software, Inc. in 1997 to provide training and consulting in software quality and testing. >>>

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1:15-3:45
Thursday 13 September

Usability Testing in a Nutshell

Because our systems are becoming more complex and the market is becoming saturated with competing brands, usability can be a differentiating factor in purchasing decisions.

A classic system requirement is "The system must be user-friendly" but what does that mean, and more importantly, how do we test for this requirement?

Join Julie Gardiner as she describes usability techniques you can employ to demonstrate a user interface's efficiency and effectiveness. Find out how to predict and test for usability, and, most importantly, for user satisfaction before the software's release.

Take back new knowledge of proven usability testing techniques:

• heuristic evaluation
• cognitive walkthroughs
• focus groups
• user personas
• contextual task analysis
• usability labs and
• satisfaction surveys.

Learn how to define usability goals and how to get management to take usability defects seriously.

If you want to improve your skills in usability testing, this session is for you.

Julie has done lots of consulting and training over her twenty years' experience in the testing world. She has even been a marker for the ISEB Practitioner certification. She has used lots of software development methodologies, from Waterfall to Agile, and is a certified ScrumMaster. Her specialities include usability testing, agile testing, test management and people issues >>>

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4:05-4:50
Thursday 13 September

A Method of Assessing Risk Mitigations

IS projects have habit of getting into strife. There are often deadline, budget and resource squeezes that require that Project Managers find a way to do the impossible under the least conducive conditions.
Most of us have had to manage risks as part of the project management process however we can find that the most seemingly plausible mitigation strategy is not always the best one.

Geoff will present a proven method for identifying and appropriately assessing risks and their mitigations for IS projects. This method has been successfully used on a number of different projects across a number of different types of business. It is based on evaluation of risks and assessing the impacts across a variety of key criteria including resources, productivity, cost, quality and confidence. It is then presented in a colour-code graphical format that enables easy and straightforward comparison and prioritisation of the mitigation strategies to be deployed.

You'll cover:

• the importance of good risk management
• how to assess each risk impact across a number of criteria
• how to collate, present and interpret the results in a manner that facilitates an easy sell to management.

Recently Geoff has focused on a few select clients running complex initiatives in a senior management capacity. Organisations Geoff has worked with include Auckland Watercare Services, Telstra, IBM, Fosters and Country Energy >>>

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4:05-4:50
Thursday 13 September

Applying Creativity to Business Analysis Through Design Thinking

In this entertaining session, Andrew gives an account of applying over 15 years of Business Analysis and Design Thinking principles when commissioned to design a volunteer led play program for Sydney Children's Hospital.

He highlights the challenges faced in applying traditional Business Analysis skills and stakeholder involvement with the toughest stakeholders of all, kids, and what they can tell us that reflects back in the way we do Business Analysis in the corporate world.

Andrew takes participants through a journey demonstrating the importance of stakeholder, goals and scope and design thinking techniques in non traditional spaces that help to provide practical ways of acting creatively in our own business analysis and project management project environments.

Andrew specialises in the area of Business Requirements definition, looking at imaginative and creative ways to elicit requirements. >>>

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4:05-4:50
Thursday 13 September

Centres of Excellence

Details to be announced

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4:05-4:50
Thursday 13 September

Software Testing - to be announced

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4:05-4:50
Thursday 13 September

Cloud Testing

Details to be announced

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5:30-6:30
Thursday 13 September

Networking Drinks:
Join us for a drink on the house, catch up with colluages and make new contacts.
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6:30-8:30
Thursday 13 September

Conference Dinner:
Join us for dinner (at the conference venue) and hear about tomorrow today from one of Australia's leading Futurist.

Peter Ellyard

Peter Ellyard is Australia's most prominent Futurist, as well as a strategist, author and speaker. As a speaker his addresses are noted for being informative, inspiring and highly motivational. A graduate of Sydney University and of Cornell University (PhD) with a background in both physical and biological sciences, he spent 15 years as a CEO of public policy organisations including two associated with Environment and Planning and one with Industry and Technology, and was also Chief of Staff of an Environment Minister in Canberra for three years before formally becoming a Futurist after his appointment as CEO of Australia's Commission for the Future.

Peter is currently Chairman Director of the Preferred Futures Institute and the Preferred Futures Group, which he founded in 1991. He also chairs the Sustainable Prosperity Foundation and two start-up environmental companies. He is Adjunct Professor of Intergenerational Strategies at the University of Queensland and is a Fellow of the Australian College of Educators, the Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand and the Australian Institute of Management. He is an elected Member of the International Union of Associations, based in Brussels, which has 45,000 international NGO members.

Peter has been a Senior Adviser to the United Nations system for more than 30 years including to the 1992 Earth Summit where he was a senior advisor on both the climate change and the biodiversity conventions. In this he was the only Australian and one of only 20 globally. At other times he has been a senior consultant to the UNEP, UNDP and UNESCO. He has also advised the OECD over 20 years.

He has developed unique intellectual property and methodologies - a Futurist's toolkit - to assist people to understand and anticipate what the future might bring, and assist them to develop and implement visions and strategic actions to become both resilient future-takers in, and purposeful future-makers in 21st century society. Most of the job categories and products and services of 25 years hence have yet to be invented. Peter Ellyard can describe what these products and services will be. Peter envisages a global society that is prosperous, sustainable, harmonious, secure and just in the year 2050, and narrates what is being done, and can be done, to ensure its emergence. In doing this he is describing the emerging 21st century global economy.

Peter's most recent books are Designing 2050: Pathways to Sustainable Prosperity on Spaceship Earth (2008), and Destination 2050: Concepts Bank and Toolkit for Future-Makers (September 2011). His first book, Ideas for the New Millennium (1998, 2001) was an instant best-seller.
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9:00-10:30 (incl. morning tea)
Friday 14 September

Birds of a Feather Round Tables 

Begin the day with a number of small group discussions covering topics in the conference you may not get to or areas of interest and importance. Round tables will include:

• Enterprise Analysis,  Design Thinking,  Systems Thinking,  Agile Testing,  Agile with Embedded Systems,  Cloud,  Mobile,  with more to be added.

If you have a topic you'd like to have discussed please let us know (you can drop an email to fusion(at)softed.com).

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10:30-11:15
Friday 14 September

The Future of Cloud Services: From Infrastructure to Applications

Sam will discuss key trends and perspectives in relation to the rapid rise of the global cloud computing market. He will then outline the imperatives for starting to plan for the transition of applications and services towards a cloud-based future.

Importantly, Sam will summarise the major considerations, issues and hurdles that are often encountered when trying to gain the benefits of cloud computing from current production applications. 

Sam is an Independent ICT Strategist, Industry Analyst and Advisor at Business Aspect with extensive knowledge of as-a-service (cloud) computing and undertook the first in depth research into the implications of cloud computing and other "as-a-service" ICT offerings on the Australian and near shore markets. The report entitled, "Defining cloud computing highlights provider gaps in the Australian ICT market", was widely reported in both the online ICT industry press and mainstream media >>> 

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11:20-12:05
Friday 14 September

Managing Open Source

Details to be announced

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12:10-12:55
Friday 14 September

Managing Change

Details to be announced

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10:30-1:00
Friday 14 September

How to Innovate Processes (BPM in Practice)

What you'll learn about:

• innovating processes - the black hole in BPM methodologies
• four structured pathways towards better design - beyond brainstorming
• real world insights into how organisations operationalize process innovation
• the transformational capacity of social media in process innovation.

Improving, and even more exciting, innovating business processes is the most crucial step in process lifecycle management. This importance, however, is not reflected in the available set of BPM tools, techniques and methods. There is an over-supply of (reactive) process analyses approaches while little guidance, beyond brainstorming, is provided for the task of coming up with better process designs.

This interactive workshop will introduce four pragmatic ways to improving processes; i.e. process enhancement, process innovation, process derivation and process utilisation. Short exercises will be used to provide a deep understanding for these four pathways to better processes. Case studies will demonstrate how organisations have implemented this framework by using social media and advanced governance structures.  

Michael is one of the leading figures in the Business Process Management (BPM) space in the world. He's written seven books and more than 180 referred papers. His book Process Managementhas been translated into German, Russian and Mandarin and his most recently edited bookHandbook of Business Process Managementis the most comprehensive consolidation of global BPM thought leaders ever written. >>>

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10:30-1:00
Friday 14 September

Estimation: How to Identify and Address Key Risks to Develop Successful Estimation Approaches

Estimation is hard - we often ask the wrong questions at the wrong times and end up with the wrong answers. In this workshop Anja, Sharon and Shane will work with you to help improve your estimation process and approach.

This workshop will enable participants to identify the key problems and risks associated with estimation. You will learn about the challenges associated with estimation throughout the SDLC, irrespective of your methodology, and the issues faced by other team members.

Root Cause Analysis will allow the participants to understand how and when the issues can be addressed. The group will then work together to define actual solutions to their problems and leave the workshop with:

• solid estimation checklists
• key approaches for successful estimation
• a list of common estimation factors to consider when estimating.

Anja is a Certified Business Analysis Professional™ (CBAP©) and ScrumMaster as well as SoftEd's Business Analysis Practice Lead and trainer. She has international experience in Business and Systems Analysis including presenting at IEEE's 19th International Requirements Engineering Conference (Re11) in Trento, Italy on 'What are the Day-to-Day Factors that are Preventing Business Analysts from Effective Business Analysis?'. >>>

Sharon is SoftEd's Software Testing Practice Lead and trainer. She has more letters after her name than are in the alphabet (see for yourself; B.Sc(Hons), Grad.Dip.IT, ISTQB CTFL, CTAL-ATA, CTAL-ATM, CTAL-TTA) and many years' experience in testing. She develops and delivers Agile and Software Testing training courses at every level.>>>  

Shane is the first Agile Alliance board member from Australasia, part of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) working group creating an Agile Extension to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK®) as well as being a Certified Business Analysis Professional™ (CBAP©), he is ISTQB Foundation certified (CTFL) and is a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM). >>>

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10:30-1:00
Friday 14 September

The Big Picture of Test Automation 

Successful test automation requires much more than scripts that manipulate the system under test. In many not-so-complex scenarios, writing the code can be the easiest part of a successful test automation system.

In this workshop, Alan Page will walk you through scenarios and exercises designed to get you thinking about every aspect of a top-notch test automation system - and arm you with ideas and solutions to enable you to take on any aspect of implementing test automation. We'll start by building a strong foundation of test design ideas for automated tests, and move on to discuss options for executing automated tests, test architecture and more. Along the way, we'll discuss (and discover) common pitfalls and obstacles to writing trustworthy automation that lasts beyond the current release.

Whether you have a test team of three or three-hundred; no matter what programming languages you use, and regardless of your experience in test automation, this workshop will be full of new and practical concepts you can apply immediately and for years to come.

We'll use pseudo-code and discuss some code constructs, but coding skills are required for this workshop. Testing skills and a strong desire to learn and discuss new ideas in test automation and automation concepts are a must-have. Join Alan for a unique and informative dive into mostly uncharted territories of test automation.

Alan has been involved in software testing and quality with Microsoft since 1995. Currently he is working on the Office Communicator team and Xbox. He was the lead author on the book How We Test Software at Microsoft and contributed chapters to the books Beautiful Testing - Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software (Adam Goucher/Tim Riley), Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation (Dorothy Graham/Mark Fewster) and wrote the foreword to Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design (James Whittaker) >>>

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1:50-2:35
Friday 14 September

When Requirements Are Not Enough: Testing with Oracles

Ask most testers and they will tell you that they rely on requirements or acceptance criteria to detect bugs. If the software doesn't match what's in the requirements then bingo! A bug!

Unfortunately, requirements and acceptance criteria are also a source of frustration to many testers as they're often incomplete, out of date, contain hidden assumptions or don't exist at all. How can a tester test to any satisfactory level in this situation? Should we become the gatekeepers of the requirements - refusing to test until the requirements are complete?

I think there is a better way.  As testers we need to get resourceful about finding other ways to recognize bugs. We need to develop and use multiple oracles in our testing. That way, we cease to rely on requirements as our only source of knowledge.

This talk will examine oracles in testing, how we can use them to find more powerful bugs, what other oracles can be used when requirements inevitably let us down.  

An Exploratory Tester, Trainer, Coach and In-house test consultant Anne-Marie is active with the Association of Software Testers (AST), is presenting at the Software Test Professionals Conference (STPCon, March 2012) and is a founder of the Sydney Testers Meetup>>>

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2:40-3:25
Friday 14 September

Business Analysis

Details to be announced

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1:50-2:35
Friday 14 September

Agility in an Embedded World (123,675,796) 

Agile practices can be applied to embedded systems, but the nature of the embedded world means that some practices require adjustment. We cover first why these adjustments are necessary and what those practices are. We then examine the practices and the implications of these revised practices.

Stephen is an original signatory to the Agile Manifesto, Chair of the Advisory Board for IEEE Software , an adjunct professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, ACT and a 'prime mover' at the Object Management Group (OMG) where he was elected to the Architecture Board and sat on the Board of Directors. Most importantly, Stephen explains the intricacies of real-time and embedded systems model-driven development with clarity and humour >>>

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2:40-3:25
Friday 14 September

Software Testing

Details to be announced

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1:50-3:25
Friday 14 September

Better Stakeholder Relationships: Avoid Avoiding Difficult Stakeholders!

This workshop provides you with practical tips on improving interpersonal and communication skills to help bring together everyone you interact with, including key stakeholders, to help drive successful projects and business outcomes.

We all run into difficult stakeholders, eventually. Good interpersonal skills are key to our success as well as key to software development professionals being a major contributor towards overall business success. Successful communication requires an understanding of yourself and what triggers difficult responses together with behaviours and strategies for communicating with different people.

Learn to use your analysis skills to identify best-approach communication strategies to break through difficult stakeholder interactions.

This hands-on workshop will cover things like:

• your influential potential and how to harness it
• affects of the communication model and that DARN Stakeholder
• who's calling who difficult and what makes you twitch
• an approach to common difficulties.

We all have the power to influence buy-in, stakeholder expectations, project direction and to be able to gain support through the application of good interpersonal and communication skills. Join Ellan and identify key communication strategies, through examples, to help you drive successful projects and business outcomes, and avoid avoiding difficult stakeholders.

In addition to her knack for managing communications, Ellan has the analytical skills to enhance interaction between business, management and technical groups In 2011, she delivered a communications workshop at the IIBA® NZ conference. >>>

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3:45-4:45
Friday 14 September

Fusion Closing Keynote Address 

Details to be announced

Emma helps organisations revolutionise customer experience, put joy back into work and do what matters. She gave the keynote at IIBA Business Analysis Conference 2011 (London) and is really looking forward to sharing her thoughts about the importance of Systems Thinking as a key discipline for the Fusion attendees to have in their toolkit. >>>

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