Tuesday Afternoon Conference Sessions

PSQT

PSTT

Requirement Management

Process Improvement

Process Management

Quality Management

Test Process I

Test Process II

Web Testing

Test Automation

Can We get Complete Requirements Even When The Pressure is on? (B)

Dr. Rebecca Staton-Reinstein

SOFTWARE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT A Case Study at Infosys (I)
Sanjay MohapatraBhashyam M R & Srinivas P

Measuring Software Usability: Developing a Heuristic Evaluation Process and Tool (I)
Laura J. Grosvenor

Zero defect initiative– Path to improve product and process quality (B)
Godavarma C K & Babu N S

Reducing Cycle Time by Eliminating Requirement Defects and Automating Test

Dr. Mark R. Blackburn

Dr. Rebecca Staton-Reinstein is President of Advantage Leadership, has had a successful career as an organizational leader, educator and management consultant. From 1986 to 1989 she established Quality Assurance functions in two major insurance companies. Dr. Staton-Reinstein is on the faculty and develops courses for the American Management Association.

·         Project initiation in Infosys
·         Typical project organization structure
·         Project execution and tracking
·         Forms/Tools/Checklists
·         Defect prevention through defect pattern analysis
·         Causal analysis
·         Project closure

·         Following a well-defined software development process will result in better quality of deliverables
·        We can track quality in a software project through out its life cycle
·         At the initial stage we can set goals quantitatively for a project
·         Quantitative project management in software process development will enable us to analyse actual      versus estimate value against these goals
·         Analysis of defects will help us prevent occurrence of same defects again
·         Using past experience, we can predict number of defects that are going to be injected in aproject and take corrective action accordingly

Sanjay Mohapatra has a wide experience in various organizations in design and software development. His experience ranges from analysis of existing system to implementation of the product developed. He also has been involved in defining the process for software development as well as implementing the defined process in various projects. The basic strength of the author is Quantitative Project Management and the case study used in the paper is a project in which the author was the project Leader. In the project under consideration, he had defined the process, laid out the step by step approach and tracked the project against the goals set. As a result the project was a success and earned him quite a few appreciation letters.

This presentation describes the real world process of two usability practitioners in devising a defined procedure and tool that would reveal usability problems in software prototypes and products. The checklist and method reveal a significant percentage of software usability problems during structured heuristic evaluation sessions.

·         Heuristic evaluation – how we started
·         Further development – applying a process and user-centered principles
·         Putting the work to work
·         Conclusions and recommendations

·         Description of usability heuristic evaluation method in current use
·         Overview of usability heuristic guidelines and their limitations
·         Introduction to new approach developed by usability researcher
·         A new, hands-on tool/checklist that will facilitate tester/evaluators to locate numerous usability problems and describe them in greater detail than previously possible
·         Lessons learned from application of the combined and revised tool

Laura J. Grosvenor is the Senior Usability Analyst/Researcher for the Information Systems Laboratory (ISL), Applied Research Laboratories, The University of Texas at Austin (ARL:UT). ISL designs and delivers experimental software for a wide-range of military applications. Ms. Grosvenor assists in design, evaluation and testing of the software to ensure its usability for human beings. Through her daily work and master’s degree research she has been developing and refining usability evaluation methods for several years. Ms. Grosvenor has completed a Master’s in Psychology, undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Sociology, and is currently completed a doctorate in Psychology studying the impacts of information technology on human communication in work teams. She also currently serves as an invited instructor at the Software Quality Institute, The University of Texas at Austin.

This presentation explains how the program “Zero Defect Initiative” can help process and product quality. The technique being presented has been used in one of the product releases at Infosys* and has yielded very good results. Infosys realized that that most of the bugs getting introduced were due to lack of understanding of the system as a whole because and developers and designers didn’t know where their work fit into the entire system. The presentation discusses a case study about a zero defect initiative done at Infosys, the activities during release execution, and the benefits that Infosys realized.

*Founded in 1981, Infosys has grown from a small start-up company to one of India’s most respected software companies.

·        Strategy
·        Process modifications
·        Process measurement & performance
·        Benefits realized
·        Continuos process improvement

·        Defect prevention
·        Improved project team communication
·        Improved mentoring
·        Improved project management practices
·        Widening domain knowledge
·        Motivation factor

Godavarma C K is a Quality Advisor working in the Quality Group at Infosys, extending services in software quality assurance and software process improvement to the Banking Business Unit at Infosys Technologies Ltd. He was involved in implementing ISO & CMM frameworks at Infosys. He has received his Certified Quality Analysis (CQA) certification and has over six years of experience in Information Technology.

Reducing Cycle Time by Eliminating Requirement Defects and Automating Test
Dr. Mark R. Blackburn

This presentation provides an overview of problems most organizations face that are impeding the rapid deployment of software systems critical to the operations and growth of their business. We describe a family of solutions we have created that use model-based development and test automation to remove requirement defects while automating test vector and test driver generation. We discuss what it means to have a requirement defect, and how such defects can be detected using our approach. We summarize how companies have effectively adopted this approach and summarize the results companies have achieved in using the solution on various projects for both software and system analysis and testing.

·         Model-based development and process scenario overview
·         Model analysis and defect detection
·         Effective approach for integrating approach in industrial organization
·         Summary of results from industrial use

Dr. Blackburn is a Software Productiviy Consoritum Fellow, President of T-VEC Technologies, Inc. and co-inventor of the T-VEC system. He has twenty years of software systems engineering experience in development, project leadership and applied research in object technology, requirement and design specification, model-based development, formal methods, and formal verification. His more recent technical activities have been focused on transforming various functional, OO, and control-system models from 3rd party tool systems into a representation that can support requirement defect removal and test automation. He earned a BS in Mathematics from Arizona State, MS in Mathematics from Florida Atlantic University, and a Ph.D. in Information Technology from George Mason University.