Patrick Townsend
President, Patrick Townsend and Associates
Presentation: Leadership, Quality and Democracy? How will they help me be a better QA manager?

Presenting: Patrick Townsend, President, Patrick Townsend and Associates, Author of “Commit To Quality” and other important books on improving quality Presentation: Leadership, Quality and Democracy? How will they help me be a better QA manager?

As a Testing or Quality Manager, or aspiring one, understanding that Leadership and Quality are inexorably intertwined begins your journey towards a fuller understanding of both. Use that understanding to apply lessons learned about one toward continual improvement in the other. Your learning can be expanded by considering two sets of concepts: Leadership, Quality and Democracy vs. Management, Productivity and Authoritarianism. Consider the most obvious difference between the two sets of concepts: in the first set, the individual is assumed to have value while in the second, only the central “governing” group/individual is assumed to have value. Apply your new knowledge to the tough job of “leading” and “managing” all quality activities.

Former Malcolm Baldrige Award Examiner Pat Townsend is one of America 's foremost experts on quality and leadership. His popular books include the best-selling Commit to Quality and Quality in Action: 93 Lessons in Leadership, Participation, and Measurement , Five-Star Leadership: The Art and Strategy of Creating Leaders at Every Level, How Organizations Learn: Investigate, Identify, Institutionalize and Recognition, Gratitude & Celebrations . Combining his offbeat humor, enthusiasm, and common sense to deliver a message that motivates and entertains, Townsend shows how leadership at every level of the organization is required to deliver top quality and to achieve long-term profitability.

Linda Hayes
CTO, Worksoft, Inc.
Presentation: Creating Agility and Effectiveness in Software Testing: Agile Functional Test Automation

Most companies resist test automation until the software is stable, reasoning that any savings from automation will be offset by the maintenance required to keep up with changes. Also, traditional record/script/replay approaches can't be implemented until the code is functional, which is too late in an agile development environment.

This session will describe an incremental approach to test automation that allows automated tests to be written before the code, then rapidly updated as changes are introduced. Attendees will learn how to:

• Improve code development practices through automation
• Define executable requirements
• Write self-documenting automated tests before code is developed
• Implement a test tool and platform agnostic automation architecture
• Automate test case maintenance for rapid response to changes

Linda is the CTO of WorkSoft, Inc., developer of next-generation test automation solutions. She is the founder of three software companies including AutoTester, the first PC-based test automation tool. Linda holds degrees in accounting, tax and law and is a frequent industry speaker and award-winning author on software quality. She has been named as one of Fortune Magazine's People to Watch and one of the Top 40 Under 40 by D all as Business Journal. She is a regular columnist and contributor to StickyMinds and Better Software magazine, as well as a columnist for Computerworld and Datamation , author of the Automated Testing Handbook and co-editor Dare to be Excellent with Alka Jarvis on best practices in the software industry. Her article “Quality is Everyone's Business” won a Most Significant Contribution award from the Quality Assurance Institute and was published as part of the Auerbach Systems Development Handbook.

Luda Kopeikina
CEO of Noventra Corporation
Presentation: The Right Decision Every Time: How to Reach Perfect Clarity on Tough Decisions

Presenting: Luda Kopeikina, CEO of Noventra Corporation, MIT fellow and author of the breakthrough study on clarity in decision making Presentation: The Right Decision Every Time: How to Reach Perfect Clarity on Tough Decisions.

Learn the breakthrough, MIT-developed techniques for making faster, better decisions! Gain unprecedented clarity in all your decision-making, so you can make consistently better decisions-and make them more rapidly. Drawing on her research with 115 CEOs, Luda Kopeikina offers practical, proven techniques for structuring decisions, achieving clarity about the real issues and using that clarity to improve every decision you make. Using Kopeikina's approach, a stunning 93 percent of CEOs made clear strategic decisions within 90 minutes or less-even when these decisions had been sitting unresolved for weeks or months. You can be every bit as effective.

Luda Kopeikina is a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and CEO of Noventra Corporation, an innovation commercialization and licensing firm. Ms. Kopeikina spent six years at General Electric in various vice presidential positions where she had an opportunity to work with Jack Welch and observe his methods in action. As President and CEO of Celerity Solutions, Inc., she executed a complete turnaround in two years and grew the company six-fold. She has been ranked as one of the top twenty CEOs of US high-tech public companies for her performance and total return to shareholders.

Michael Fagan
CEO, Michael Fagan Associates
Presentation: Find More Defects: Using Inspections and the Fagan Defect-Free Process™

Presenting: Michael Fagan, CEO, Michael Fagan Associates, originator of the Formal Inspection process that has proved to be the most effective technique for finding defects and used as the model for Peer Reviews Presentation: Find More Defects: Using Inspections and the Fagan Defect-Free Process™

The Fagan Inspections and the Fagan Defect-Free Process™ methodologies are credited with dramatically reducing the number of defects in software and hardware products, increasing the feature content per release, shortening cycle time, increasing customer satisfaction, improving development processes, accelerating SEI/CMM maturity in organizations, and significantly reducing costs.Learn to use this powerful process that was the model for the CMM Peer Review. Apply the Fagan Defect-Free Process™ to develop Formal Process Definitions, and reinforce the Continuous Process Improvement aspect of the Inspection Process. Use Inspection metrics to monitor projects and keep them on track.

Michael Fagan Associates was formed in 1989 to teach others how to use this method successfully. Michael has continued to refine the methodology and maximize its efficiency. Organizations have produced impressive results in projects ranging from systems programs, applications, data base programs, hardware designs, systems and applications requirements to Object Oriented Tools. Michael Fagan had a 20 year career at IBM including: line manager of software and engineering development and manufacturing, manager of programming methodology, senior technical staff member in the T.J. Watson Research Laboratory; member of the Corporate Technology Staff and being a founding member of the IBM Quality Institute. He has been widely honored for his breakthrough Inspection technique.