Title: Change The Questions For More Valuable Answers
Speaker: Scott Barber, Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Time: 12:35 PM - 1:30 PM
I’ve started referring to software testing as “The under-informed, instructing the under-trained to do the irrelevant.” Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to testing and quality metrics. Managers and executives typically don’t understand what testers do, or the ways in which we do (or can) add value to their organizations. When asked, testers typically don’t know how to describe the value they provide in terms those managers and executives find enlightening or valuable. As a result, those managers and executives ask us for what they are familiar with… metrics. Unfortunately, they often tell us what metrics to provide, we comply, then those metrics are used to justify whatever decision needs to be made – whether or not those metrics support, or are even related to, the topic at hand. If we’re to have any hope of improving the metrics situation, we need to start by changing the questions from “Can you provide me with metric X?” to “Can you provide me with information that will help me make decision X?” During this session, Scott Barber will provide his tips, gleaned from many years of consulting (and more failures than successes) on changing the questions to enable more valuable metrics.
About Scott Barber
Scott Barber is viewed by many as the world’s most prominent thought-leader in the area of software system performance testing and as a respected leader in the advancement of the understanding and practice of testing software systems in general. Scott earned his reputation by, among other things, contributing to three books (co-author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, Microsoft Press; 2007, contributing author Beautiful Testing, O’Reilly Media; 2009, contributing author How to Reduce the Cost of Testing, Taylor & Francis; TBP Summer, 2011), composing over 100 articles and papers, delivering keynote addresses on five continents, serving the testing community for four years as the Executive Director of the Association for Software Testing, and co-founding the Workshop of Performance and Reliability.
Today, Scott is applying and enhancing his thoughts on delivering world-class system performance in complex business and technical environments with a variety of clients and is actively building the foundation for his next project: driving the integration of testing commercial software systems with the core objectives of the businesses funding that testing.