UK Tester Forums

Is Software Change Driving IT Organisational Change?

A 'successful' system or software product ought to last for many years. It might be an operating system, an application package or an internally developed system or web site. But, if the software is to last, it must evolve through its lifespan to keep in step with changing user needs. Whether you call it software evolution, maintenance or change, the hard fact is that the post-deployment cost of a successful system is several times more than its initial development cost.

So much is common knowledge to developers, maintenance programmers and testers of course. But are we any better now at managing software change than ten or twenty years ago? We are all familiar with the problems of changes made in a hurry, with insufficient analysis and inadequate testing. Promoting better change management, impact analysis and regression testing practices is all well and good. But the cost of failure in production may be driving some companies to look at other solutions. Is yours?

Facilitated by Colin Robb, HP

Aligning Development and Testing Lifecycles

The first objective of a test strategy is to align the testing activities with the development activities. It’s obvious really, but sometimes hard to do. In fact, it seems to be getting much harder recently with the advent of iterative and agile development lifecycles – hasn’t it?

Developers change their development approach in order to be more efficient and effective (and ‘up-to-date’). But testers and their approach haven’t kept pace. While the developers have changed their methods, by adopting an iterative or agile approach for example, the test team will probably be used to a more traditional, structured, V-Model approach.

It’s no surprise that testing and development activities aren’t aligned.

This session will take a look at traditional (structured), iterative (RAD) and agile (incremental) development lifecycles and their associated testing lifecycle counterparts.

Facilitated by Graham Thomas, Independent Consultant