SQS Software Quality Systems


T6	Agile Testing: Improving Productivity
Tom Gilb, Kai Gilb Result Planning Limited

Improving Testing Productivity: Specific techniques to reduce wasted testing effort, and to improve the productivity of the testing effort. Part 1: Requirements: how should requirements be organised so that they are inherently more testable? Part 2: Quality Control: How should we organise quality control inspections of requirements and test planning so as to drive people to better practices, and to avoid wasting time on bad inputs? Part 3: Systematic Reduction of Defect Injection: The Defect Prevention Process: how can we organise ourselves at the test level to analyse recurrent problems and implement practical changes to avoid them? Part 4: Shift Focus to Qualitative Value Delivery: some wildly successful software producers have focussed on delivering a handful of key improvements to their stakeholders, frequently, measurably and testably. How does this change the testing process in practice?

Biography

Tom Gilb was born in Pasadena, California in 1940; emigrated to London, England 1956, and to Norway 1958, where he joined IBM for 5 years, and where he resides. He has worked within the software engineering community, but since 1983 with Corporate Top Management problems, and since 1988 with large-scale systems engineering (Aircraft, Telecoms and Electronics). He is an independent teacher, consultant and writer. He has published 9 books, including the early coining of the term "Software Metrics" (1976, CMM L4 Foundation); "Principles of Software Engineering Management" (1988) and "Software Inspection" (1993); 'Competitive Engineering: A Handbook for Systems Engineering, Requirements Engineering, and Software Engineering Using Planguage' (2005). He is recognised as the founder or major driver of several technical disciplines such as software metrics and evolutionary project management, as well as being an innovative pioneer in Inspections, and the inventor of the planning language Planguage. He is directly recognised as the idea source for parts of the Agile and Extreme programming methods (primarily the incremental cycles). His methods are widely adopted by organizations such as IBM, Nokia, Ericsson, HP, Intel, Citigroup, Symbian, Philips Medical Systems, Boeing - and other large and small organisations. See www.gilb.com, for papers and downloads.