Featured Speakers -- TESTING COMPUTER SOFTWARE Conference

           15th International Conference and Exposition on

                     TESTING COMPUTER SOFTWARE
                   Theme: Testing Under Pressure 

                         June 8-12, 1998
          (Conference: June 9-11; Workshops: June 8 and 12)
 
      Washington, D.C. * Sheraton Premiere (Tyson¹s Corner) * USA

In cooperation with:
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGSoft American Society for Quality (ASQ) Software Division Software Technology Support Center (STSC)

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The general sessions of the Conference on Testing Computer Software Conference will address major issues of concern to the developers and users of software. The theme of the Conference "Testing Under Pressure" focuses on providing practical and essential solutions to the software development profession, and the users of computer software at all levels.

Ed Yourdon will give the Conference keynote address: "Testing Strategies for Death-March Projects." A death-march project is one whose schedule, budget and/or staff resources are 50-100% more aggressive than normal. Among other things, this usually means that a high-quality testing effort is even more difficult than usual. Yourdon will explore the strategies and tactics that should be followed to make testing as effective as possible. Guidelines and suggestions will be offered, based on his recent book, "Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects."

Charles Howell's lunch address will present "Rules of Evidence: Combining Sources for Critical Software Assurance." He will explain how Critical Software Assurance can used to describe a collection of techniques that contribute to a thorough evaluation of the contribution of the software components to overall system risk.

John D. Musa's topic will be "Improved Testing through Software Reliability Engineering." His session will give you an overview of how to test to achieve more reliability faster and cheaper by applying the procedures and techniques of Software Reliability Engineering.

Shari Lawrence Pfleeger will discuss "Measurement and Testing: Doing More with Less." Her talk will cover seven simple guidelines for using measurement to help make your testing more effective. Techniques will be explored for presenting and using test data and for using decision trees to tell you which metrics are the best predictors of fault-proneness.

Les Hatton will explore "Avoidable Software Failures and Why We Don't Seem to Avoid Them." His analysis of real system failure data suggests that many recurrent failures are entirely avoidable. With the predicted doom and gloom of the Year 2000 problem almost upon us, he'll discuss just how much is avoidable, and how the software industry can learn from its mistakes.

Tom Gilb's topic will be "The Evolutionary Project Management Method." Gilb will summarize "evolutionary" project management, the revolutionarily new project management paradigm. This method will have a major impact on our concept of testing, requiring to test earlier and more frequently. This talk will try to bring out the structural changes, the advantages and the problems in the inevitable evolutionary experience we all face.

The Conference will conclude with the wrap-up session: "Conference Reflections -- and a few surprises thrown in!" Once again Boris Beizer will expertly summarize: What we did; Where we've been; Where we're going.

Thirty-two parallel Track Sessions will cover a wide variety of topics on: management, advanced issues, automation, pressure, techniques, Internet issues, metrics and third party components. The Conference sessions were designed to meet the needs of software professionals, ADP managers and their organizations.

Twelve Pre- and Post-Conference Workshops will present comprehensive technical sessions for software testing practitioners. These workshops will provide detailed training on major software testing technologies, tools and methodologies.

Finally, the Testing Tools vendors exhibit will present the latest in products and services to support software and applications testing.

For a continuously updated program check out on the Web:

     http://www.uspdi.org/conference

A printable version of the Conference brochure may be downloaded from:

     http://www.uspdi.org/conference/printbrochure.html

The Conference brochure and other information may also be requested by:

Regular Mail: USPDI, 612 Ethan Allen Avenue, Suite 100; Takoma Park,

              MD 20912-5400 (USA)
Phone:        301/270-1033
Fax:          301/270-1040 
E-mail:       admin_at_uspdi.org

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