Indianapolis Conferences

Mike Kelly posted to the IWST news group about two upcoming group meetings that are taking place in Indianapolis. I listed them in order of perceived relevance. The first one is free, and is a day long, similar to the excellent IWST that I attended in September. The second one is not free, and lasts two three days. The first one seems particularly useful, although the second might be as well.

I’ve edited liberally, so here goes…

Workshop on Regulated Software Testing

May 15, 2009

The WREST is coming to Indianapolis again in 2009. The topic for the workshop is “Beyond Scripted Testing.” You can learn more about the workshop here.

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Major Questions of Interest

How can we better test software in regulated environments while retaining processes and documentation that will pass regulatory audits?

How can we prove the value of implementing progressive test approaches within the context of the necessities of regulation (FDA, SOX, CMM, etc.)?

Workshop on Performance and Reliability

April 16-1716-18, 2009

Through much arm twisting and whining, the WOPR 12 organizers are hosting WOPR next year here in Indianapolis. The theme for the workshop is “Resource Monitoring During Performance Testing.”

You can find more details here.

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The ultimate goal of performance testing is identifying and fixing performance bottlenecks before production deployment. While a large percentage of bottlenecks are ultimately traced to the application code, they may also occur in servers, system software, and network components. Critical to identifying their source and diagnosing their root cause is monitoring the “bellwether metrics”. Let us define “bellwether metrics” as the “key indicators of future developments or trends”, and thus the minimum set of system vitals that we should be measuring for each hardware and software component.

Thoughts

The process for applying to share an experience report was pretty easy. Just have some relevant experience and know enough about it to share. Come up with a presentation. Kind of like a brown bag really. If either of these two are similar in size to IWST, they are enjoyable because you get to know the people at the meeting. If you’re jazzed about this kind of stuff, you should totally do it, for both the knowledge and the experience.