Scott is widely recognized as a thought leader in software performance testing.

He is Chief Technologist of PerfTestPlus, Executive Director of the Association for Software Testing , Co-Founder of the Workshop on Performance and Reliability and co-author of Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications .

Scott's particular specialties are testing and analysing performance for complex systems, developing customised testing methodologies for individual organisations, testing in Agile environments, teaching software testing, embedded systems testing, testing biometric identification and security systems, group facilitation and authoring instructional materials.

A trainer of software testers, Scott is an AST certified On-Line Lead Instructor who has authored over 100 educational articles on software testing. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE, American MENSA, the Context-Driven School of Software Testing and is a signatory to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Scott will present a keynote and workshop on performance testing in Wellington and Sydney.

Immediate past President of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) and co-author of the ISTQB Foundation Syllabus.

With a quarter-century of software and systems engineering experience, Rex is President and Principal Consultant of RBCS, Inc., a leader in software, hardware and systems testing. Rex specialises in working with clients on engagements small, medium, and large to ensure complete satisfaction and positive ROI.

He is the most prolific author practicing in the field of software testing today. His popular book, Managing the Testing Process , has sold over 25,000 copies around the world, including Japanese, Chinese, and Indian releases. Rex has also written a number of other books on testing including;- Critical Testing Processes , Foundations of Software Testing , and Pragmatic Software Testing - which have also sold thousands of copies, including Hebrew, Indian, Japanese and Russian editions.

In addition, he has written numerous articles and papers and has presented at hundreds of conferences and workshops around the world. Rex is a past President of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board and of the American Software Testing Qualifications Board.

Rex will present a half-day workshop, The Future of Test Management, and a keynote in Wellington and Sydney.

WORKSHOP (Half-day - 3 hours)
Rex Black, President, RBCS (USA)
The Future of Test Management

Outsourcing. Open source. Legacy systems. Too much testing in too little time with too few resources. Simultaneous skills gluts and skills shortages. Choosing the right certifications for testers. Systems of systems. Iterative and Agile methodologies. Connecting to business value. These are ten systemic, long-term topics that confront current and future test managers.

The successful test manager will enter the future ready to handle these issues, while other test managers will become former test managers due to their failure to handle them.

In this workshop, Rex Black will talk about these challenges and possible solutions to them.

• What role do test tools and test automation play in these issues?
• What skills do we need as test managers, and what skills do our testers need?
• What test process implications exist for each issue?

Rex will illustrate the points with anecdotes and case studies from current and past RBCS clients. You’ll have the opportunity to engage directly with Rex and raise your own concerns for the coming times and get his considered and experienced take on them. From this session, which will be more an engaging consult, you’ll leave better able to survive and thrive in the coming decade.

Secretary of the Association for Software Testing and seasoned trainer, Dawn is passionate about improving the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice of software testing rather than continually promoting last year's "best practices."

Dawn is a highly regarded trainer of software testers. She blends experience and humour to provide testers of all levels with tools and techniques to help them generate new approaches to common and complex software testing problems.

She has more than twenty years of experience supporting, administering, developing, and testing software and hardware systems - from small business operations to large corporate enterprises like John Hancock, Xerox, Rational Software and New England Medical Center in Boston. She has also run her own consultancy and been a technical training manager.

In addition to being the Secretary of the Association for Software Testing , Dawn is a member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) and holds ASTQB/ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL) and ASTQB/ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Level – Functional Tester (CTAL-FT) certifications.

Along with consulting for PerfTestPlus, whose clients include Dell, IBM, Microsoft TV and Mobile ESPN among others, Dawn’s popular training covers Mastering Test Design, How to Break Software, Systematic Software Testing, Strategic Software Test Planning and Software Testing Certification courses.

Dawn will present a keynote and workshop in Wellington and Sydney.

Henrik is a leading European consultant in the field of testing in Scrum environments and the use of Exploratory Testing. In 2008 he co-founded House of Test, a testing consultancy and outsourcing  company based in Sweden and China.

His main areas of focus are in TPI, Exploratory Testing, Session Based Test Management, Context Driven Testing, Heuristics, Risk Based Testing, Rapid Software Testing and Agile Testing. Henrik works mainly with helping organisations in transitioning from traditional development processes like RUP and waterfall into Agile processes such as Scrum, Lean, Test Driven Development and KanBan.

He is a follower of the school of Context-Driven Testing. Henrik describes the essence of context-driven testing as a project-appropriate application of skill and judgment. The Context-Driven School of testing places this approach to testing within a humanistic, social and ethical framework. Ultimately, context-driven testing is about doing the best we can with what we get. Rather than trying to apply "best practices", we accept that very different practices (even different definitions of common testing terms) will work best under different circumstances.

Prior to founding House of Test with two colleagues, Henrik was a quality engineer in the medical devices industry, a consultant in the IT services field on SAP integrations, a test manager with Sogeti and in the telecommunications industry he managed the development testing of major parts of multimedia software applications for Vodafone Live 3G.

Henrik has presented at software testing conferences in Europe and North America on topics such as test management, embedded systems testing and exploratory testing. His current assignments often find him as test management consultant and Agile coach on Scrum projects.

Henrik will present in Wellington and Sydney the keynote, Testing Scrum: Avoiding the Sideline, Getting Across the Advantage Line, and the half-day workshop, Getting Started with Exploratory Testing (ET).

KEYNOTE (1 hour)
Henrik Andersson, Founder & Consultant, House of Test (Sweden)
Testing Scrum: Avoiding the Sideline, Getting Across the Advantage Line

Agile and Scrum attract huge attention and interest in Sweden as they do in New Zealand and Australia. Many companies today claim to be Agile. Some are successful but many are struggling and starting to realise that they need to do more than just say that they are Agile to become Agile.

Scrum has been one of the most popular methods to adopt – perhaps the most popular. Many companies look at Scrum and see it as a quick and easy process to implement. One misunderstanding is that Scrum is enough and complete; that you do not need to practice anything further to solve all of your problems.

My story is about one team at one company that I believe has a lot in common with what many of you are struggling with. This team had run just over 20 sprints before I started coaching them. They had been trying hard for quite a while and made many improvements, but still were struggling.

The first thing the team members told me was that on paper they used Scrum but felt they were not really practicing Scrum. Looking further into how the team was working I noticed that they did do the things that Scrum stated. Things such as having a Product owner and a Scrum master, user stories, sprint planning, daily meetings, demos, retrospectives, but still got no leverage from it. How could this be? What were they doing wrong? How did they change? And what did the team achieve?

The answers to these questions will be addressed during this talk. Lots of pitfalls to avoid, pictures, tips and tricks will be presented, all derived from actual experience. 

WORKSHOP (Half-day - 3 hours)
Henrik Andersson, Founder & Consultant, House of Test (Sweden)
Getting Started with Exploratory Testing (ET)

Exploratory Testing promises many rewards for testers and testing, whatever environment you are working in (Agile, Waterfall or some Hybrid), but many struggle with just getting started. This workshop is for those of you who have read a bit about Exploratory Testing (ET) and gained some basic understanding of ET but have not yet been able to figure out how to get it into your practice at work.

This workshop will focus on how you can bring ET into you workplace without major disruption to your current overall test process.

We will not practice ET in itself. First you will receive some background and context from a case where I helped an organisation with a strategy and framework to start using ET without major changes in their overall test process. This will give you a way to get started. The intention is that this will give you inspiration, ideas and questions that we will use to help you during this workshop.

There is no "one way" to introduce ET and that is why I will not provide you with answers! The intention with this workshop is that you, with support from myself and your group, will figure out and create your own strategy that you trust will work for you in getting ET started. This workshop will not be a lecture and will require your active participation.

We will split into smaller somewhat homogeneous groups like, "less then five testers at the company" or "working in the  financial industry". This is so you will share similarities and common context within the group. Your assignment will be to create a realistic plan to get ET working at your company. We’ll look at:

• what you need to do yourself,
• who you need to get buy in from and
• what actions you need to take to get going.

You will also come up with two major obstacles or problems that threaten your strategy. We will have a presentation and short discussion about what your group have come up with. You will now have not only your own strategy but also the other groups' solutions to bring home.

In the second part of the workshop you will focus on your identified obstacles and problems. We will form new groups, each taking one item and coming up with a couple of different ways to solve these problems. Each group will present suggested solutions.

You will come away from this workshop with several ways in which you could introduce ET and also a number of solutions to your major challenges.