Testers Can Prevent Defects Too - Maturing the Test Profession Towards True Quality Assurance

Software organizations hire test professionals every day to improve the quality of their products through all types of testing. The focus is mostly on how to make the test team become more effective in finding more defects and making sure the released products meet customer expectations. Even when a company adopts terms like "QA" and "Quality Assurance" as part of the team name or the job titles, we all seem to be focusing on testing as if it is the most effective way to ensure the quality of products. If we just go back the teachings of Dr. Edward Demings and other quality pioneers, we can easily see that a much more proactive approach to improving product quality involves the process that was used to build the product. That is why many organizations have process improvement initiatives and many process assessment and improvement models have been adopted by companies.

The question now is how to make our test teams not only effective in testing but also effective process improvement agents within the software teams. In this webinar, Dr. Hanna will share how he has been teaching and building test teams that improve their own process every day. The key is defect prevention as opposed to defect detection. Testing, as a process, doesn't exist by itself. This webinar will show how test teams can effectively reduce the number of problems found in the release by helping improve the test process, the requirement process, and the development process, most importantly, while maintaining the harmony with the rest of the project team.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Hanna is a recognized educator, speaker, and consultant in several areas of software engineering. His distinguished seminars have been highly rated by software professionals. His experience with software goes back to the mid 1970's, when he worked as a developer at the NCR Center and the American University in Cairo , Egypt . Over the last thirty-five years, Dr. Hanna has worked in all aspects and capacities of software projects and processes. He has trained over 50,000 professionals around the world over the last 20 years. His passion and enthusiasm for testing, process improvement, and software engineering are contagious.

Dr. Hanna is Founder, CEO, and Chairman of several organizations:

• International Institute for Software Testing (www.iist.org), leading educational and professional development organization that provides education-based certifications to software test and quality professionals around the world. Dr. Hanna serves as the Chairman of Advisory Board for the Certified Software Test Professional (CSTP) and the Certified Test Manager (CTM) credentials.
• International Institute for Software Process (www.spinstitute.org), leading professional development organization that provides education-based certifications to software process improvement professionals around the world. Dr. Hanna serves as the Chairman of Advisory Board for the International Software Process Improvement Certification (ISPIC).
• International Conference on Practical Software Quality and Testing, (www.PSQTconference.com).
• International Conference on Software Process Improvement, (www.icspi.com).
• RommanaTM Software (www.Rommanasoftware.com). In this role, he is the Chief Architect of an Integrated Software Lifecycle Management System.

Dr. Hanna also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Software Test Professionals, a publication of the International Institute for Software Testing, now the Bug Free Zone (www.iist.org/bug-free-zone.php). As a professor of Software Engineering at the University of St. Thomas , he taught graduate courses on several software engineering topics with emphasis on practical software quality techniques. Dr. Hanna consults with companies to define and improve their software processes using disciplined software engineering approaches.

Dr. Hanna developed new approaches and methods in software engineering including the Scenario-Based Development and Testing (SBDT), Requirement-Based Project Management (RBPM), Software Quality Engineering Methodology (SQEngineer), the Unified Data Model (UDM), and the Data-Driven Object Model ( DOM ). Dr. Hanna and his instructors conduct hundreds of free online webinars each year.

Dr. Hanna holds a Ph.D. and a Masters Degree in Computer and Information Sciences form the University of Minnesota