What can the software quality industry learn from quality in other industries like education, health care, manufacturing, government? What can other industries learn from us? Tell us.

The PNSQC seeks broad interaction and exchange of ideas from different sources. Whether you are a software quality engineer, tester, manager, consultant, Agilist, non-Agilist, software developer, maintenance engineer, or whether you are directly in the field of software quality or simply related to it or concerned about it, we invite you to interact.

Generally acknowledged best practices for software development strongly favor co-location, but with mergers, acquisitions, outsourcing, and off-shoring the co-located team is becoming an endangered species. Teams now are commonly project-based and geographically distributed. How can we work effectively with team members in different physical locations?

Learn from key open source leaders that with the help of virtual teams produce some of the highest quality, most widely used software today. Come prepared to speak your mind, share your experience, listen and learn about working in a virtual team. If you are involved anywhere in the software development lifecycle, this event is for you.

What is an Unconference?

An Unconference is the inverse of a conference, in that there’s no predetermined, pre-set schedule, agenda, or speaker lineup. Utilizing the concept of OpenSpace, this unconference is the coming together of participants, with no predetermined agenda or program, to have an open discussion and share insight in a place where experts and beginners are equal. You won't be lectured at, rather you'll leave with a better understanding of a topic and the satisfaction of being heard outside Q&A time.

The OpenSpace methodology is carefully designed to elicit maximum involvement and creativity in a constructive atmosphere. It is also highly flexible so that the content is entirely determined by you -- the participants. This is not to suggest that the conference will not have content or outcomes, for there certainly will be both. Achievement in the meeting will be totally dependent upon individual and collective responsibility to make it happen. The content is what each person shares, and the outcome is what we will all create. The event will be inventive, creative, productive and full of surprises.

Capacity: 160 attendees

Audience: From executives whom are concerned with productivity, quality and cost management to product owners, analysts, developers, designers, and testers all who are attempting to share a single thought and build upon it.

Tickets | Volunteer

PNSQC 2012 – Engineering Quality

PNSQC is the best software quality conference in the west from the standpoint of take-home, usable learning, state-of-the-art and practice discussions, and high quality interactions and networking in the broad field of software quality.

Registration is now open.

If your company needs a real shot in the arm – ideas that work in today’s complex computing environment – then you’ll want to attend PNSQC.

Joining us will be the following Keynote Speakers:

• Matt Heusser (Excelon) will explore A Brief History of the Quality Movement and what Software Should Do About It.
• Dale Emery will discuss Testing Quality In.

The invited speakers will be Suzanne Miller (SEI), Ben Simo (Quality Frog), Linda Rising, and Peter Walen. There will also be 8 in-depth workshops, including a two-day Certified ScrumMaster Training with Solutions IQ.

The complete two-day technical program is now available with talks across the software industry – from Mobile and Cloud to UX and Design, with Testing, Automation, Process Improvement and more.

Both Matt and Peter are in Portland for PNSQC. Matt will be a keynote speaker at the event, as well as conducting a full day workshop. Peter will be presenting on Having User Experience Drive Testing. For our event they will be discussing the complete package of testing where they will provide pointers for:

 Explaining testing

 Setting expectations

 Risk management

 Doing more with less

Event Details:

 Onsite parking in front or on the side of Con-way. Please come into the front entrance, and sign in at the reception desk.

 Pizza and beverages will be served

 Event is FREE to the public and NO RSVP is required to attend

Matt Heusser

Software Process Naturalist, Excelon Development Matt Heusser has been developing, testing, and managing software projects for his entire adult life. A Consulting Software Tester and also contributing editor for ST&QA magazine, Matt was the initial organizer of the Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference. In 2008 Matt served as lead organizer for the Agile-Alliance Sponsored workshop on Technical Debt. Matt contributes to the STP Community Blog, and his personal blog, "Creative Chaos", is consistently highly ranked among testing blogs. After contributing a chapter to "Beautiful Testing", by O'Reilly, and finishing up a two-year stint as a part-time instructor in Information Systems at Calvin College, Matt recently served as Lead Editor for "How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing" (Taylor and Francis, 2011). He is also a frequent presenter at software quality conferences.

Pete Walen

Quality Assurance Engineer, ACI Worldwide Peter Walen has been in software development for over 25 years. After working many years as a programmer, he moved to software testing and QA. Following a brief foray in Project Management and Business Analysis, he returned to software testing. He has worked in the fields of insurance and finance, manufacturing, higher education/universities, retail, distribution and point of sale systems. Peter is an active member of several testing associations, an active blogger on software testing, and presents at software quality conferences around the world.

For more on Matt and Pete: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mheusserhttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/peter-walen/3/55/100

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SQAUG is Portland/Vancouver area’s only Software Quality Assurance User Group! We are BRAND NEW, and would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone who would like to participate in a user group dedicated to growing the Quality Assurance field.

SQAUG is made up of a group of SQA professionals who have banded together in an open forum to learn from each other through a series of interactive discussions, engaged debates, training presentations, exploring tools, and general networking and sharing of job opportunities. Our goals are to expand knowledge about Software Quality to all professionals who are passionate about their careers, and take Software Quality seriously.

SQAUG is very excited to have such great speakers for this event!

Sponsored by AgilePDX, Agile Open Northwest, TAO QA & Dev Forums, PNSQC:

"Agile Testing: How do WE Make it Work?"

As our organizations move toward "Agile” for developing software, we all face the challenge of understanding how to adapt our former roles and ways of working to new work roles and processes. How do we ensure the continued value of testing?

Join us in Open Space to share your questions, challenges, strategies, success stories, and how you've overcome stumbling blocks.

In small groups, we’ll discuss topics such as:

· How is Agile testing different from how we’ve always done it? · How do we know what to test? · How do we know what not to test? · On Agile teams, when does testing happen and whose job is it? · What is Exploratory Testing and why should we care? · How do regression tests work? · How does testing improve my design? Should it? · How do we ensure it is cost effective? · What do people mean when they say, "no defects”? · Does Agile change how we test or does it just raise the existing issues?

Bring the topics you feel passion for and add them to the list!

Each self-organizing discussion group will create a document or other record of their discussion, ideas, questions, and insights. We’ll share everyone’s experiences at the end of the day.

Who should attend?

· Testers facing an Agile adoption/People new to the testing role/Testers eager to jump in · Devs who want to get serious about defect-free code · CTOs and Managers of Test/Validation, Dev, Application Delivery · Academics preparing new software/IT professionals for the real world

Cost to attend: $75 per person (Register early. We expect to sell out.)

Interested in contributing to Puppet? Want to come hang out with fun people and do geeky things all day? Come to our Triage-A-Thon on Wednesday, October 2nd! You can participate virtually from anywhere in the world, or join us in person in our office in Portland, OR.

If you plan to attend, please register to help us plan for food and space!

Our goal is to review all the open tickets in the Puppet and Module projects to: - Update and confirm that issues are still relevant - Ensure tickets are in the right status and all the right information is present to fix the problem - Close any invalid or no longer relevant tickets

We’ll assign blocks of tickets to every participant, explain what you need to do, and provide people on the ground to answer questions and help you make decisions. If you want a few more details about how you can help, you should read about the process we use to triage bugs.

Participate online worldwide: Virtually we’ll provide an IRC channel (#puppethack), IM, and rewards for people who triage tickets and get involved. The Triage-a-Thon will be happening online from 1am-5pm PDT so that our friends and employees outside the US can also participate, so drop in any time that works for you.

In Portland: Join us in person at our office in the Pearl! We'll provide breakfast, coffee, a delicious lunch, snacks and space in our office. Please bring a laptop computer with you. The in-office portion of the Triage-a-Thon starts at 9am, and runs all day, so you're welcome to drop in at any point.

The first 200 people who help for at least 2 hours will be sent a special edition Puppet Triage-a-Thon 2013 t-shirt, and we'll have additional prizes for top participants!

Please join us to kick-off this new Meetup group and help us develop a thriving community of practice for FitNesse in Portland.

If you’re not sure what FitNesse is or how it can be used to automate tests, specify requirements or support TDD practices, here are some sites to check out:

http://fitnesse.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FitNesse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_dVuQjWXaw

Please RSVP at the website. We hope to see you and other members of the Portland development and SQA community there.

The key to successful adoption of any development methodology is a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of each team member within that framework. As agile continues its rapid adoption, it’s essential to define the role of QA in Scrum as concretely as we’ve defined the other team roles.
Agile methodology gives QA an opportunity for broader and deeper involvement in the software development lifecycle, enabling us more effectively to ensure quality, not by finding defects, but by preventing the introduction of defects in the first place. Because quality starts with the user story, QA can drive defect prevention by asking key questions of product owners during requirements definition. We can ensure that comprehensive acceptance criteria are in place, to drive high quality development, testing, and story acceptance. We can also ask technical questions of developers. This results in more thoroughly defined user stories and prompts developers to consider additional issues, and avoid pitfalls in advance of implementation. Finally, to prevent the steady growth of technical debt, we must remind scrum masters to plan story points for fixing both known and unknown defects as part of every sprint. This presentation will teach you how to leverage Agile within your organization to see immediate improvements in the quality of your software delivery.

About the speaker... Karen Ascheim Wysopal has been in software QA for over 20 years, in roles including tester, release manager, software engineer, test automation engineer, and 8 years as QA manager. She’s spent the past five years at Hewlett Packard, and currently heads Quality & PMO in the Software and Web Services organization, overseeing HPConnected.com, ePrintcenter.com, and related HP web-connected print technologies. She was a leader in the organization’s transition to Agile last year. Karen has presented at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. Her professional passions are building high functioning innovative teams from the ground up, defining processes that encompass a holistic approach to quality, and speaking on best practices to foster improvements across the industry. She can’t seem to stop breaking software.

The presentation starts at 6:30.

Abstract:

What is your company’s culture? What is your org’s culture? What is your team’s culture? The three may be completely different, or have strong themes, but the point is that a culture exists with or without you. You don’t force a culture, you either invite or incite it to take on certain characteristics that are valued. For example, aspects such as learning, communication, and collaboration are three activities that may be rewarded on your team, but are they valued enough for the team to do it on their own? Culture is what an anthropologist sees if they observed you in action. Is it forced by another or is it organic? In this talk, Jon will share his thoughts and experiences about the cultures he has seen over the years and what you might take away to incite (and invite) in your culture when you get back to your desk.

Jon Bach from eBay

With almost 20 years of experience in software testing, Jon Bach has held technical and managerial positions at Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and eBay. His role as Director of Live Site Quality at eBay involves being on a team dedicated to building “end-to-end” tests (activity flows) to discover bugs on eBay’s sites that threaten its core business. Jon is most notable for being the brother of renowned testing expert James Bach, with whom he created Session-Based Test Management. He can usually be found wearing a ball cap, hanging out in conference hallways, talking about testing techniques and philosophy.

A Special Treat from PNSQC

Plan on coming early! In collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) the SPIN meeting will complimentary hors d’oeuvres and beverages beginning at 5:30 pm. This is a great opportunity for networking and knowledge exchange with other practitioners on the current state of software development.

PNSQC is the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, a group of volunteers interested in Software Quality. The Mission of the PNSQC is to enable knowledge exchange to produce higher quality software. As a non-profit, it seeks to promote software quality by providing education and opportunities for information exchange within the software community.

How to Register

This is a FREE lecture sponsored by the Rose City SPIN. But you can help us plan by registering at: http://october-2014-spin-pnsqc.eventbrite.com

Rose City SPIN

The Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) is a monthly forum for networking, mutual support, and promotion of effective software practices. We exchange practical experiences, ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and war stories about the technical, business, and human facets of software process improvement. The Rose City SPIN serves the software development community of the Portland/Vancouver metro area. Whether you work for a large company or a small one, corporate or self-employed, industrial or academic setting, you are welcome at the Rose City SPIN.

Rose City Software Quality Engineers (RCSQE)

Empowering software professionals to build better software for tomorrow by championing quality today

Tonight's discussion: 'Multiply with Beaker' by Alice Nodelman (Puppet Labs)

Beaker is an acceptance level testing tool developed by Puppet Labs that supports both multi-platform and multi-virtualization techniques.  Beaker tests combine basic Ruby with a custom DSL and are designed to be executed no matter the operating system or cloud provider selected at runtime.  SUTs of a variety of platforms (linux, mac, windows, etc) are provisioned on a variety of virtualization systems and are then validated and configured.  The result is a SUT abstraction that allows automators to write understandable and powerful scripts.

PNSQC has a strong Pacific Northwest region attendance profile with a substantial proportion of national and international presenters and invited speakers.

The conference attracts a diverse audience and is considered a “must attend” event for software product managers, quality professionals, Agilists, managers, contractors, consultants, customers, developer-testers, tester-developers, and maintenance engineers.

PNSQC Mission: Enable knowledge exchange to produce higher quality software.

PNSQC Town Hall with Rose City SPIN Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 5:30 – 6:30 PM

Come join PNSQC and the Rose City SPIN for networking and knowledge exchange with complimentary hors d’oeuvres and beverages. After two intense days of presentations, it is your chance to talk over not just PNSQC 2015 but the current state of software development. This event is open to the public because we want to share the knowledge gained at the conference with the entire silicon forest community. Please stop by.

Rose City SPIN Presentation Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 6:30 – 7:30 PM

Exploring the Landscape of Software Quality – An Agile Park Bench with David Hussman Invited Speaker Panel

In this session we will welcome many of our keynote and invited speakers to the stage for an interactive panel discussion. As an audience member, you will have the chance to be actively involved by submitting questions for the panel speakers to answer and then voting on whether you want the discussion to continue or change topics after a period of time. This is a great opportunity to engage with an established set of practitioners that are exploring the best in software quality today.

Join us ahead of the event for a fantastic networking session with drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Join fellow attendees and local community members to share in great conversation. Panel questions will be collected here so don’t forget to submit some of the challenging questions that come up in your discussions!

A two-day technical program and one day of workshops for software quality engineers, testers, managers, consultants, software developers, Agilists and non-Agilist.

A featured speaker is author, consultant and “Pragmatic Manager” Johanna Rothman of the Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. She will lead a workshop on using Agile + Lean to deliver business value every day..

PNSQC events draw participants from Universities and Corporations from around the world. Among the major participants are ADP, Boeing Computer Services, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Mentor Graphics, Tektronix, Microsoft, Portland State University and Oregon State University.

PNSQC’s mission is to enable knowledge exchange to produce higher quality software. We seek to increase the awareness of the importance of software quality. As a non-profit corporation, we seek to promote software quality by providing education and opportunities for information exchange within the software community. PNSQC provides opportunities to demonstrate, teach and exchange ideas on both proven and leading edge software quality practices.