Better Software Conference & EXPO 2004


Karl Wiegers, Process Impact

The history of many software projects shows that requirements mistakes are the most expensive ones to correct late in development. So, why do we make big requirements errors over and over, even in mission-critical software projects? Karl Wiegers, author of a best-selling book on software requirements and a consultant on many such projects, shares his top ten requirements principles to help your organization produce accurate, consistent, and unambiguous requirements.

Steve Wrenn, Liberty Mutual Insurance Information Systems


Thirumalesh Bhat, Microsoft Corporation


Jay Weiser, WorkSoft

Design and architecture decisions made early in the project have a profound influence on the testability of an application. Although testing is a necessary and integral part of application development, architecture and design considerations rarely include the impacts of development design decisions on testability. In addition, build vs. buy, third party controls, open source vs.

Paul Desantis, Hughes Network Systems

In this session Paul Desantis takes you through the important aspects of requirements discovery, including sampling documentation, research, observation, questionnaires, interviews, prototyping, and joint planning.

Douglas Hoffman, Software Quality Methods LLC


Richard Ford, Florida Institute of Technology

How do you build a product that is secure? Why are some products inherently more secure than others? Join Richard Ford as he shares his experiences, both building products and teaching other developers how to think about security. All too often, computer security is the last thing considered when building a new product; that is, security is relegated to a "bolt on" ... something to be added to the product before it can be shipped.

Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software

Expressing requirements as user stories is one of the most broadly applicable techniques introduced by eXtreme Programming and adopted by other agile development processes. User stories are an effective approach for capturing requirements from an agile project, not just those using XP. In this session learn what user stories are, how they differ from other requirements approaches, and why you should consider using them. You also will learn the six attributes all good stories must exhibit and see how to get started with user stories.

Ken Pugh, Pugh-Killeen Associates

eXtreme programming emphasizes test-first coding-you write the tests before writing the implementation code. You can apply the same approach in design when developing a complex system, including an architecture to support testing. To be successful, systems developed with agile methods must support a high level of testability and test automation. For large distributed systems, more sophisticated testing is needed to help determine which components may be contributing to failures.

Robert Walsh, EnvisionWare, Inc.

Test-driven (or test first) development (TDD) is an excellent method for improving the quality of software applications. It forces the programmer to focus on ensuring that the behavior of the objects at the lowest level of the system is appropriate. It also provides a mechanism to ensure that future source code changes do not break existing behaviors.


AgileConnection is one of the growing communities of the TechWell network.
