As it is its fine tradition, the CONQUEST Conference Chair Ina Schieferdecker (picture 1 and 2, right) awarded the Best Paper Award and the Best Presentation Award, which both where sponsored by Logica this year. Winner of Best Paper was Hans Hartmann, Objentis for “Test Automation for Lotus Notes Projects”, who had to leave the conference already in the morning. The Best Presentation award winner Graham Bath, T-Systems Test Factory, for “The benefits of modelling in a large-scale test integration project: A case study” was applauded enthusiastically by the audience. Ina Schieferdecker and iSQI’s director Stephan Goericke (pic 2, left) also thanked the exhibitors, sponsors and participants for their contribution and efforts as well as CONQUEST’s organizing chair Tanja Brütting (pic 2, middle) for her excellent work.

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Karin, the Test-Driven-Developer, met Andreas, the Certified Tester. They have different kinds of background and hold different views to development and testing. This presentation hasn´t been a »usual« keynote, it was a dialog between two persons and hopefully enjoyable to the audience.

They have different backgrounds and hold different views on development and testing. Instead of merely giving a talk on pros and cons though, they enacted a sequence of them meeting at work and discussing their different views. All this was done playfully (they even had commercial breaks and short intermissions as studies show that people cannot concentrate for more than 10 minutes in a row). The keynote finished on a reconciliatory note and the couple emphasized that testers and developers can learn a lot from each other and are aiming at the same goals. Their solution presented is pair programming, which is not only more efficient but also a lot more fun.

Dr. Karin Vosseberg works as Senior Consultant by pdv.com Beratungs-GmbH in the team of Business Development. Her focus is on software development and quality assurance processes. Prof. Dr. Andreas Spillner has 30 years of experience in the field of software development and testing, in practice and research. He works at the University of Applied Sciences in Bremen Prof. Dr. Spillner is foundation member of the German Testing Board and member of the ASQF Advisory Board.

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The Israeli participants of CONQUEST were invited to Potsdam’s town-hall by the mayor Jann Jakobs (picture 2, middle) on Friday morning. After a press conference four pupils introduced their school project “stumbling blocks” to the delegation. These concrete blocks are embedded in the pavement and indicate former Jewish inhabitants’ names and their dates of birth, deportation by the Nazis and death. One of it was visited by the delegation on a short guided tour. Together with these pupils and the mayor, the Israeli delegation leader Yaron Tsubery (pic 2 and 3, left) laid a wreath at where Potsdam's destroyed Jewish Synagoge used to be.

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The Keynote speech on Friday morning, entitled “Making Models Work: Fail-Safety Checking for Automotive Software”, was given by Ingolf Krüger, University of California, San Diego.  

Model-based development is of widespread use in automotive development.
However, several observations are to be made such modelling does not support different views, different levels of abstractions, domain-specific concepts, or seamless transformations or such as models are not yet considered as main assets which evolve over time, are made available, are exchanged, can be searched for. This implies various challenges for the enhancement of model-driven development where Ingolf besides others points at the neccessity for joint efforts between research and industry as only a reflection of the industrial needs will lead to applicable solutions from academia.

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Germany is Israels second largest trading partner after the USA and ahead of China. The capital region Berlin-Brandenburg is almost the same size as Israel. Israel has the largest concentration of High-Tech companies outside the Silicon Valley. Berlin-Brandenburg in this respective has the largest concentration in Germany although these are all very small sized companies. These were only few of the parallels between the State of Israel and the State of Brandenburg that encouraged the get-together BusinessLink. As it is practice at Speed Dating Meetings, the companies were matched according to their business aims and interests. Each coupled conversation had the maximum of twenty minutes to exchange ideas, project offers and business cards.

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In his keynote „Innovation in products and processes – software quality as a key enabler for service industries“ Walter Benzing, Deutsche Telekom AG, illustrated the clash of industrialization – which is in particular standards, specialization and quality – with flexibility. Whereas the classic telco approach had to face

• High initial volume of investments
• Few changes that are expensive
• Network planning years in advance
• Highly standardized services
• Cables used more than 30 years,

customer oriented managed services challenge the old approach. Now there is the need for flexible processes with high throughput at low costs as well as fast processing with maximum reuse and standardisation.

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The International Secure Software Engineering Council was founded at the fringe of CONQUEST on Wednesday morning. The Council is going to supervise the new personnel certification standard, that provides a qualification to people involved in the software development lifecycle and attests their very best skills to produce secure software. It guarantees knowledge about aspects of security in all phases of the software development lifecycle:

• Requirements Engineering
• Design & Specification
• Programming & Testing
• Evaluation, Distribution & Maintenance

The ISSECO certification standard was introduced at the CONQUEST break at noon, that is why Peter Trommler (picture 1, right), ISSECO Vice President, called it a “Lunch with Launch”.

For more information please visit www.isseco.org.

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In her keynote speech on Thursday morning, the Chief Operation Officer for Matrix Global (Talpiot) Israel, Libby Affen, introduced her company and its work of “Software Development and Testing in an Offshore Environment”. Talpiot has 650 employees of which 450 are orthodox women. In Israel ultra orhodox communities live quite separate in a few insular cities and neighbourhoods with limited transportation. Therefore it is quite a challenge to arrange transportation for the women, who on average each have 5 to 6 kids – as Libby Affen herself has, too. Since parenting for them is a chief concern, flexible working hours and the coexistence of religious guidelines and strict trainings are essential for Matrix Global, that has an annual growth rate of 20 percent, Libby Affen stated.

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Conference Chair Ina Schieferdecker (picture 1) opened the CONQUEST Session Days and welcomed the program committee as well as the participants and exhibitors that come from 21 countries. In her speech she gave facts on CONQUEST and spelled out some advice for the participants:

•         C         come to meet friends & colleagues
•         O         open your mind to new methods
•         N         nothing not to ask – technically
•         Q         quality is key – focus on it
•         U         use the community network
•         E         experience new tools
•         S         see latest results
•         T         talk to the experts
 
Ms Stel Pinhasov Beck (pic 3), Commercial Attaché of the Embassy of Israel and Director of the Israel Trade Center, introduced Israel and some of its 1200 software companies, of which 600 are start-ups, to the audience. She illustrated that quite a number of the most important High Tech innovations – e.g. VOIP, Centrino Processor, Instant Messaging Service, pill-sized video cameras – came from Israel. In addition to her talk she showed a film, starring industrial leaders like Bill Gates, Microsoft, or Richard Lampman, HP, who compliment Israel on its quality of education. Ms Pinhasov Beck’s message: “Invest in Israel, where breakthroughs happen”.   

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At this year's CONQUEST the Lounge is not only accessible for speakers, also Certified Quality Assurance Management Professionals (QAMP) are allowed to use the Lounge to relax or to prepare for talks and meetings in a quiet atmosphere. The QAMPs are special guests of Hewlett Packard, that announced QAMP as new software quality testing certification on Wednesday morning.

To read the press release please go to www.qamp.org.

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On Thursday morning the exhibition paralleling the conference welcomed the participants. 18 companies and institutions present their products and services. This year, exhausted conference guests can induldge in the luxury of a sound-massage – please visit Barbara Peer (2nd picture) at the exhibition.

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At the Welcome Reception on Wednesday evening the GTB and iSQI honored the 10,000th certified tester. He was certified by iSQI and according to GTB-standards. Mr Marco Weissenborn (pic middle) – actually a software developer and not a tester in the classical sense – explained his interest in the software tester certification as follows: “As a developer it is important to think outside the box. I believe every developer should have basic knowledge of software-testing.” The 37yearold passed his examination in June and was presented with his certificate and an iPodTouch by the GTB president Tilo Linz (pic left). iSQI Director Stephan Goericke (pic right) invited him as a guest of honor to the CONQUEST.

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The opening keynote of this year’s CONQUEST was held by Bjoern Brauel, Vice President and Deputy CTO of Software AG. His speech “Bringing Innovation and Quality together in highly distributed systems – A practical view“ focused on the requirements of an efficient “Governance Automation” so that distributed systems will meet the challenges of the future. His four central points were “transparency, process clarity, policies and measurement of results”. For everyone keen to learn more or who needs a gift for his boss, Brauel recommended his book “SOA for Dummies”, which will be released in November. In there you will learn more about the advantages of maximum clarity and simplicity in the requirements formulation – definitely worth reading, not only for Dummies.

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On Wednesday the German Testing Board (GTB) held their GTB forum parallel to the CONQUEST. All “Certified Testers” were invited to celebrate GTB’s 10th founding anniversary and also the fact that the Board has by now supervised more than 10,000 examinations in Germany. Additionally all participants could learn all the news on the future perspective of the certification scheme. At the evening the GTB hosts a Welcome Reception for the whole Tester-Community and cordially invites all CONQUEST participants to join in.

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CONQUEST Organizing Chair Stephan Goericke, Director iSQI, welcomed the first Israeli conference guests, among them the leader of the Delegation Yaron Tsubery (picture 1), Director QA & Testing at Comverse. Together with his colleague Efi Bruker (picture 2), Director R&D at Comverse, he is holding the one-day-tutorial at CONQUEST regarding the topics “Performance & Load”.

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The 11th Conference on Quality Engineering in Software Technology welcomed its guests this Wednesday morning in Potsdam. Tutorials on the topics Test, Performance, Design, Security and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) let expect high quality lectures and vivid discussions. In the afternoon Bjoern Brauel, Vice President Software AG, will give his keynote speech.

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