»CONQUEST 2007

Wednesday Welcome Reception at Hasso Plattner Ventures

Stephan Goericke, iSQI’s Director, welcomed the exhibitors, speakers and participants on the first day of the joint CONQUEST/EuroSPI2 2007 in Potsdam. He thanked Eran Davidson for excellently hosting the Reception for the second time: “We already feel at home, thanks.” Furthermore Goericke appealed to Brandenburg’s and Berlin’s Ministries of Economics not to give subsidy money to huge industrial clusters but to support small sectioned and specialist networks of business and academia: “They (small companies) have a lot of innovative ideas but not the time to go around and ask who might support them.“

Dr. Manfred Wäsche, head of innovation/environment at the chamber of industry and commerce Potsdam, agreed with Goericke that most companies in the capital region are of small size and work together only in small sectioned networks. In addition he thanked the iSQI for its “great efforts“ to reduce the shortage of skilled staff through vocational training and further education.

CONQUEST/EuroSPI-Conference Opening

Brandenburg’s minister of economics, Ulrich Junghans, addressed his greeting to 250 participants in the packed auditorium at the conference opening on Thursday morning.

Keynote Bernd Leukert, SAP AG

Bernd Leukert, SAP opened the Conquest with his keynote on "Driving Quality in a Global Software Company". He referenced the Harvard Business Review February 2007 that 70%-80% of market value is based on hard to assess intangible assets: "It takes many successful years to build a solid reputation and only one to lose it!" SAP considers quality and reliability of its products to be a core value - the Customer Satisfaction Survey shows that this is the 2nd top most important aspect for customers. Fagan code inspections, automatic tests and support pack validation are key elements of SAP's quality focus. Mr. Leukert completed by saying "Execution without quality fosters hallucination!" resembling Thomas Edison saying "Vision without execution is hallucination."

If you are interested in the keynote speech please contact jana.noack@isqi.org. Mr. Leukert kindly permitted iSQI to provide the presentation slides.

Keynote Paul Baker, Corporate Portfolio Manager – Testing Technologies, Motorola

In the keynote by Paul Baker, Motorola on "Testing and Models - A Partnership for Improved Effectiveness?", the excellent experiences of Motorola with Model-Driven Engineering have been reported. By use of techniques such as Requirements Modelling & Verification, Design Modelling & Simulation, and Aspect Oriented Modelling it is possible to shift defect detection to early phases of development - recently, Motorola developed applications with zero design defects. Automated tests brought effort savings of 60-70%. Motorola will proceed his way towards optimized model-driven engineering: "There is no option to that - the rollout of MDE within Motorola will be continued."

If you are interested in the keynote speech please contact jana.noack@isqi.org. Mr. Baker kindly permitted iSQI to provide the presentation slides.

Social Event Krongut Bornstedt

Traditional Prussian food was served at the Social Event at the crown estate „Krongut Bornstedt“ on Thursday evening. Frederic the Great (Stephan Goericke), a Prussian Guard (Richard Messnarz) welcomed the guest, Queen Victoria and a mistress as well as artistic performers amused the guests. At the “Hau den Lukas” (ring-the-bell game) every qualification from trainee to expert level were acchieved.

Potsdam’s Lord Mayor Jann Jakobs welcomed the participants in his town and celebrated a couple of ours with them. Buffel beer was of satisfaction to everyone.

Keynote Bj Rollison, Test Architect Microsoft

Bj Rollison spoke about his experiences in sixteen years as a Microsoft test architect. He jokingly refered to Microsoft as a „whore house“: „We all know that it is there, some of us know better what is going on, most of us don’t“. He was going to present some details….

Bj Rollison teaches more than 500 testers per year and is on a couple of universities’ advisory boards. The main message of his speech: Software Test is much more than just finding bugs, it is also about design and analysis. Quote: „The value of Software Testing is the ability to prevent defects, accurately evaluate business critical product attributes and capabilities and adequately identify and analyse potential risks.”

If you are interested in the keynote speech please contact jana.noack@isqi.org. Mr. Rollison kindly permitted iSQI to provide the presentation slides.

Keynote Charles Petrie, Senior Research Scientist at the Computer Schience Department, Stanford University.

Charles Petrie spoke on “Policy-Oriented Enterprise Management and How Semantic Web Services Enabled Practical Computational Logic”. The presentation slides are available at http://logic.stanford.edu/talks/conquest/.

Best Presentation award

The winner of the “Best Presentation award” of CONQUEST 2007 is Emmanuel Cohen-Yashar from Israel. His session F4 on Friday was about Application Security.

Conference Chair Ina Schieferdecker gave him the present.