Are there problems that threaten the value of the product?

Is the product you've got the product you want?

Are there problems that threaten the on-time, successful completion of the project?

If there are problems, isn't it better to know about them now than to find out later?

I can help you and your organization to get better at answering these questions.

Nobody likes to hear about problems. But if there are problems in your product, you want to know about them right away so you can decide to fix the big ones or live with the ones that don't matter so much.

You're developing in some context—Agile, DevOps, Lean, Scrum, or something more traditional. The product you're making is complex, with loads of potential value and lots of potential risk. Yet most approaches to testing seem to be aimed at hiding the risk.

• Management consulting on software testing to software development organizations from startups to global enterprises
• Consulting on due-diligence evaluation of software or testing processes for companies engaged in mergers and acquisitions
• Presenting in-depth, experiential courses, workshops, seminars, and clinics on software testing worldwide
• Helping product teams and management in understanding, co-ordinating, scheduling, and integrating testing into the product lifecycle; fostering clear communication between project stakeholders
• Providing testing and program management services to software companies and engineering groups in the early stages of product development, ensuring proper planning and co-ordination until permanent staff becomes available
• Providing short-term program management, testing and configuration management services to development and engineering groups in order to rescue runaway projects and bring them back under control
• Providing advice and assistance to companies and program managers in establishing simple, effective, non-invasive processes that help to ensure the delivery of high-quality software projects on time and on budget
• Qualifying, hiring, and training of permanent program management and engineering staff

Qualifications

• Over 20 years of experience providing training and consulting services to companies involved in a wide variety of software and Web development projects, including large banking, retail, mass-market commercial software, networking, startups, small service shops...
• Co-author (with senior author James Bach) of Rapid Software Testing, a methodology of testing that focuses on the skill and the mindset of the individual tester to perform excellent testing more quickly and less expensively, in a way that stands up to scrutiny
• Fifteen years of teaching Rapid Software Testing courses and workshops in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and South America; and four years of prior experience teaching software testing
• Four years of experience as a columnist for Better Software Magazine, the world's most prominent software testing and quality assurance publication
• Respected and highly rated speaker at numerous worldwide conferences, including STAR East (Orlando, FL), STARWest (Anaheim, CA), Amplifying Your Effectiveness (solo and co-presentations with James Bach, Fiona Charles, and Jerry Weinberg), EuroSTAR (Stockholm, Den Haag, Copehagen, Manchester, Gothenburg), STeP-IN Forum (Bangalore, India), expo:QA (Madrid, Spain), STANZ (Wellington, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia)
• Writer of section on exploratory testing in Agile Testing by Crispin and Gregory.
• Author of "An Analysis of Costs in Software Testing", featured in How To Reduce the Cost of Software Testing.
• Program Chair for EuroSTAR 2013
• Winner of the inaugural CapGemini Award for Innovation at EuroSTAR 2008
• Program Chair for the Conference for the Association for Software Testing, 2008
• Program Chair for the Toronto Association of System and Software Quality, 2005 to 2008
• Founder (with Fiona Charles) of the Toronto Workshops on Software Testing, 2005 - present.
• Four years experience as program manager for a major commercial software company, delivering eight major releases and ten maintenance releases which set the company's highest standards for quality and timeliness
• Program Manager for QEMM-386 (which was, at its time, the best-selling software product in the world, per PC Magazine), DESQview, Quarterdeck (later Norton) CleanSweep and other products.
• Repeatedly assigned to rescue troubled software projects late in development process, bringing them back on schedule to release; also co-ordinated first company releases of several externally-developed products
• Directed internal product teams averaging twelve core members and up to thirty associated members, including subsidiary offices in Europe
• Successfully managed relationships with outside development groups in external sites from Los Angeles to Israel
• Principal author of company-wide product life cycle manuals and extensive technical documentation
• Practical experience in all aspects of product life cycle, including specification, programming, quality assurance, configuration management, technical support, marketing communications, training, and documentation
• Presented company products as primary speaker at Comdex USA, Comdex Canada, Pacific Rim Computer Show, and other national and international trade shows
• Author of VSS2CCM, a tool to migrate Visual SourceSafe version control databases to Continuus/CM, a configuration management product
• Co-author of INTLAPI, a software library written in C++ to aid companies in rapid internationalization of existing code