This is a presentation on the value of certifications in the various areas of IT consulting. This is a compilation of current research and indicated trends on the influence of certification on IT hiring, IT rates, and demand in today's marketplace. The trends are presented from a local and national level and include the list of trump cards clients are looking for in hiring new professionals. Also discussed are other investments that may have a higher ROI than certification in some areas as seen by S.i. Systems Ltd., one of Canada's largest IT staffing organizations.

How do you know when your process is good enough? This session is about how to do software process improvement - from the planning through to deployment of initiatives and the all important care and feeding / ongoing maintenance of your system.

Planning includes identifying and prioritizing opportunities for improvement and input can include ISO9001 requirements, customer satisfaction surveys, CMMI, lessons learned and simply where the pain is in the organization. Management buy-in is critical.

Just as in software development, there needs to be a balance between major improvement initiatives (features/enhancement in a software context) and maintenance of the existing system (fixing bugs and incorporating improvements that the design teams have introduced).

Answering the question 'how do you know when your process is good enough?' can be answered in many ways. Fiona has a couple of strong answers, based on her experience with the Nortel software development team in Calgary.

User Experience is an umbrella term used to describe all the factors that contribute to a site user?s overall perception of a system. The user, rather than the system, is placed at the center of the design process. This approach, called ?user-centered design? incorporates user concerns and advocacy from the beginning of the design process and dictates that the needs of the user should be foremost in any design decisions.

The design of a strong User Experience includes tasks and elements surrounding the creation of the presentation layer of a system: business objectives, user needs analysis, functional specification, content requirements, interaction design, information architecture, interface design, information design and visual design.

Usability refers to the measurement of the User Experience. Usability concepts and principles can be used to measure the quality of the User Experience. Usability analysis can be conducted by any person who is trained in assessing screens using usability principles. Usability testing implements more formal methods of using usability principles to measure the user experience. There are many different types of tests that can be used, from simple paper prototyping to comprehensive user performance testing.

Usability testing can sometimes be conducted in collaboration with QA cycles and, certainly, QA personnel can be trained to help identify usability concerns. In an effort to produce the best product possible, the symbiotic relationship between User Experience and Usability must be utilized as much as possible. Collaboration between teams will go far in supporting this goal.

This is our first open discussion session of the year; the topic is Usability. This is your opportunity to hold forth on what you think Usability is; what it means to you and your users; how you go about infusing usabilility into your programs, projects and software; what measures you use to gauge the level of usability; and how you know when you've achieved it -- Usabiliity, that is.

How can we make applications harder to test? Sounds like a crazy question, but it is a surprisingly powerful one when it comes to trying to get to grips with testability. We can define testability by the things that reduce it, and by inference we can also identify strategies that should improve testability. Finding out which of those strategies are practical and achievable on our own software projects is a harder question. To do that we must first identify an operational definition for testability that allows us to measure testability and hence gives us the power to improve our ability to test an application.

Employee appreciation is so much more than ordering team T-shirts. Understand the language of employee recognition and motivation. Explore business and employee perspectives to discover why Employee Appreciation builds effective teams. Discover the dynamic Equity Equation, and how it fits into employee appreciation activities. Find out the "value" of money as a vehicle for employee recognition. Share exciting real life experiences and come prepared to tap into your creativity and imagination!

What a great opportunity to meet with fellow quality practitioners to partake of some fine vituals, hoist a few and talk about software quality, amongst other things, I'm certain.

We're meeting at the Auburn Saloon again this year, since our previous outing here was a huge success. The Auburn is located 119 9th Avenue SW. It's on the south side of 9th Avenue, on the west side of the Palliser Square office tower, directly across from the Glenbow Museum.

As always, this is an informal affair. We can start congregating around 5:30 pm and wrap up any time we want. Food will be served starting shortly after 6:00.

Communication - it's something we all do every day, so why is it so difficult? The goal of this talk is to first raise awareness of both our own and others' communication styles, and then apply that knowledge to improve our ability to effectively "hear and be heard". The first part of this talk will explore the basic principles of good communication, including:

• Communication Model
• How meaning is derived
• Promoting effective communication
• Communication barriers
• Communication Styles

The second portion will take workshop approach to applying this knowledge to the world of software quality. Exercises may include work on such problematic areas as:

• Gathering requirements
• Saying precisely what you mean
• Ensuring you have heard the message
• Communicating so others can "hear" you

This is our second open discussion session this season; the topic is Effective Communicating. Communication, in one form or another, is central to every part of the software life cycle; and everyone involved in designing, developing, deploying and maintaining software has a role to play. This facilicated, open discussion will take a look at what communicating effectively looks like to you, what you're doing to encourage and promote effective communication strategies and tactics. We'll also look at how you may measure the effectiveness your communications and how you know when you've been successful.

Valleri will give an overview of the ITIL framework and the readiness training required for each competency. John Krogh, one of the leads on the City of Calgary ITIL implementation project, will share some inside stories on software and ITIL processes.

Calgary Lab Services is the primary provider of Laboratory Services in the Calgary area. Laboratory data drive 70-80% of all health care costs. The data must be accurate and timely, protected and delivered to the care providers that need to know.

In the spring of 2005, a Revision Upgrade was done to the Lab Information system. One aspect of the upgrade introduced unexpected code, that changed the inherent patient identifier in the information. While no patients came to any harm, the impact has been enormous.

This presentation will discuss what happened, the points of failure for the error to get as far as it did, and other risks that have since been identified. As well, I will discuss what our quality processes were at that time, the changes that have been introduced and where we will be going in the future.

As AltaGas moves forward with multiple software projects this year, the realization that how we design and implement software solutions have dramatically changed as a result of SOX compliance. Questions in areas like:

Change Management Controls

Control Objectives

• All changes occur in accordance with Corporate Change Management Procedures
• All change requests should be documented, tested, approved by application owner, impact to other applications assessed, and security controls re-validated prior to moving test environment into production

Interface Controls

Control Objectives

• Access to application by interface
• Authority to run interface
• Approval of transactions before or after interface completed
• Processing of information is validated
• Error reporting ? job failed
• Output is validated to source originals
• Audit trails and history

All of these play a part in deciding how software is designed, implemented and sustained form part of my discussion.

This discussion will focus on defining emerging trends in data quality, why it has become important to Oil and Gas industry. Topics covered include:

• What is Data Quality?
• Why is data quality becoming more important to the Energy Industry?
• How it impacts delivering software quality?
• What are some best practices?

This presentation uses real case studies where E&P companies were faced with the challenges of resolving the data quality before or after delivering complex software systems. Learn how new technologies were used to help solve data quality problems and implement successful solutions.

Software maintainability is the result of many different factors including good design. Other somewhat less obvious factors like ownership, homogeneous development environment, leadership, and business strategy have all been equally important to Peloton's approach to releasing maintainable software. In my presentation I will provide a list of maintainability factors that Peloton focuses on and discuss examples of how they contribute to providing maintainable software.

This is the final open session for the year; the topic for discussion is Maintainability. The concept of "good enough" probably plays a big part in defining the what and the how, especially how much, of maintainability. The artifacts, tangential, and otherwise, I suppose, that you're trying to maintain will also have a bearing on your approach. Help us sort through the issues, concerns and insights to the maintainabilty "opportunity" -- what is it, how do you know when you have it, or not, and how do you go about achieving it. See you there!

Calgary oil and gas producers have been directed by the AEUB to change their data systems from the old NAD27 coordinate system (datum) to the more recent NAD83 datum by 2008. For EnCana, Canada's largest oil and gas company, this involves changes to 150 Tbytes of data held in >600 databases and migrating over 50 interconnected systems, all without impacting the business.

This challenge, which can be compared to "changing all the tires on vehicles running on Deerfoot without disrupting traffic", is the subject of this case-study discussion. The data clean-up, risk management and quality assurance approaches being employed will be explored. The work is being run as a program of related projects and the presentation will also discuss the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools being used to manage and track the program along with the upcoming challenges for 2006 and 2007.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a thorough process to investigate why a problem occurred with a view to taking action to prevent recurrence of this type of problem. It is expensive in terms of people's time and therefore an organization needs to select carefully the issues which are worth doing RCA on. This workshop will examine the process for RCA, including the 'timeline of events' and '5 Whys' tools, and provide an example to aid understanding. Be aware that RCA has a prerequisite - the organization needs to have the discipline to follow a repeatable process, otherwise RCA is just going to add more change to an already ad-hoc environment.

This is our annual planning session where organizers, volunteers and participants, active or otherwise, get a chance to make their mark on next years sessions. Everything is up for discussion. Bring your ideas and suggestions to make this an even better discussion group next year.