Introduction

While virtually everyone agrees today that testing is critical for a project’s success, in practice testers and developers more often than not experience an ‘Us and Them’ relationship. Even agile teams, where cross-discipline teams are encouraged, often report that testers are the experts responsible for the quality assurance of the engineering process, whereas programmers are responsible for the programming part. Furthermore, many organizations regard testing as a step in the process, potentially maintaining this ‘Us and Them’ culture.
Yet, as the agile frameworks suggest, testing is considered an integral part of the engineering process.
Agile Practitioners IL 2012, nicknamed “Mind the Gap”, is the first conference in Israel that sets a goal to bridge the gap between software development and software testing.

The goal of the conference is to allow professionals from both ends of the spectrum to meet up, discuss and work together on creating ways and techniques on “building quality in”. We strive to setup a new platform that will allow individuals and organizations, to learn ways to overcome cultural barriers, process obstacles and technical difficulties that prevents and widen the gap between product development and product quality assurance.

Conference Objective

The goal of the Agile Practitioners Israel Conference 2012 is to offer an independent, community based software development and testing conference that brings together high quality speeches, both local and international, with small to large scale players in the software market. We wish to provide a platform for exchanging ideas and experiences between professionals and representatives from diverse areas of business and IT organizations.

Target Audience

At the Agile Practitioner 2012 you will potentially meet professionals, managers, and decision makers in software quality assurance and in software development alike. The goal of the conference is to bring closer these two main fields, by building content that appeal to professionals from both fields.

It aims to connect:

• Project and Program Managers
• Process Improvement Specialists
• Quality Managers
• Professional Software programmers and managers
• Business/System owners
• Business Analysts
• Maintenance Personnel

We expect to attract between 200-300 professional from various organizations.

Key Issues

The focus of the conference presentations is to demonstrate ideas and techniques gathered by people involved in testing and Quality to people involved in software programming, and to demonstrate ideas and techniques gathered by people involved in programming and software development  to people involved in software testing and QA.

In light of this we shall create content that will deal with the following key issues

• Organization – how we can help our organization brings QA and development closer together
• Methodology – what aspects of the methodology can help in the joined effort of QA and programmers
• Practice – which practices can help increase the cooperation and collaboration between QA and programmers
• Tools – what tools are helpful in sharing work between QA and  development
• Success stories and lessons learned