This year’s UK Software and Systems Quality Conference will take place in London from September 29th - 30th.

The event is focussed on how testing and quality management can help improve business productivity and I see a number of interesting themes in the programme:

• Increasing penetration of agile development methods - boldly going into organisations where no agile methods have gone before.
• Organisations experimenting with setting up a centralised quality management / testing group in preference to having project-based groups. Sort of a quality centre of excellence.
• A stronger focus on professionalism in testing - (more) emerging standards and certification options.

There is also an extra day of tutorials on October 1st with a heavy focus on testing in an agile setting.

Last years inaugural event drew over 400 participants and the organisers expect similar numbers this time around.

We’ll be on stand 17 of the associated exhibition demonstrating Axivion Bauhaus Suite and pure::variants.

I guess it’s pretty clear how Bauhaus helps improve software quality through its battery of software analysis tools but it’s perhaps less clear how pure::variants can help so I’ll explain.

pure::variants helps organisations who are developing software product lines - families of similar-but-different product variants. Organisations developing software product lines are commonly found in the embedded space but are also present in other sectors.

pure::variants is a whole life cycle tool for managing the variability that is inherent in such product lines. This variability arises for example from the need to deliver different software for different target devices, for different locales or legal frameworks or for different end-user organisations. Even in small product lines this variability can be very hard to manage and so systematically managing your product line with pure::variants will help improve productivity and quality.

pure::variants integrates with requirements management tools and so helps improve quality through reuse of requirements and by providing a significantly stronger variability modelling capability than any requirements management tool leading to more clarity and less rework.

pure::variants integrates with test and quality management tools and so helps improve quality through reuse of tests and higher-level test artefacts. The integration with quality management tools allows you to identify which combination of features is associated with a particular bug and so focus your test effort on only those product variants that have this combination of features.

pure::variants also allows you to reduce the number of code-level variability constructs (such as if-defs). This makes it clearer what your code actually does and so helps improve quality and reduce the potential for error.

If you do come to the conference drop by and say hello and we’d be happy to explain in more detail.