QW2001 Paper 4V1 Mr. John Keller (TeamShare, Inc.) Collaborative Product Design and the New Role of Testing

Key Points

• The Collaborative Product Design (CPD) methodology is essential in today's economic climate because companies can no longer afford to build products that miss the mark.
• The role of testing in a CPD paradigm expands beyond simply "Does it work" to "Is it what the customer is looking for."
• When it comes to building a CPD development environment, technology isn't everything, but it is a critical enabler.

Presentation Abstract

Collaborative Product Design (CPD) is a relative newcomer to development methodologies, but it builds on foundational principles found in other more well-known development paradigms including Extreme Programming, Customer Relationship Management, and Outward Focused corporations. CPD is essentially all about creating a collaborative environment where customers, partners and new product development groups can join together to build products and services that have a rapid time to market, and to market embrace. CPD is in direct response to the economic climate of today, where gone is the mentality of "if we build cool technology, they will come", and in its place is the mentality "we're not going to build it if there aren't customers who will buy into it."

Historically, testing organizations focused attention on isolating defects in products simply in terms of finding features that are broken. In the CPD environment, the testing organization must be more intimately involved with specifically what customers are looking for, and build test plans that address features in terms of customer needs.

This presentation will discuss the concepts behind CPD and what it takes to build a CPD development environment.

About the Author

John Keller has over 9 years in the IT industry including Product Management and Development with four different leading software companies. He is currently a Product Business Manager with TeamShare, which specializes in the development of Web-based process management tools.