Track: Test

Software testing is usually performed within projects of delivering valuable software to someone. Testing is about gathering information about the software to enable this someone insight about the values delivered. This years testing tracks has the two focuses of Context Driven testing and testing in Agile projects. Sessions will deliver insights from real projects doing exploratory testing and ATDD/BDD, how to visualize progress and quality and some really interesting aspects of how human factors affect testing. While these two days do not cover many aspects of pure testing, the power of this conference is that testing is highly represented in the rest of the program as well.

Thursday

10:00-10:50

How I wish users knew how I help them through context driven testing

This talk will be about the journey of being a context driven tester and the opposition I faced and how I paddled through it to win in most of my assignments. People think I did it wrong. I was aggressive on people to change their thought process to context driven thinking. I realized that when I win their heart, I also could win their brain.

Pradeep Soundararajan

Pradeep is an awarded thought leader, renowned author, invited writer and speaker around the world. He co-founded Moolya Software Testing Private Limited ( www.moolya.com ) which is headquartered in Bangalore, India and is a new generation testing services company. His consulting stories, test reports and experience reports have fascinated many people across the world. He has consulted for product startups, small & medium size software organizations, and multi billion dollar organizations. Pradeep's Tester Tested! blog http://testertested.blogspot.com is one of the widely influential & read blogs in the industry. He likes to mention that in past he was fired from a large organization as they considered him as the worst tester they ever hired. He was finding bugs and they couldn't show 98% test case pass to the senior management. He is humorous and there have been very few people who have not laughed to his humor :-P

11:10-12:00

Case Study on Team Leadership with Context-Driven Exploratory Tests

What's the effect of exploratory testing on a Team? What effect the practice has on their leader?Shmuel’s team experience in user centered Context-Driven projects made them realize that more than technical practice, it calls for change in leadership style and interactions.This dynamic talk tells a story of innovation in methods, deliverables and management. More than that, it tells a story of people, excellence, skills and satisfaction. If you have a testing team, and you want to see an alternative for team operations that maximize their potential and satisfaction, this talk is for you.

Shmuel Gershon

A technical leader at Intel Corporation, Shmuel Gershon has experience in firmware and software testing, and also in coaching testers and helping friends. His experience includes working in companies and as freelancer in different countries. He used to be a programmer, but discovered that testing is twice the fun. A frequent presenter at local software conferences, Shmuel is convinced that a most significant factor in our quest for quality is people, not features or technology. He blogs about software testing and is author of “Rapid Reporter”, an exploratory testing note taking tool.

13:00-13:50

Sleeping with the enemy

Traditional software delivery models are based on a lack of trust. Because the business doesn't trust developers, testers are asked to provide independent validation. Because developers don't trust testers, everyone wastes a lot of time arguing about whether a problem is in the code or in the tests. And testers are taught not to trust anyone! All of this distrust even though we share the same end-goal—delivering a product that satisfies our customers. Gojko Adzic describes why independent testing should be a thing of the past. He explains how testers engaging with developers and business users create opportunities to accomplish things they cannot do otherwise. Learn how delivery—from small web start-ups to large financial institutions—facilitate good communication and trust among business users, testers, and developers to deliver better software, faster.

Gojko Adzic

Gojko Adzic is a consultant based in the UK who helps ambitious teams worldwide implement Specification by Example and agile testing practices

14:20-15:10

Diversity in team composition

A tester is a tester or is it so? Let's have a look at team composition. There are several schools of thoughts on this matter. Along with a strong agile movement come a popular believe that it today is necessary for a tester to have strong programing skills. I do not disagree that programing skills can be beneficial in a test team but there is so much more to it then that. Another example is that many companies require their testers to be ISTQB certified. I se a pattern that we tend to uniform our testers, we want them all to be the same preferable copies of a pre defined role description. Many in the test community has previous claimed that a problem with testers is that we do not have enough or the right skills and that the solution is programing and certifications. What i now see is that we are beginning to lose something precious among us testers, that is diversity. Testing is the art of investigation and searching, we do not know what we are looking for and we do not know where it is hiding. To be great at this we need different skills and a team of diversified testers. We like to be prepared to approach our test object from many different angles and to analyze it's feedback with from different viewpoints. We should not look for unity when composing our test team instead we appreciate diversity and when looking for skills don't forget to look outside the technical area and the most obvious so called testing skills.

Henrik Andersson

Henrik Andersson is consultant and founder of House of Test, consultancy and outsourcing based in Sweden and China. He helps companies increase their efficiency and reconstructing their testing. He provides leadership and consulting for managers and leads. He tests, coaches, consults, speaks, writes, manages and thinks about software testing and problem solving.

15:40-16:30

Focusing Testing on Business Needs

Testers often forget that they are service providers whose role is to provide critical information to the project’s stakeholders. Testing must focus on business needs to add the most value and gain respect. Attend to discover communication techniques that will help testers connect with stakeholders and get them clamoring for more testing. Leave with real-world approaches for handling difficult conversations and project situations that will gain the respect of stakeholders.

Selena Delesie

A consulting software tester and agile coach, Selena Delesie has been managing and coaching on software, testing, and agile practices for a decade. She facilitates the evolution of good teams and organizations into great ones using individualized and team-based coaching and interactive training experiences. Selena is a contributing author to How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing and an active speaker, participant, and leader in numerous associations and conferences. Follow Selena online at DelesieSolutions.com.

17:00-17:50

Artful Testing

Art and testing may look like an odd couple. True, Glenford Myers combined both in his book “The Art of Software Testing”, but the art in there was strictly limited to the title page, since the term isn’t even mentioned once throughout the whole book. It referred to skill and mastery, of course, not to an aesthetic experience. More recently, Robert Austin and Lee Devin published “Artful making” which mainly addressed software development and its resemblance to art. This got me thinking: what about artful testing?In this presentation I will investigate what happens when we infuse testing with aesthetics. Can the fine arts in any way support or complement our testing efforts? With some surprising examples, I will illustrate that I think they can.The tools used by art critics, for instance, can be a valuable addition to our tester toolbox. They enable us to become software critics, engaging in demystification and deconstruction. Testers can also benefit from studying art and looking at it. After all, this largely resembles what we do when we are testing: thoughtfully looking at software. Art carries the risk of being mistaken for superficial “look and see”, as does testing: we look; we see what’s there – or we believe we do. But looking at something in ways that make sense of it calls for much more than that. It appeals to our experiental and reflective intelligence. Art feeds and stimulates the tester’s hungry eye. As we are overloaded with greater amounts of information than ever before, our ability to find meaning in things surrounding us involves a complex set of thinking skills. Naming what we see is one of them. Analyzing context based on personal association and perspective, cultural knowledge, interpretation, evidence, imagination, exploration and risk is another. These questioning and reasoning strategies used in evaluating art can be applied in testing too. This is where testing and art can meet. Good testing should be artful, in so many ways.

Zeger Van Hese

Zeger started his professional career in the movie distribution business, only to discover that there are more bugs to be found in software testing. He has a passion for exploratory testing, testing in agile projects and, above all, continuous learning from different perspectives.