SeaSpin

Abstract:

What do you say when a stakeholder asks, "How's it going?"  If you have a pile of test cases on your desk, it may be enough to say, "I ran 35% of these tests today," or "I'll be finished with this stack in 4 days at my current rate."  But that might be just one of many stories you can tell about your testing. For example, you might have found a nasty bug from going "off-road" from those test cases, or you might have created a complex scenario you contrived on-the-fly from your experience, or by operating the program, you might have discovered a valuable new purpose for it! You might have done any number of interesting things, but your summary might have obscured the compelling parts of your testing story.  If you've tested software, you know that good testing ideas reveal important information as you go, just as an interesting story becomes more compelling as you read. In this talk, Jon talks about how his role as a journalist, author and writer has enhanced his role as a tester for the past 13 years, helping stakeholders know enough detail about testing to make good decisions on what to fix and how to plan from limited resources.  This talk is about why storytelling is a skill that should be studied to help us imagine better tests and give more meaningful reports to those who ask "How's it going?"

Bio:

Jon Bach is the Manager for Corporate Intellect at Quardev, Inc., an onshore test lab where he manages testing projects ranging from a few days to several months using rapid testing techniques. This talk won him "Best Presentation" at STAR East 2008 in May has been selected as a keynote for STAR West in September. He is an ardent advocate of building test communities and is currently the Vice President for Conferences for the Association for Software Testing, the speaker chairman for Quardev's public QASIG, and producer for the "Questioning Agile" stage for Agile2008 in August. He is best known for inventing Session-Based Test Management for managing and measuring exploratory testing, but he is also a published author ("Above the Clouds", 1993) and has a testing blog ("Notes, Bugs, and Issues") at quardev.com.