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Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm
Half-day Tutorials

Exploratory Testing Is Now in Session

The nature of exploration, coupled with the ability of testers to rapidly apply their skills and experience, make exploratory testing a widely used test approach—especially when time is short. Unfortunately, exploratory testing often is dismissed by project managers who assume that it is not reproducible, measurable, or accountable. If you have these concerns, you may find a solution in a technique called session-based test management (SBTM), developed by Jon Bach and his brother James to specifically address these issues. In SBTM, testers are assigned areas of a product to explore, and testing is time boxed in “sessions” that have mission statements called “charters” to create a meaningful and countable unit of work. Jon discusses—and you practice—the skills of exploration using the SBTM approach. He demonstrates a freely available, open source tool to help manage your exploration and prepares you to implement SBTM in your test organization.

Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.

With more than eighteen years of experience in software testing, Jon Bach has held technical and managerial positions in companies including Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. In his current role as director of Live Site Quality for eBay, Jon is dedicated to building “end-to-end” tests (activity flows) in eBay’s core sites to discover important bugs that threaten its core business. He is most notable for creating, with his brother James, Session-Based Test Management, a method to manage and report exploratory testing.

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