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. Jon frequently speaks at the STAR conferences and usually can be found wearing a ball cap, hanging out in the conference hallways, encouraging others, and sharing best testing ideas and patterns.

Speaker Presentations

Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - 8:30am

Half-day Tutorials

Exploratory Testing Explained

Exploratory testing is an approach to testing that emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of testers to continually optimize the value of their work. It is the process of three mutually supportive activities done in parallel: learning, test design, and test execution. With skill and practice, exploratory testers typically uncover an order of magnitude more problems than when the same amount of effort is spent on procedurally scripted testing. All testers conduct exploratory testing in one way or another, but few know how to do it systematically to obtain the greatest benefits.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - 1:00pm

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.

Thursday, April 11, 2013 - 12:45pm

Special Topics

Testing After You’ve Finished Testing

Stakeholders always want to release when they think we’ve “finished testing”. They believe we have revealed “all of the important problems” and “verified all of the fixes,” and now it’s time to reap the rewards. However, as testers we still can assist in improving software by learning about problems after code has rolled “live-to-site”—especially if it’s a website. At eBay we have a post-ship “site quality” mindset in which testers continue to learn from A/B testing, operational issues, customer sentiment analysis, discussion forums, and customer call patterns—just to name a few.