Rob Sabourin

AmiBug.com

Rob Sabourin, P. Eng., has more than thirty years of management experience leading teams of software development professionals. A well-respected member of the software engineering community, Rob has managed, trained, mentored, and coached hundreds of top professionals in the field. He frequently speaks at conferences and writes on software engineering, SQA, testing, management, and internationalization. Rob wrote I am a Bug!, the popular software testing children's book; works as an adjunct professor of software engineering at McGill University; and serves as the principle consultant (and president/janitor) of AmiBug.Com, Inc. Contact Rob at [email protected].

Speaker Presentations

Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - 8:30am

Keynote

Testing Lessons from Hockey (The World’s Greatest Sport)

Over the years, Rob Sabourin has drawn important testing lessons from diverse sources including the great detectives, the Simpsons, Hollywood movies, comic book superheroes, and the hospital delivery room. Now Rob scores big with breakaway testing ideas from hockey, Canada’s national sport. Like star hockey players, testers develop skills and continuously adapt and perfect them. Like team “stats,” test metrics show how performance impacts business. Like the penalty box, a smoke test keeps flaky builds out of play. Like Zambonis, testers must reset environments to a known state.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - 10:30am

Agile Testing

The Tester's Role in Agile Planning

If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be missed or glossed over. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while helping the team implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers contribute to the estimation, task definition, clarification, and the scoping work required to implement user stories.

Thursday, April 11, 2013 - 10:30am

Test Techniques

Whiteboarding—for Testers, Developers, and Customers, Too

How can testers spend more time doing productive testing and waste less time preparing "useless" project documentation? Rob Sabourin employs whiteboarding techniques to enable faster, easier, and more powerful communication and collaboration—without all the paperwork. Rob uses whiteboarding to help identify technical risks, understand user needs, and focus testing on what really matters to business stakeholders. Whiteboard block diagrams visualize technical risk to stakeholders. Whiteboard fault models highlight failure modes to developers and testers.