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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 30, 2013 - 8:30am
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.

Monday, April 29, 2013 - 1:00pm
Half-day Tutorials
The Craft of Bug Investigation

At testing conferences, many presentations mention techniques and processes meant to help you find bugs, but few talk about what to do when you find one. If it’s as simple as writing what you saw, how do you know that’s the real problem? What do you do when you find a bug but the developer wants you to provide more information? How do you reproduce those pesky, intermittent bugs that come in from customers? Join Jon Bach in this hands-on tutorial to help you practice investigation and analysis skills like questioning, conjecturing, branching, and backtracking.

Thursday, May 2, 2013 - 9:45am
Special Topics
Testing—After You’ve Finished Testing

Stakeholders always want to release when they think we’ve finished testing. They believe we have discovered “all of the important problems” and “verified all of the fixes”—and now it’s time to reap the rewards.