Game Theory: The Test Engineering Path to Success
Every customer has different expectations for their software, requiring different testing strategies. Game designers can help us understand how to plan our strategy for managing various QA tools so teams can successfully navigate each different customer strategy in a risk-reward environment. A customer who makes their money from understanding and teaching software to others, rather than selling it, requires continuous integration and delivery, because they need new material on a regular basis. A customer who uses the software to defend life and limb requires it to be right the first time and are less concerned with rapid releases, so they require a balance of automation, CI, and functional and system testing. William Bell will show how to apply the skills engineers already possess to games of different genres—from mobile, console, and computer games to complex board games—as a way to model test engineering by matching their customer's winning strategies.
William Bell has ten years experience working in test engineering for the Department of Defense where I worked in a double helix customer interaction model that allowed agile like development in a waterfall industry. He moved from being a test engineer to building and leading teams of test engineers within the DoD with a very high success rate of DCMA acceptance of test cases and modeling. For the last 3 plus years William has been managing a team of test engineers in the risk averse and heavily governed health industry, but building software using agile methodology. William believes the marriage of agile and risk averse customers is extremely challenging, yet it can be rewarding if done well.