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

Thursday, October 3, 2013 - 8:30am

Selling (and Buying) “Live Site Quality” at eBay

In the February Fortune magazine, eBay made the cover with the title “eBay is Back!” The article cited improvements in the look and feel of the site, strategic investments in fulfillment, and technology partnerships with retailers to establish it as more than just an online auction service. Jon Bach joined just as eBay was making big bets to make notable and visible gains with this strategy. Jon recounts his two and a half years as a quality engineering director and introduces a concept he calls Live Site Quality.

Monday, September 30, 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—learning, test design, and test execution—done in parallel. 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.

Monday, September 30, 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.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013 - 8:30am

Half-day Tutorials

The Craft of Bug Investigation

Although many training classes and conference presentations describe processes and techniques meant to help you find bugs, few explain what to do when you find a good one. How do you know what the underlying problem is? What do you do when you find a bug, and the developer wants you to provide more information? How do you reproduce those pesky, intermittent bugs that come in from customer land? In this hands-on class, Jon Bach helps you practice your investigation and analysis skills—questioning, conjecturing, branching, and backtracking.