Jon Bach has been in testing for twenty years. Is testing in 2014 different from testing in 1994? If you’ve been in the business that long, maybe you’ve seen it move from a little bit of automation and tooling to almost total automation and tooling. Maybe you’ve seen lab setups go from hours of loading OS images on “boat anchor” boxes to virtual, on-demand, scalable cloud provisioning in seconds. Maybe you think testing is dead because we live in a DevOps world where it’s good enough to run a happy path checklist. Maybe you think testing isn’t dead because you’ve seen recent computer science graduates know dangerously nothing about the craft of sapient testing. Jon wants to know what you’ve seen in your careers. In exchange for his thoughts, he wants to hear yours: How do you define testing? What are your best ideas? What works for you? Under what contexts does testing not matter at all? Whether you’re stuck or confused, inspired or hopeful, come, listen, and contribute your experiences … On Testing.
Jon Bach
With more than eighteen years of software testing experience, Jon Bach has held technical and managerial positions in companies including Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. 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 and his brother James created 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.
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. In SBTM, testers are assigned areas of a product to explore, and testing is time boxed in “sessions” that have mission statements called “charters” to create a meaningful and countable unit of work. Jon discusses—and you practice—the skills of exploration using the SBTM approach. He demonstrates a freely available, open source tool to help manage your exploration and prepares you to implement SBTM in your test organization.