Testing as a profession is becoming more and more demanding. We must adapt to faster development lifecycles, get to know about exploratory testing, and use different ways to add greater value to our projects. Bart Knaack believes that if we are to rise to this challenge, we need to learn additional skills—requirements engineering, database manipulation and monitoring using SQL, usability heuristics, exploratory testing, visual notation techniques for test preparation, and creation of test data. By mastering these skills, we will not only become better testers but we also can mentor others in their work. These skills enable us to improve software quality by means other than just testing. Come and learn about these skills and what is expected of a tester in today’s environment. Practice these skills and start off in the right direction for further improvement. Want to broaden your horizon? Join Bart and learn in a funtastic way.
Bart Knaack
Test advisor at Professional Testing, Bart Knaack has more than twenty years of experience in testing and test management. Bart has contributed to testing projects and processes in roles of test manager, test data management team lead, and process improvement agent. He has coached testers, built up test teams, and developed processes in test, test support, and overall quality management and improvement. Bart is a frequent speaker at conferences, universities, and colleges. In 2009 Bart and James Lyndsay co-founded the TestLab, an exciting part of today’s STAR conferences.
As we face new technologies, methodologies, and approaches, the roles and responsibilities of testers are evolving. To stay current, the test professional’s skill set must increase. Due to agile, the strict separation of developer and tester roles is fading. Teams, rather than just testers, are now responsible for quality. Emerging technologies—continuous integration, mobile, the Internet of Things, and cloud—are drastically changing testing. Formerly seen as the least technical IT activity, testing today is one of the most technically challenging. Bart Knaack describes the new skills testers need to develop for properly testing mobile apps and applications in the cloud. Bart examines the changing role of test management and draws conclusions on how to organize teams and departments for maximum productivity and value to the business. Because testing is changing under our feet, we all must grow and adapt to survive and thrive in this brave new world of testing.