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Jon Bach

Jon Bach
eBay, Inc.

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.

Speaker Presentations
Tuesday, September 29, 2015 - 8:30am
Full-day Tutorials
Testing under Pressure: A Case for Session-Based Test Management
NEW

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 is often 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. In SBTM, testers explore an area of a product, framing their testing in time-boxed “sessions” meant to create a meaningful and countable unit of work. In this hands-on tutorial (laptop required), Jon guides you through the mechanics of session-based testing to help you discover if it’s something valuable for your project. Through practical open-ended testing exercises, you may discover some surprising things about how you perform under pressure and can see how your colleagues respond to the same challenges.

Participants are required to bring a laptop computer to this tutorial.

 

Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - 11:30am
Test Techniques
The Testopsy: Dissect Your Testing

To improve as a skilled tester, you don't necessarily have to attend a class or read a book. James and Jon Bach show how you can grow by recording and then dissecting as few as five minutes of your test process. Using a Testopsy, you build your skills of observation, narration, and test framing. And if you do it with a colleague or as a group, it stimulates discussion on test design and test strategy. James and Jon demonstrate a live Testopsy to underscore these points and give you specific guidelines for conducting your own. Testing is a performance—not an artifact. Much like a medical examiner narrates his autopsies into a tape recorder, you can look very carefully at what you actually do and identify your own heuristics. By putting that process into descriptive, evocative words, you can discover surprising depths in each act of testing you perform.