DevLin2018 – Workshop: It’s Not About Test Cases – James Bach

This is a workshop designed for people who are not testers and perhaps never wanted to be testers. (Although testers are welcome too!) Nevertheless, here you are, trying to create a good product for paying customers, and that means you need to look for bugs. This requires a certain mindset and skillset which most people have not practiced since they were children: an irreverent, critical way of thinking, rather than a constructive one. To develop software you must be positive; you must believe in quality. But to test software well, you must believe in the opposite of quality: failure, trouble, mistakes, unwelcome surprises. It’s a way of thinking that cannot be directly reconciled with development, and yet, unless you do, your development process will be reckless and irresponsible.

It is not about creating test cases– although that is a common side-effect of testing. Instead, it’s about exploring and reasoning about potential risk, which leads to experiments designed specifically to probe those risks. Some of the topics we will cover are:

• First, How to Think Like an Analyst (Working with Models and Heuristics)
• How Testing is Different from Generic Analysis
• Managing Critical Distance
• The Round Earth Approach to Test Strategy (Instead of the “Testing Pyramid”)
• The Heuristic Test Strategy Model
• How To Tell a Testing Story

James Bach

James Bach is a software tester, author, trainer and consultant. He is a proponent of exploratory testing and the context-driven school of software testing and is credited with developing session-based testing. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Software Testing. Lessons Learned in Software Testing, a book he co-authored, has been cited over 130 times according to Google Scholar, and several of his articles have been cited dozens of times including his work on heuristics for testing and on the Capability Maturity Model. He has written numerous articles for IEEE Computer