Session speakers listed in alphabetical (first name) order.

You can download the detailed program (pdf) here: Detailed Program.pdf

“Testing Hypnotically” - Alan Richardson

This presentation deals with the skills, and mental attitudes, required to understand and adapt to context, using an ‘unrelated’ topic as the map. The ‘unrelated’ topic being… Hypnosis

I’ve studied, and used, hypnosis for well over 20 years and view hypnosis as an entirely context driven activity. Many of the models that influence my approach to testing stem from my study of hypnosis. And in this session, for the first time anywhere in the world, I will explain my secrets, exclusively, to you.

Hypnosis, if you read the blurb on popular books, is: a fun way to amaze and entertain friends and party goers, a fast track road to wealth and power, the secret way to achieve anything you desire, the single most powerful way to tap into your latent psychic powers. In many ways, just like Software Testing. In addition to the obvious parallels above, I will cover:

- the best advice I ever received when learning hypnosis and how it applies to software testing
- the application of “Utilisation”
- the “Effective Communication” model of Software Testing
- the essence of a ‘persona’

And so much more. Join me for this exclusive ‘no secret left hidden’ session and learn to test hypnotically.

Alan has been trained in conversational and stage hypnosis (he even has the certificates to prove it) by hypnotic luminaries such as Ormond McGill, Jerry Valley, Paul McKenna, Richard Bandler, John La Valle, Michael Breen, and Eric Robbie. Alan’s test approach incorporates elements from hypnosis, cybernetics, systems thinking and other counter culture influences. Alan manages, leads, explores and automates. He has talked at conferences world wide and is the author of “Selenium Simplified”. Alan blogs at http://www.eviltester.com

“Going Against The Stream” - Alexandru Rotaru

 This is the story of my software testing company’s challenges over the past 3 years, of the testing experiences I’ve had and the changes I’ve made when it comes to my overall approach to software testing. Working with both clients and potential employees that know all about “best practices” in software testing and offering offshore testing services when most of our potential customers think that our only advantage is our price might have been sometimes frustrating, but it has also been enlightening. It is the story of my company’s struggle to resist the temptation to cut corners ‘just this once’ and the lessons I’ve learned from this experience.

The talk is about our shift from scripting to exploratory testing, about how we realized the importance of context in our work, of continuous learning and of keeping an open mind.

I discovered testing in 2005, but only in 2008, when Altom was founded, I began to be more and more interested in how to get better at it. Co-managing a service providing company for the last 3 and a half years has been a great learning journey which helped me to better understand the tester’s role as a service provider for the project / product team, and also made me want to be more effective in my testing.

I believe in the power of the testing community and the value it can bring to this craft.

“Testing in the Black Swan Domain” - Anders Dinsen

Nassim Taleb introduced the concept of Black Swans in his influental 2007 book: Rare events, in principle extremely unlikely, but very dangerous – and they occur much more often than we expect.
IT incidents are true Black Swans. Incidents are tricky to test for, and this is probably why they are rarely treated exploratorily in testing.

I would like to see that change, since with increasing complexity and the ubiqtous nature of IT systems, failures in todays’ IT systems are much more consequential than they used to be, and incidents are frequently the cause of great losses; in some systems they even put human lives at risk.

I will present my view on the ”art” of testing for system incidents. My view diverts fundamentally from the non-functional tests, robustness tests, and performance tests which are often carried out.
Instead, and based on a systems perspective, I will introduce heuristics and models which will allow explorative testing and learning – even in the Black Swan Domain. There are no bullet proof ways to do it, but by understanding the nature of incidents and by being able to identify vulnerabilities in the context in which testing is taking place, I beleive that you as a tester will be better able to focus your exploration and observation on what’s important: The system vulnerabilities.

I am a freelance tester, father of 4, and occasional blogger based in Copenhagen, Denmark. For more than 17 years, I have worked as a developer, project manager, tester, and test manager in various projects in finance, logistics, telecom, and the public sector. In later years, I have found myself engaged in increasingly complex projects building increasingly complex systems, and while I have a passion for the simple and beautiful, I have to admit that I’m fascinated by the way complexity affects our industry.
Blog: blog.asym.dk
Twitter: @andersdinsen
E-mail: ad@asym.dk

“Coaching Testers” - Anne-Marie Charret

Coaching is no longer belongs solely in sweaty football rooms and is increasingly becoming an invaluable tool in helping us educate testing professionals. More and more we are seeing how coaching can help us in our day to day lives, in developing talent in business and more closely in agile projects.

Introducing tester coaching, where instead of focusing on improving your penalty goal, the coaching focuses on improving tester skill.

Coaching differs to traditional teaching and training as its the student who takes charge of the learning, they chose the learning objective, not the coach. Because of this, a student is likely to be more willing to learn the topic in hand. Tester coaching is focused on learning through solving problems and much of the concepts come from the socratic teachings. A coaching session typically revolves around a testing task that the student applies themselves to. My talk is a result of my experience in coaching testers both remotely and within a test team. Coaching testers remotely is performed using online messaging. The coaching sessions are performed one on one, where the tester is given a task or exercise to perform based on a learning objective they have.

Coaching testers is a more traditional approach but is an effective tool for a test manager to help testers improve their skill within a project context. There is a Latin saying “docendo discimus” which translated to english means by teaching we learn. If you ever truly want to understand what an oracle is, try teaching it to someone. This is why coaching is beneficial not only to the student but the the coach as well.

As part of my work with James Bach on coaching, I will explain some of the complexities of coaching such as understanding a student’s attributes, what a task is and the importance of energy within a coaching session. To do this, I explain what a coaching space is and how I use coaching patterns to help me through a coaching session.

The talk will end with an online demonstration of an instant messaging coaching exercise

Anne-Marie Charrett is a testing coach and trainer with a passion for helping testers discover their testing strengths and become the testers they aspire to be. Anne-Marie offers free IM Coaching to testers and developers on Skype (id charretts) and is is working on a book with James Bach on coaching testers. An electronic engineer by trade, testing discovered Anne-Marie when she started conformance testing to ETSI standards. She was hooked and has been involved in software testing ever since. She runs her own company, Testing Times offering coaching and software testing services with an emphasis on Context Driven Testing.

Anne-Marie can be found on twitter at charrett and also blogs at http://mavericktester.com

“The Testing Dead” - Ben Kelly

I’ve worked in places where I’d get up in the morning and pray for the zombie apocalypse to have happened overnight just so I didn’t have to go to work. I realized some time later that the apocalypse had already happened, and I’d been working with them – The Testing Dead.

The testing dead are the slaves to process; the ones who stop and mill around aimlessly when there is no documentation to tell them how to act. Knowledge passes through them unmolested like bacon through a bar mitzvah.

This presentation takes a light hearted look at what is actually a pretty serious problem in the field of testing – zombie testers, and what can be done about it.

Ben Kelly is a software tester living and working in Tokyo, Japan. He has done stints in various industries including Internet statistics, insurance and most recently online language learning. When he’s not agitating lively discussion on other people’s blogs, he writes sporadically at testjutsu.com and is available on twitter @benjaminkelly

“Defect Management from a Context-Driven Perspective” - Carsten Feilberg

What is going on with defect managing, and does it have anything to do with the principles that defines context-driven testing? I think it does. A bug report is only an observation – but you cannot fix an observation. Before a fix can be decided, let alone fixed, it must be transformed. Bug trackers violate this. By correlating the normal bug handling process flow to the principles of CDT, I hope to use this presentation to spark a lively discussion and make you think a bit differently about bug trackers and how to use them.

Carsten Feilberg has been testing and managing testing for more than a decade working on various projects covering the fields of insurance, pensions, public administration, retail and other back office systems as well as a couple of websites. With more than 17 years as a consultant in IT his experience ranges from one-person do-it-all projects to being delivery and test manager on a 70+ system migration project involving almost 100 persons. He is also a well known blogger and presenter on conferences and a strong advocate for context-driven testing. He is living and working in Denmark as a consultant at House of Test.

“An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Concepts” - Chris Blain

The area of artificial intelligence provides an umbrella that pulls together a variety of disciplines such as probability, logic, machine learning, scheduling, game theory an many others. As such it provides a framework that you can use to generate new ideas in testing philosophy and actual test techniques.

A downside is that the field can be hard to approach. This talk will be an introduction that will provide a quick survey of the field and allow you to hone in on the areas you find most interesting and applicable to your context. It will be full of sites, books, and other resources to jumpstart your study and application of this area.

Chris Blain is a consultant who has more than fifteen years of experience working in software development on projects ranging from embedded systems to web applications. He is a former board member of the the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, and recently starting speaking at conferences such as CAST. You can follow Chris on Twitter as @chris_blain.

“You are a scientist - Embracing the scientific method in software testing” - Christin Wiedemann

A software tester is nothing less than a scientific researcher, using all his/her intelligence, imagination and creativity to gain empirical information about the software under test. But how do we prove to others that software testing is indeed a scientific method, that testing actually requires certain skills and that our work deserves recognition and respect? And even more importantly, how do we convince ourselves of our own value?

Starting with Galileo’s struggles to prove that the Earth is round, I will give a brief historical overview of the birth and use of the scientific method, drawing parallels to the evolvement of testing over the last decades. By going through the steps of the scientific method I will show that good software testing adheres to those principles. I will also talk about how truly understanding and embracing the scientific method will make us better and more credible testers. And boost your self-confidence!

Changing careers after eleven years as an astroparticle physicist, Christin Wiedemann brings her logical and analytical problem-solving skills into the world of testing. Four years down the road, she is still eager to learn and to find new ways to test more efficiently. In her roles as tester, test lead, trainer and speaker, Christin uses her scientific background and pedagogic abilities to continually develop her own skills and those of others. Christin is constantly trying new approaches and is keen to share her experiences. Follow c_wiedemann on twitter.com or visit Christin’s blog christintesting.blogspot.com.

“The Zen of Software Testing” - Dawn Haynes

Many testing approaches are based on models or theories. Models are derived from experience while theories are derived from thought. When these two approaches meet, sometimes they clash and diminish each other. Zen is a Buddhist doctrine that strives for harmony and balance, and states that enlightenment can be attained through direct intuitive insight. Using a Zen approach to testing can help to meld disparate testing approaches together. We can use our models and theories to organize our thoughts to formulate a direction, and then use our intuitive insight to find the rest. What can we take away from a tiptoe through Zen philosophy that we can apply to our jobs as testers? We can learn to blend the spirit of testing with our internal experience and strengths (as guides), blended with our creativity and intuition (infusing enhancements), filtered through a tapestry of ethics (finding appropriateness) to take testing into the next level.
There are three pillars of exploration in this talk:

- Learn about the parallels between Buddhist teachings and scientific methods of testing, and what we can apply to improve software testing
- Discover your own inner tester and explore how to map it to a style and technique for expanding and varying your testing
- Understand the role of ethics in Zen philosophy and consider some of the larger impacts of ethics in testing in terms of what they mean to testers, projects, products and organizations.

Dawn Haynes is Principal Trainer and Consultant for PerfTestPlus, Inc., and a former director of the Association for Software Testing. Her unique blend of experience, humor, and effectiveness at providing delegates at all levels with tools and techniques to help them generate new approaches to common and complex software testing problems has resulted in international recognition as an elite trainer of testers. Dawn provides consulting services and is frequently invited to speak at testing conferences, peer conferences, local testing groups and intimate gatherings of testers. She has more than twenty-seven years of experience supporting, administering, developing and testing software and hardware systemsóacross startups, small business operations, high-tech companies and large corporate enterprises.

Dawn holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Management of Information Systems, with a minor in computer programming, from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, and is a current member of the ACM, AST, ASTD, ASQ and IEEE. Dawn is a continuous learner across many domains and participates in programs to improve her skills regarding public speaking, training and instructional design, testing methodologies, skiing, floral design, figure skating, jewelry making and bartending. Dawn is a contributing author of the book “Quality Web Systems: Performance, Security & Usability”, and seeks to find ways to advocate for better testing everywhere while trying to make the industry a better place for testers to flourish.

“Strategies for a Successful Systems Integration Test” - Fiona Charles

The first time you’re faced with a big Systems Integration Test, it can seem like an overwhelming job—a logistical nightmare or quality disaster in the making. There’s just so much of everything to take in and take on.

- With limited time and budget, what do you really need to focus on to succeed?
- Where do you start, and how do you approach developing a test strategy?
- How do you plan and staff the test, and then prepare test cases and get buy-in from all the interested parties?
- Is there a way to manage test execution without driving yourself and everyone else crazy?
- What useful information can you provide to keep management informed, and still allow yourself time to manage the testing?
- How do you satisfy Audit or your internal QA department?

Drawing on experience managing large Systems Integration Tests in a variety of industries, Fiona Charles presents key strategies to help you address the important questions, and craft a manageable and effective test.

Fiona Charles is a software test consultant who teaches organizations to match their software testing to their business risks and opportunities. With extensive experience in software development and integration, she has managed testing and consulted on testing on many challenging projects for clients in retail, banking, financial services, health care, telecommunications and emergency services. 

Throughout her career Fiona has advocated, designed, implemented, and taught pragmatic and humane practices to deliver software worth having—in even the most difficult project circumstances. Her articles on testing and test management appear frequently and she speaks and conducts experiential workshops at conferences. Fiona edited The Gift of Time, and guest-edited the “Women of Influence” issue of STP magazine. Fiona is co-founder and host of the Toronto Workshop on Software Testing.

“Do You Trust Your Mental Models” - Henrik Emilsson

It’s not only Model-based Testing that is based on models. In fact, all testing is based on models. When we develop and test software we use models in form of written specifications, prototypes, mind maps, schemes, etc. We also use anything non-written about the software and the context that helps us understand the product. A model is anything used in any way to represent anything else, and you might think that the explicit and implicit models are the only things that we use. But we also have our mental models, which often are generated from the explicit and implicit models.

Jay Wright Forrester defined (general) mental models as: “The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system.”

So can you trust your mental models? Can you rely on your ability to select the right concepts and their relationships? Do you have an authentic representation of the system that you are currently testing? In this session, Henrik will talk about mental models used in software testing and give examples of how these can guide your testing in a structured way. Also, we will have a discussion on how we can sharpen these so that we can put more trust in our mental models.

Henrik Emilsson is managing the test team at Qamcom Research and Technology AB, a team that specializes in providing context-driven testing services. Henrik is co-founder of the think tank “Thoughts from the Test Eye” (www.thetesteye.com), which has been an important channel for him to discuss new ideas and thoughts about testing.

During the last years he has created a university course in test design and co-created a 2-year course “Qualified Software Tester” at the college of higher vocational studies in Karlstad; he has also been teacher at both these courses. Henrik is a contributing delegate at the SWET peer conferences, and was arranger for SWET2 in 2011. Over the years he has been a speaker at both national and international conferences, latest seen at CAST 2011, and he was also arranging the EuroSTAR TestLab in 2011.

“So You Think You Can Test?” - Huib Schoots

As a test consultant I have worked for numerous companies and have met hundreds of testers. Many of them had obtained certificates like ISTQB or TMap. In this presentation I do not want to discuss if these certificates are useful or not. This presentation is about testing skills, passion for testing and last but not least, how collaborating with other disciplines like developers and business analysts will help you become a star tester.

Collaboration is the key in becoming more effective and efficient in testing. Learn why software development is a team sport. By being passionate you will get your team test infected. Showing your testing skills can help the others in your team. Even developers will participate if you can show them your skills.

To be the best you need to learn all aspects of your job. How can testers learn? We need to practice continuous learning. Become skilled in various ways of testing. This talk gives ideas to become a better tester: examples of resources to study, practical tips you can start doing right now! To become Europe’s Next Top Tester!

Huib has 15 years experience in IT and software testing. After studying Business Informatics he became a developer. Soon he discovered that development was not his cup of tea and software testing is fun. Huib has experience in various roles such as tester, test coordinator, test manager, trainer, coach, but also in project management. He is currently team manager testing at Rabobank International. He tries to share his passion for testing with others through coaching, training and giving presentations on different test subjects.

Huib sees himself as a context-driven tester. He is curious, passionate and has (unsuccessful) attempted to read everything published on software testing ever written. He is a board member of TestNet, the association of testers in the Netherlands. He is a member of DEWT (Dutch Workshop on Exploratory Testing), student at the Miagi-Do School of Software Testing and maintains a blog on magnifiant.com

“Mixup Testing - A Cross Team Testing Activity” - Johan Atting

For two years we have been using Scrum and we have testers in all of the Scrum teams working side by side with the developers as equal members in the teams. We have small teams with 1 tester and 2-3 developers while our large teams have 2 testers and 4-5 developers, and we have approximately 10 teams. We have found a lot of benefits with having the testers in the scrum teams, compared to having them in a separate test team. However, we have also seen some new challenges, e.g. that it’s easy to get biased and not fully objective as a tester when you have been sitting with the developers and taking part in the design work of the item to test, and also that it’s difficult to find time to discuss testing with testers in other teams.

So, to boost the testing, to get fresh eyes on the new stuff after every sprint, to encourage interaction, discussion and learning between testers and also to get an opportunity to try new testing techniques, tools and ideas we introduced Mixup testing. Today we run the Mixup testing as a one day bi-weekly testing activity, with all our testers, spanning over three days. Day one is a one hour planning meeting, day two is a full day of testing and day three is a thirty minutes retrospective meeting.

In this session I’ll talk about the Mixup testing; what it is, how we have implemented it, why we have implemented it and what benefits we have seen from it.

Johan has 18 years professional experience from the software development industry. He started as a developer but moved after two years into project-, quality- and test management roles, and later also into line management roles. He has worked in various industries such as Transport, Bank & Finance, Telecoms and Med Tech. In 2005 he joined Sectra Medical Systems as head of their test department where he turned the testing from a traditional scripted approach into a context driven approach and introduced things like exploratory testing and risk based testing. Johan was also a key player when Sectra in 2010 moved from a waterfall development process to an agile process with Scrum and Kanban. In 2011 he started a network among software testers in the county of Östergötland in Sweden called EAST. Johan currently holds a position as Chief Quality Officer at Sectra Medical Systems. You can follow Johan on twitter as @JohanAtting.

“Making Dialogue Effective” - Leo Hepis

It is the hallmark of deceitful politics: a politician appears to respond to a question, while in fact the response is the answer to a different, much more convenient, question the politician wishes was asked. What politicians do for deceit, in software we sometimes do accidentally. Answers are given to questions not asked; conversations veer off to fascinating but not-pertinent topics; options appear to be exhausted and decisions appear to be made.

Yet we often leave such conversations feeling we did not provide or obtain information that sheds light to the problem at hand. In some cases, the conversation was not even a dialogue; it was two monologues instead. Organizations benefit when conversations more clearly reveal better courses of action.

To that effect, in this session we will explore techniques that help us keep dialogue relevant, congruent, and constructive.

Leonidas Hepis has been testing software and managing test teams since 1994. As a tester he has become an expert at *not knowing*, helping organizations understand what can be reasonably considered known, or not, through testing. Better informed about the limits of testing, organizations can better steer processes and products towards creating value for customers. In that regard, he considers excellence in Testing to be on par with excellence in science.

He’s a member of the Association for Software Testing, as well as a senior member of the American Society for Quality. He believes that organizations must maintain their sense of humor and playfulness if they are to creatively solve problems. For over a decade he has lived in San Diego, California, where he’s helped small companies with their software testing and quality efforts.

“Experiences from the Financial Services testing trenches” - Louise Perold

I would like to share some of my experiences leading testing on Financial services projects. Although the industry was the same, the contexts were very unique. The experience report will share how

I dealt with (and sometimes didn’t deal with) the various –

• Stakeholder expectations of what testing should be
• Testing approaches and tailoring these to the context
• Leading teams with varied experience and varied sizes
• Making use of the tools available as effectively as possible

And whatever else comes up in the discussions…

Louise is a passionate believer in context-driven testing and has been enthusiastically refining her approach to testing for over 10 years. She works for a software testing consultancy in Johannesburg, South Africa – Micro to Mainframe – Testing, leading and mentoring test teams within the Financial services industry. Her current role is at an Investment bank, managing a team using Session-based testing. The rest of her time is spent delving into the fast paced social life that living in Joburg demands.

“Charter my tests!” - Markus Gaertner

With the introduction of session-based test management test teams struggle with good test charters. But what makes up a good charter?
In this session we will create and discuss good and bad charters to find out more about them.

Markus Gärtner studied computer sciences until 2005. In 2010 he joined it-agile GmbH, Hamburg, Germany, after having been a testing group leader for three years at Orga Systems GmbH. Markus is the co-founder of the European chapter in Weekend Testing, a black-belt instructor in the Miagi-Do school of Software Testing, contributes to the ATDD-Patterns writing community as well as the Software Craftsmanship movement. Markus regularly presents at Agile and testing conferences, as well as dedicating himself to writing about testing, foremost in an Agile context.

 ”From Good to Great with xBTM” - Michael Albrecht

Exploratory testing provides both flexibility and speed, which has become increasingly important with more and more projects going agile. Scripted tests are struggling to keep up with the high pace of short iterations and increased quality demands. But how do you retain traceability in exploratory testing?

Michael has good experiences using a combination of Session-Based Test Management (SBTM) and Thread-Based Test Management (TBTM) which he calls xBTM. In SBTM we are given a great way to run structured and documented exploratory testing in sessions without losing our creativity. However, sometimes the work environment is too hectic or chaotic and requires more flexibility and freedom, which is provided by TBTM. But why not pick the cherries from the cake? In xBTM we unite SBTM and TBTM to get the full advantage of both methodologies, all the way from test planning to test reporting. By using xBTM Michael is able to spend more time actually testing, and create documentation that is not only used but even re-used!

The speech will briefly talk about SBTM but the focus will be war stories from TBTM and xBTM. The style xBTM has been developed by Christin Wiedemann and Michael Albrecht as a result of their consultant assignments.

By successfully implementing Scrum and exploratory testing in customer projects covering as diverse areas as online gaming and stock exchange programs and as a co-creator of xBTM, Michael has a very good track-record of inspiring testers to take their testing to new levels and to find unexpected bugs in unexpected ways. Michael is also one of the enthusiasts behind Swedish Exploratory Testers (SWET), a peer conference for exploratory testing geeks in Sweden.

By working together with KYH, a Swedish college with a program for the next generation testers, Michael is spreading his knowledge about new and efficient test methods to a larger audience. Michael is also sharing his thoughts online. Follow MickeAlbrecht on twitter.com or visit  http://www.addq.se/blogg/. 

“Testing as Value Flow Management: Organise your toolbox around Congruence, Systems Thinking and Emergence” – Neil Thompson

Is testing, as some claim, “dead”? No, but it’s evolving. I will argue for a holistic Value Flow Management approach which not only distinguishes Context-Driven from context-aware, -specific, -imperial etc, but also incorporates some agile principles and thinking tools which I believe are usable and useful even in non-agile, eg “legacy” contexts. I include “static testing” (reviews etc, considering format and content of requirements and other oracles), and I develop the idea that testing should be more scientific.

But how does all this fit together? I propose a “structured toolbox”, starting with a top layer:

• centred on Congruence (self, other people and context);
• using the science of psychology to understand ourselves and our stakeholders;
• managing our relationships with stakeholders, in context, using Value Flow ScoreCards; and
• improving knowledge of our context, role and opportunities using a Systems Thinking framework, complexity theory, and Emergence of innovations.

Underlying this is a middle layer of experiment-oriented “scientific method”.
The third, base layer holds the full range of techniques and tools which we may selectively reach for, but guided by the two upper layers, eg:

• Organisational, Effects & Factors Mapping;
• Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints and Dettmer’s associated thinking tools; and
• Risk-Inspired Testing, eg Bayesian.

I hope this session will stimulate your ability and desire to:

• select and organise your own toolbox of key concepts;
• understand how this could be adapted to wider usage; and
• be ready to embrace emerging evolution, e.g Artificial Intelligence.

Neil Thompson has specialised in software test management and consultancy in recent years, but his company is deliberately named more generally, about “information systems”. After graduating in natural sciences (which included some psychology), he worked for five years for software houses as a programmer, analyst and project manager, then four years with a user organisation, where his work included 1st, 2nd & 3rd-line support, maintenance and enhancements. The next ten years were as an IT/IS management consultant with ”big 6/5/4” global firms, after which (1998) he became an independent consultant. He co-authored with Paul Gerrard the book Risk-Based E-Business Testing. Neil is currently enthused as a “born-again scientist”.

“Journey to the other side - starting to offer ET and SBTM as a service” - Oliver Vilson

Celeg Hannas offers and promotes ethical efficient testing. We consider our work well-done when our customers feel that we’ve helped them to reveal previously unknown information that actually matters to them. We also organize various testing events like Test Camps (one full day of testing with a community’s practitioners on a real application with Coke and Pizza), Testers’ Night Out (Tester meet-ups to share war stories and try out new testing exercises) and various testing courses (most notable would be James Bach’s courses in Estonia).
As with any new thing I was faced with several problems when I started to offer Exploratory Testing with Session-Based Test Management as a service. First problem was how to explain it to our customers in contexts where testing is mainly seen as “write test case – execute it – pass/fail”. Second problem was how to make it work for our company’s own context without overburdening neither test lead nor specialists with too much overhead.
I will use self-oriented humor about my assumptions and how they failed (sometimes miserably) to illustrate the story of implementing Session-Based Test Management as our working process, explaining it to our potential customers and what I learned from the journey.

Oliver entered into the software development industry at the dawn of the year 2007 as young tester hoping to move on to becoming project manager or systems analyst fast, since testing didn’t seem as prospective career option. However, meeting Michael Bolton at the Eurostar 2008 conference opened his eyes about software testing and turned him into a passionate tester who knows things can be done differently. Today he’s considered as one of the leading Context-Driven Testing promoters in Estonia. 
Beside his day-job as lead specialist and CEO of Celeg Hannas, he talk, consult and teach the Context-Driven Testing approach to anyone willing to learn. Beside his favorite field, he have been project manager and been considered rather skilled at both business and systems analysis. Now he uses all his skills to improve the craft of software testing in general.

“Curing Our Binary Disease” - Rikard Edgren

Gerd Gigerenzer’s tools-to-theories heuristic says that the theories we build are based, and accepted, depending on the tools we are using. Software testing operates on software, and we use computers for planning, execution and reporting. Our theories reflect this much more, way much more than the fact that each piece of software is unique, made for humans, by humans. We are suffering a binary disease, with pass/fail addiction, coverage obsession, metrics tumor and sick test design techniques.

- We should liberate ourselves and look at diverse information sources, uncovering what is important.
- We can investigate software as humans, make subjective judgments and handle the inevitable unknown.
- We can get rid of the numbers, and communicate noteworthy interpretations of what is important.

Rikard Edgren, test expert at Qamcom Research & Technology. Started a journey towards humanistic testing in 1998 with localized Microsoft products. 11 years with Spotfire’s interactive data analytics software gave a depth that has been generalized in works like The Little Black Book on Test Design and Software Quality Characteristics (co-authored with Henrik Emilsson and Martin Jansson, the other two founders of the test eye think-tank.) 2011 saw a switch to consulting at Qamcom Karlstad, now leaning more towards teaching testing, e.g. at 2-year higher vocational studies for software testers in Karlstad.

With an educational background in Philosphy and Musical Science, focus is not on binary verification, but rather on communicating what is important, which requires creativity since every software effort is unique. Rikard has five appearances at EuroSTAR (one in program committee), many presentations at Swedish events, and is a delegate and organizer of Swedish Workshop on Exploratory Testing.

Developers Exploratory Testing - Raising the bar - Sigge Birgisson

There is a common practice in our company to perform Developers Exploratory Testing (DET) sessions. The cool thing is that this way of performing higher level testing has actually become accepted by our developers, and they really enjoy it.

In my current work of developing our organization wide practices for quality, I have made a deep dive into how DET is carried out on a regular basis. What I have seen is that DET is accepted and acknowledged as a valuable practice, however it is not really carried out in its full potential. There are many details and aspects of it to work on, especially regarding reporting and follow-up.

This talk will gather my learnings from coaching many of our different development teams in their DET sessions. Some improvements are achieved just by carrying out ET in a better way, but there are also specifics about the involvement of the whole team, including stakeholders, testing together that give alot of value back to the project.

Sigge Birgisson is a software testing consultant at Jayway. He is a dedicated tester with very strong feelings for the agile values and principles, always having the user in mind when carefully testing a product without wasting resources on unnecessary things. Sigge also believes in effective communication as one of the strongest tools in the testers toolbox, used in all aspects of testing the product at hand. Sigge has been involved in many different types of projects, but mostly within the agile setting with close cooperation with developers as a key to success.

As a speaker, Sigge has held several presentations and facilitated workshops internally at Jayway as well as presentations on software testing for students at the university. He also attended SWET2 and SWET 3. Trying to keep up with new testing practices, Sigge is an active blogger and follows many discussions on software testing and agile practices on twitter @siggeb

“Testing Lessons from the Rolling Stones” - Simon Morley

Getting nearer to excellent testing by understanding decision analysis and frames connected to both the product and the project.

Good testing starts not only with getting to know the product but also the perspectives of the stakeholders, as well as everyone else involved with the project of delivering a working product.
Understanding why stakeholders focus on one area, why testers might adopt certain testing patterns, why developers think in a certain way about their needs helps the tester:
– Get to some of the root issues for the product and project
– Communicate in a more congruent way
– Test and communicate about testing in an excellent manor
This experience report will look at examples of the above, with ideas on avoiding traps related to “Silent Evidence”, “Test case counting” and “Confirmatory Testing”, amongst others.
Move from: “playing with fire” and your “19th nervous breakdown” and get closer to “satisfaction”…

Simon has worked with professional software testing since 1992, as tester, team leader and coordinator, thinks of himself as an emergent learner and divergent thinker. He actively expands his variety of sources to improve the way he and others think about testing and test leadership, which he considers an activity at the crossroads of the social sciences, prize-winning investigative journalism and humility. He believes in good testing – grounded in the idea that we search for questions appropriate to the problem. Occasional speaker, occasional blogger, constant learner. Blogs at http://testers-headache.blogspot.com/
Tweets at @YorkyAbroad

“Effect Managing IT - a Kick-Ass Tool for Testers” - Torbjorn Ryber

Far too often I find myself listening to detailed discussion of how we are going to solve a problem before the actual problem is fully known. I frequently interrupt and ask the question.
“Before we decide if you need a bunch of radio buttons here. Tell us what you really want do achieve”. Because users don’t need a specific button, they need to solve a problem – or , as we describe it, get a desired effect! The method supports the work of identifying stakeholders and what they want to achieve. It is all about context. What person in what situation wants to solve what problem? Work from outside in instead of inside-out. The effect map serves as an invaluable tool for requirements work, design and high-level testing.
– Description of the model
– Keeping the User focus
– Examples of where I have used the techniques
– Tips and tricks for getting really good at this

Torbjörn Ryber has been an active member of the Swedish test community for ten years. He is the author of Essential Software Test Design and a well known speaker. He spent five years as member of the SAST board in Stockholm, three as chairman. As an eager learner and teacher he started the first Swedish peer conference START and is an active member of SWET that focus on Exploratory Testing.

“Making the Case for Aesthetics” - Zeger van Hese

Art and testing may look like an odd couple. Glenford Myers combined both in his book “The Art of Software Testing”, but his art referred only to skill and mastery, not to an aesthetic experience. More recently, Robert Austin and Lee Devin published “Artful making” which addressed software development and its resemblance to art.
This got me thinking: what about artful testing? What happens when we infuse testing with aesthetics? Can the fine arts in any way support or complement our testing efforts?
With some surprising examples, I’ll illustrate that they can. Good testing should be artful, in so many ways.

Zeger Van Hese has a background in Commercial Engineering and Cultural Science. He started his professional career in the motion picture industry but switched to IT in 1999. A year later he got bitten by the software testing bug (pun intended) and has never been cured since. He is a test manager at CTG, and has a passion for exploratory testing, testing in agile projects and, above all, continuous learning from different perspectives. Zeger considers himself a lifelong student of the software testing craft. He is co-founder of the Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing (DEWT) and muses about testing on his TestSideStory blog. He is co-author of CTG’s STBoX Agile flavor, and a regular speaker at national and international conferences. Contrary to popular belief, he looks both ways when crossing a one-way street.