Cambridge Meetup - Adam Knight: "Fractal Exploratory Testing"

The Cambridge Tester Meetup Group will start in the new year with a bang - we're very happy to have Adam Knight, Director of QA and Support at Teradata RainStor, come and talk about "Fractal Exploratory Testing"!

The talk will be followed by discussion, pizza and drinks.

Many thanks to Adam for coming down from Cheltenham, and to Linguamatics for hosting and sponsoring the event!

Will be looking forward to see you all there!

What: "Fractal Exploratory Testing"

I've been running the testing in my organisation using a thread-based exploratory approach for some years now. I often find myself in the position of having to explain the benefits of such an approach to folks who may work outside testing, or may simply be unfamiliar with exploratory approaches. Since 2013 I've been using a model of "Fractal Exploratory Testing" as an easy and attractive means to present the relative benefits of treating testing as an exploratory activity over one that can be prescribed. A fractal model provides a surprisingly elegant structure for describing the recursively generating investigative activities that comprise an exploratory testing approach and visualising how these naturally focus themselves around the risk areas of a software development.

In this talk we'll look at the nature of exploration using some of the popular structures and examples that have been effectively used in the past to demonstrate the benefits of exploration. We'll see how any exploration will not be defined by a single activity, but by a recursively nested set of activities that can be defined at increasingly precise levels of scope and focus. I'll explain how the structures that are used to define exploratory activities can be seen to exhibit characteristics of fractal recursivity. By examining in the context of those characteristics we can look at the various levels at which testing activities can be defined and use the model as a vehicle for discussion some profound concepts around the nature of testing, the definition of test strategy and the creation of testing teams.

Who: About Adam Knight

Adam Knight has been testing data storage and analysis software for 10 years, and in his current role at Teradata RainStor has overseen the testing and technical support of a large scale data storage system from its initial release through to successful adoption in some of the largest telecommunication and financial services companies in the world. Adam is an enthusiastic exponent of exploratory testing approaches backed by discerning use of automation. He is a great believer in creating multi-skilled teams based on rich and unique individual skill sets. Adam has spoken on Agile, Exploration and Big Data at numerous testing conferences including EuroStar and Agile Testing Days. He has contributed to popular testing books "Specification by Example" by Gojko Adzic, and "More Agile Testing" by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory. He writes at www.a-sisyphean-task.com (http://www.a-sisyphean-task.com/).

Sponsor: About Linguamatics

Linguamatics is a world-leader in deploying innovative natural language processing (NLP)-based text mining for high-value knowledge discovery and decision support. We aim to produce software and solutions to help the pharma-biotech and healthcare industries speed up the drug-discovery cycle and improve patient outcomes. In 2014, due to our success, we won the Queen's Award for Enterprise in International Trade. We are now actively hiring: https://www.linguamatics.com/about-us/jobs