Exploratory Testing for Complex Software; Lessons from Cloud Foundry

In modern software development organizations, the days are gone when separate, independent Quality Assurance departments test software only after it is finished. Iterative development and agile methods mean that software is constantly being created, tested, released, marketed, and used in short, tight cycles. An important testing approach in such an environment is called Exploratory Testing, and the Wikimedia Foundation has made significant investments to support Exploratory Testing for its software development projects.

Elisabeth Hendrickson is "test obsessed". She was an early adopter and vocal proponent of all aspects of agile software testing. She has been particularly instrumental in encouraging and defining the practice of Exploratory Testing. Elisabeth's 2013 book "Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing" is the standard reference on the subject.

Join us in the Wikimedia Foundation collaboration space to hear Elisabeth discuss her experience doing software testing for complex projects, with particular examples of Exploratory Testing from her current work as Director of Quality Engineering for Cloud Foundry.

This talk is for everyone involved in the overall quality of software, and it will be of particular interest to Project Managers, Product Managers, and those working with software development projects who do not necessarily contribute code directly to the projects.

Speaker:

Elisabeth Hendrickson is a tester, developer, and Agile enabler. She wrote her first line of code in 1980, and almost immediately found her first bug. In 2010 she won the prestigious Gordon Pask Award from the Agile Alliance. She is best known for her Google Tech Talk on Agile Testing as well as her wildly popular Test Heuristics Cheatsheet. In 2003, she learned how to do Agile for real from Pivotal Labs while working as a tester on one of their projects. In 2012 she decided it was time to take up permanent residence in the Pivotal offices, where she is the Director of Quality Engineering for Cloud Foundry, Pivotal's Open Source Platform as a Service (PaaS).