TestCon Vilnius 2018
Independent consultant, UK
Dorothy Graham
Dorothy Graham has been in software testing for over 40 years, and is co-author of 4 books: Software Inspection, Software Test Automation, Foundations of Software Testing and Experiences of Test Automation. With Seretta Gamba, she is working on the wiki TestAutomationPatterns.org.
Dot has been on the boards of conferences and publications in software testing, including programme chair for EuroStar (twice). She was a founder member of the ISEB Software Testing Board and helped develop the first ISTQB Foundation Syllabus. She is a popular and entertaining speaker at conference and events worldwide.
She was awarded the European Excellence Award in Software Testing in 1999 and the first ISTQB Excellence Award in 2012.
Talk #1
Blunders in Test Automation
In chess, the word blunder means a very bad move by someone who should know better. Even though system-level functional test automation has been around for a long time, people still make some very bad moves and serious blunders. The most common misconception in automation is thinking that manual testing is the same as automated testing. And this thinking accounts for most of the blunders in system level test automation. Dorothy Graham takes us on a tour of these blunders, including: Testing-Tools-Test, Silver Bullet, Automating the Wrong Thing, Who Needs GPS, How Hard Can It Be, the Stable-Application Myth, Inside-the-Box Thinking, the Project/Non-Project Dilemma, and Isolationism. Different skills, approaches, and objectives are needed or you’ll end up with inefficient automation, high maintenance costs, and wasted effort. Join Dot to discover how you can avoid these common blunders and achieve valuable system-level test automation.
Talk #2
The Tester’s 3 C’s: Criticism, Communication and Confidence
The Tester’s 3 C’s: Criticism, Communication and Confidence.
Communication in agile teams is supposed to be seamless and much better than the “old days”. Whether you are in an independent testing team and need to communicate more formally, or communicating face-to-face in an agile context, how can you be effective when you are sometimes telling people what they don’t want to hear? What do testers do? They are critics, often of other people’s work; they need to communicate their findings successfully with confidence. In this talk, Dorothy Graham looks at what criticism is, its different types and “DASR”, an effective script for giving criticism (technical or otherwise). Knowing how we respond to being criticized also gives useful insight into criticizing others. Dot covers different types and styles of communication, including Virginia Satir’s communication interaction model, illustrated with an example. Self-confidence can make a large difference in our effectiveness as a critical (in the best sense of the word) tester; both under-confidence and over-confidence can be damaging, but there are ways to overcome it.
Key points:
– criticism is what testers do; it is important to understand how it feels to be criticised and how to criticise well
– the way in which we communicate is crucial to interpersonal interactions
– the right level of confidence is needed to be an effective tester