Eric Proegler
Eric Proegler has worked in testing for 20 years. He is a Director of Test Engineering for Medidata Solutions in San Francisco, California.
Eric is the President of the Association for Software Testing. He is also the lead organizer for WOPR, the Workshop on Performance and Reliability. He’s presented and facilitated at CAST, Agile, TestBash Brighton, Jenkins World, STARWEST, Oredev, STPCon, PNSQC, WOPR, CodeFest, OWST, and STiFS. He sometimes podcasts about Software Performance with the PerfBytes crew at www.perfbytes.com
In his free time, Eric spends time with family, travels, runs a science fiction book club, sees a lot of stand-up comedy and live music, seeks out street food from all over, and follows professional basketball.
Effective Software Testing: Avoiding False Dichotomies and Fake Consensus
Software Testing is a young discipline and as with many new things, it is not yet fully understood. Is software testing a technical problem to be solved by engineering solutions? What exactly is the goal of testing? What can you do to become a world-class tester?
A world-class tester understands that we are confronted with a techno-human system and that our goal as testers is to extract and deliver information about the product in a way that helps stakeholders to make the right decisions. Having said that, it does not make a lot of sense to distinguish between manual and automated testing as this categorization is not very helpful.
It’s also not helpful to make broad pronouncements about how to “correctly” perform software development and testing. No two software projects are identical. The project’s context - the people working on the project, their skills and personalities, the timelines, the industry, the customers, the company culture, the team culture, the stakeholders, the revenue model - these vary wildly from project to project, changing the circumstances under which we work.
Skilled craftspeople familiarize themselves with a variety of tools, studying the situation before selecting the tool most appropriate for the situation. Testing effectively requires similar engagement with understanding the circumstances, and then choosing the methods and tools appropriate for the context.
Ilari Henrik Aegerter presents a model of software testing that takes both engineering and social aspects into consideration, and Eric Proegler talks about varying approaches to test effectively across multiple contexts. A lively discussion during the presentation is very welcome.
