Ilari Henrik Aegerter

Ilari Henrik Aegerter's formal studies have brought him from General Linguistics and Sociology to Software Engineering and Software Testing. Coming from the medical software domain at Phonak AG and progressing to e-commerce at eBay. He is now the Managing Director of House of Test GmbH and he believes that there is still a lot of work to be done for excellent software testing. In 2013 he co-founded the International Society for Software Testing (ISST), which advocates for bringing back common sense to testing. In 2015 he was elected into the board of the Association for Software Testing (AST) where he acts as Vice President. He is also a lecturer at the HSR technical university for the post-graduate course CAS Software Testing.

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.