Software Process Improvement Network
(A-SPIN)
Four Schools of Software Testing,
by Bret Pettichord
Overview:
Testing experts often disagree. Why? It's not because of personality, but because different testers have different understandings of the role and mission of software testing. This session presents four schools of software testing, each with a different understanding of the purpose and foundation of testing.
One school sees testing as based on mathematics. Another sees it as an activity that needs to be planned and managed. A third sees it as a basis for understanding and improving software process. The fourth sees it as an intelligence service, providing actionable information. These all sound reasonable enough, but each insight has provided the foundation for a school of testing, and the establishment of hierarchies of values.
Attend this thought-provoking talk and learn more about these four schools, and the kinds of debates that tend to arise between them. You may find that you have colleagues and managers orienting from these different schools. Bret is a founding member of the context-driven school of testing and developed this presentation as a way of explaining how his school differs from others.
About the Speaker:
Bret helps teams improve their software testing and test automation. His software testing philosophy is context-driven, focusing on good relations with developers and agile methods that get results with a minimum of documentation. As principal of Pettichord Consulting LLC, he offers consulting and training.
Bret co-authored, with Cem Kaner and James Bach, ''Lessons Learned in Software Testing,'' a Jolt Award finalist. He is host and founder of the Austin Workshop on Test Automation and edits TestingHotlist.com which is frequently cited as a top ten web site for software testing. He also writes for Software Testing and Quality Engineering magazine and Stickyminds.com. Articles about his work have appeared in Application Development Trends and The Rational Edge. Based in Austin, Bret consults for leading software companies across the United States and speaks at conferences world-wide. His clients include Sterling Commerce, Research Systems (Kodak), Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, National Credit Union Administration, Texas Department of Human Services, Deloitte Consulting, Radview, Tonic, Texas Instruments, Whisperwire, Rational Software and Lucent Technologies.
Bret Pettichord, Software Tester
Book - www.testinglessons.com
Consulting - www.pettichord.com
Blog - www.io.com/~wazmo/blog
Hotlist - www.testinghotlist.com