Wim Decoutere
Wim Decoutere started his testing career at CTG Belgium over 17 years ago and has been testing at a number of companies, mostly in the financial sector. He’s passionate about teaching and feels at home when standing in front of a classroom. A couple of years ago, he became a full-time trainer, coaching and teaching about the wonderful world of testing but also ISTQB, IREB, IQBBA, test design techniques, soft skills, etc…
As a veteran youth instructor with a passion for learning theories and people management, Wim is constantly looking for new ideas to improve his own performance and that of the entire test team.
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28 November
What’s your Test Design Debt? Avoid the Inevitable!
As projects and companies grow, so does their number of test cases and thus the number of duplicate, inconsistent, and irrelevant test cases. Every change in the system requires a massive effort from all testing resources to update these test cases, which inevitably leads to more test design debt, if not done accurately. For some companies this task has become such a burden that they rather take a fresh start, throwing away years and years of work.
Where did we go wrong? When did our test design debt grow to a peak that would scare even the most experienced mountaineers? Why didn’t we see this coming? But most important, what can we do about it, without having to start over from scratch? And how can we avoid test design debt in the future?
In my talk I will introduce the concept of test design debt and explain several techniques on how to create more lightweight test cases with the same level of detail and coverage as your current test cases. I will elaborate some best practices on how to update your current backlog of manual test cases to increase the maintainability with a minimal amount of effort.
Are you curious to know more? Join me to learn more about test case maintainability.
27 November - Full Day
Workshop: Collaborative Test Design
Collaborative user story writing, review discussions, pair testing, crowd testing, etc.
Testers are working more and more with others to achieve higher levels of quality for the products they help deliver, yet there is one activity in the test process that testers keep doing alone. Whether you are determining your equivalence classes, setting up your decision tables or struggling with n-switch coverage for your state transition diagram, typically it is just you by yourself trying to uncover the required test cases for an item under test. Even if you are part of a team of testers, you still split up the work, each tester being responsible for his or her assigned part of functionality. You might review or execute your colleagues’ work, yet that is not real collaboration. Everybody knows that when people work together, the sum is often greater than its parts, so why do we keep designing tests all alone? Traditional test design techniques seem to be created for solo application, so where to find the tunes to sing a different song?
In this workshop, we want to answer the question on how to design great tests together with your peers. We present different techniques, which you will also learn to apply to experience yourself how well each new technique suits your needs. Since cooperation does not come out of a can from a vending machine, we will not only focus on the results, but also on setting the required context for collaborative test design. All by doing and experiencing yourselves!
So what are you waiting for? Now is your chance to expand your test design tool case(s) with techniques that you can practice with the whole team. Let’s make testing even more fun!
