Nyheder – Page 2 – ASYM APS – IT Quality and Safety

I'll be at Let's Test Oz in Sydney in September

DSC_0540A I’ll take a 22 hour flight Copenhagen to Sydney in September, where the fourth Let’s Test conference and the first Let’s Test Oz will be held at a resort in Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Austrailia.

The conference programme was announced a while ago, and it’s pretty awesome. I’ve attended and spoken twice at Let’s Test in Stockholm. I’m sure the Oz-edition will be as fantastic as its Stockholm counterpart.

I haven’t yet decided on my program, but I’m looking forward to Fiona Charles’ keynote by Fiona Charles and her workshop on leadership
But there’s a lot of promising stuff in the programme

I insist that testing is and should be a value adding activity. As testers, we’re not just finding other people’s mistakes; we make a positive contribution to the project with the knowledge we are collecting in our testing.

To do great testing takes clever thinking, and clever thoughts never live in isolation. They’re shared, bounced and developed into great ideas. Let’s Test is an inspirering conference, a place where great ideas develop, and that’s why I like the conference so much.

My own contribution to the programme this year is a session about politics called “All is fair in love and war”. I commit to context driven testing, but testing can be a driver for change as well. I find that a key to do it is to do clever politics on top of the knowledge we have and collect in testing. Some testers have grown to hate politics, but politics can help us, if we use it wisely: With an ethical standpoint, and with a sound vision of what we want to achieve.

Twice has Let’s Test refuelled my capabilities as a tester, a test leader, a test manager, and a test analyst. Twice has Let’s Test inspired me and given me new friends and acquaintances. I’m looking forward to my third Let’s Test, this time down under, where I expect to meet some great testers from the southern hemisphere, take time for a good talk, do some testing, have a beer or two, take a walk in nature…

You can register for Let’s Test Oz here.

Let’s Test Conference is the first conference in Europe on context driven testing – it looks like it will be a really great event. I’ll be there, speaking on day 2 about one of my favorite subjects: Black swans – things that happen, even though everyone thinks they can’t:

Nassim Taleb introduced the concept of Black Swans in his influental 2007 book: Rare events, in principle extremely unlikely, but very dangerous – and they occur much more often than we expect.IT incidents are true Black Swans. Incidents are tricky to test for, and this is probably why they are rarely treated exploratorily in testing.
I would like to see that change, since with increasing complexity and the ubiqtous nature of IT systems, failures in todays’ IT systems are much more consequential than they used to be, and incidents are frequently the cause of great losses; in some systems they even put human lives at risk.
I will present my view on the ”art” of testing for system incidents. My view diverts fundamentally from the non-functional tests, robustness tests, and performance tests which are often carried out. Instead, and based on a systems perspective, I will introduce heuristics and models which will allow explorative testing and learning – even in the Black Swan Domain. There are no bullet proof ways to do it, but by understanding the nature of incidents and by being able to identify vulnerabilities in the context in which testing is taking place, I beleive that you as a tester will be better able to focus your exploration and observation on what’s important: The system vulnerabilities.

Let’s meet there!