No More Shelfware—Let’s Drive

[presentation]
by
Isabel Evans
Summary: 

When Isabel Evans learned to drive a car, she also learned how to check, clean, and change spark plugs, mend the fan belt with a stocking, and indicate speed and direction changes with arm and hand signals. Now, we don’t expect to have to do any of those things; we just drive the car. That’s how test tools and automation could be. Just drive and concentrate on the journey of delivering software continuously—concentrate on engineering the solutions, not on the automation. To be effective engineers, we need the support of a powerful toolset that we understand. Is that what we have? Or do we still have shelfware sitting around expensively doing nothing, because we don’t know how to "clean the spark plugs"? Can we remove the difficulties and make using test automation a better experience, just like driving a car? Isabel researched testers’ experiences of their toolsets and automation to identify what issues exist and whether it is possible to improve the behavior and enjoyment of using these tools. Join Isabel as she shares ideas about applying UX to tools acquisition, and learn a way of assessing the user/tester experience (UX/TX) of test tools.

About the Presenter

Independent quality and testing consultant Isabel Evans has more than thirty years of IT experience in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her work focuses on quality management, software testing, and user experience (UX). Isabel authored Achieving Software Quality through Teamwork and chapters in Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment , The Testing Practitioner , and Foundations of Software Testing . A popular speaker and storyteller at software conferences worldwide, Isabel is a fellow of the British Computer Society and a twenty-year member of software industry improvement working groups, and she received the 2017 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award. Connect with Isabel on LinkedIn, Twitter, or her website.

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