Buzzwords and skills Importance of basic tester skills: the revival of testdesign techniques

Better software quality by learning basic skills of testing: the revival of testdesign techniques

I love agile! And I love (agile) testing! But I am worried at the same time: there is a lot of noise on buzzwords which is not focused on the core of our profession.

Rahul Verma talked about this at Agile Testing USA last year in his "the last keynote on testing". There is much more value to uncover and learn even in the fundamental test design techniques. He called upon the experts in the room to share the applications of techniques with the community.

Pete Walen and I immediately sat up straight during the keynote and got together after that talk because it resonated with us so much. With this talk I am joining the movement Rahul started: it is time for the revival of test design techniques! We need to help testers learn important skills to design better experiments and become experts is test design. A good example is state transition testing. Everybody heard of it, but not many people actually know how to do it well. And it is super important to know how to test state machines, because state machines are everywhere!

In this talk I want to share my vision and many practical handles for everybody working in software development. How can teams set up their testing focussed to do testing more quickly, less expensively, with excellent results? To get there we need to see the what the fundamental basics of testing are: what mindset and what skills we are talking about? And how can you learn/train/practice them?