SIGiST Israel Year Conference 2008

Great show again.

For 4 days, SIGiST have put a testing show that exceeded last year by far. With more than 230 participants, 51 companies, 7 tutorials (1-2 days course), the Israeli forum for Testing - SIGiST Israel - have organized the biggest independent testing professional conference in Israel so far.

There were 2 days of professional courses, like performance & load in action, TPI, offshore testing risks and approaches, how to write test cases from requirements phase to end of test design, data base testing, and more. more than 85 people participated!

On the next 2 days, there were 3 parallel tracks on various topics: test management, test design techniques, test automation, test methodology.

Interesting sessions that made a unique appearance and interest in my eyes were of Debi Zylbermann, of Dr. Avi Ofer about metrics, and Dakar Shalom about BPT. you will be able to read about those on www.sigist.org.il in a few days probably.

Another improvement in this conference is that conference participants will be able to download any lecture - as they were audio recorded in sync with slides. Using a Webcast tool by SELA Group, a unique effort was done recording 28 hours of presentations - covering all track sessions. 28 hours of recording were done during the last 2 days, with 22-24 presentations to choose from.

Others, non participants, like SIGiST members and any person interested, will have to pay some amount. I was assured by SELA that SIGiST members will by asked to pay a symbolic amount only for that great service.

Now if you were in the conference, and missed the presentation you heard later on about good things, you can download and hear/see it with speakers voice and Q&A session at the end! What a great improvement for the conference services, and the testing community.

Awards: best presentation award was won by Danny Kovach, expert in Agile/Scrum for his presentation about the role of QA engineer and QA manager in an Agile world. Among the 3 best presentations were also Debi Zylbermann and Michael Stahl.

Sponsors were : QualiSystems, Aqua SW, Microsoft, RadView, iSQI, ITCB, SELA Group. Supporting organizations were: D&H, Testing Experience (magazine), Testing & Finance, Conquest, Gasq.

Who says testers needs to know programming?

In the last couple of talks I had with a few testing colleagues of mine, I found out that some persisted that testers will be trained in the future with programming skills as a must in their portfolio. They presented a job activity request that testers will be engaged in code inspection, in root cause analysis of problems in the code and finding patterns of problems in the future. All of that plus test automation in code level.

Are we or should we go into that direction? Maybe: we [testers] are known as people who like to know more, want to find how to break things and build them better [improving processes]. But, the simple truth is that we are also interested in systems thinking and systems view, and NOT going into code is something I saw attracting testers into the profession many times in my career.

Testers are specializing in systems testing; they are familiar with the system architecture, requirements, and studied the processes and end to end scenarios that are possible from client perspective - all clients profiles are relevant not just the ones that are most common. So, I can say that these testers are not less professionals, representing the client perspective, are capable or testing the product with its many aspects.

Do we need to go into a future where every tester needs to know programming? I do not believe so. But, we should have some testers do that – I suggest they shall be the ones having the most technical tendency. Some others with a more process orientation, and wide system view should keep on doing mainly what they have been doing so far – kick the hell out of the system’s processes.

So, to summarize our discussion (or is it just a beginning...), in my eyes we shall probably need two kinds of testers in the future:

Technical approach – a tester that would have to know code, be involved in a more close relationship with the developers, knows how to read code, and try to influence developers in testing better (with their code).

Customer-like approach – a tester that would have to know the product on a super customer level, knows the different architecture and design aspects, the end to end possible scenarios or customer stories, that the customer might exercise with the product.

Both approaches may be going hand in hand, enableing us to get from detection to prevention when exercising the testing profession.