1. How to stop guessing and start knowing, and how to start getting to big data with small steps.

A free-lancing tester currently coaching transformation into data driven testing at the Swedish Police Authority. Been consulting within test and agile for the last 5 years and prior to that worked as test engineer and leader at a major medtech company.

When was the last time you used your log files for something other than a reference to go back and look at when you have noticed something going wrong?
Our product’s logs are a gold mine for the hungry tester’s mind. The product/test interface gives the result of the test cases performed, whereas the log file gives the results of all the tests we didn’t run explicitly. Parsing a log file is like piggybacking on the back of your user, see what she sees, and where she is lost. In our experience, harnessing the power of log files and instrumentation made us go from guessing and repairing to beeing proactive and data driven .

Through testing, we provide information on the value of the product to our stake holders. We need real data for this examination. Fortunately, as services and applications are increasingly online, this real-life data is not that hard to get. Often it is sitting right there, just not in a way we are used to look at it. Let’s take a while to look at the ins and outs of log file analysis, and see where we can find the synergies between all kinds of areas, such as user analysis, performance testing, AB testing and error reproduction.