1. Understanding the true, practical and pragmatic side of testing.
2. Learning about techniques that are proven working in practice.
3. Learn to use the power of modeling, exploration, experimentation and questioning.

My profession is software testing and by that I don’t mean mindless clicking on UI elements, nor comparing result to predefined expected states. When I talk about testing or perform testing or teach testing I always think of it as a scientific activity, process of evaluation of quality, exploration, of questioning, modeling, experimentation, risk assessment and gathering of information in general. In other words, I take software testing very, very seriously! I come from a non-technical background - linguistics and I am very happy about it, since it provides me with a unique perspective and a lot of diverse experience which is always something that is beneficial in software testing. In my previous experience as a software tester I was involved in many different projects related to mobile testing, testing of software products in the telco area, integration testing, test automation (even though I prefer the term “tool assisted testing”). In general I am interested not only in the technical, but also in the scientific part of testing and its relation to other sciences like epistemology, system thinking, logic, problem solving, psychology and sociology. I am currently also a part-time lecturer in software testing academy called Pragmatic, on topics related to exploratory testing, mobile testing and non-functional testing. In my free time I like reading books, playing MMORPG games and practicing Japanese martial arts. If you are interested on my views on testing and want to read some more of my thoughts, you can visit my blog: http://mrslavchev.com

Listening to testing presentations and reading testing blogs and books might leave you with the false impression that testing is easy, well organized, structured and perfectly fits in time. The problem is it is not. We all want to have perfect documentation, perfect environment, plenty of time to run our tests, transparent management decisions that will back our testing up and help the project run smoothly and tools, to facilitate most of our job, so we perform more efficient… but these are all dreams.

The difference between testing in books, blogs and presentations and real life is like the difference between a walk in the park and trying to survive with limited resources in the middle of the amazon jungle.

Testing in real life is surviving in a hostile and high risk environment – hard, complex, unfair and we have to fit in the smallest amount of time possible to deliver our input on a project.

Often the following problems occur:

• We lack time
• We lack testers
• We lack documentation and / or knowledge about the product
• We lack tools or budget for them or time to use them effectively
• Company we work for is low on budget
• We’re under serious pressure

As you can see, there’s plenty of factors, sometimes combined, sometimes all of them at once, that try to take us down. In order to be useful we need to develop a strategy that is flexible and adaptive enough to work in extreme circumstances.

This session forms part of a conversation track on Monday afternoon.