Testing Inspiration When You Least Expect It

Adam Goucher

My Uncle once said that he knew that he understood French when he stopped having to do translations to English in his head first. The really good testers have all undergone a similar epiphany when they realize that ideas and inspiration for testing are everywhere. Based on my successful CAST 2008 talk, I will outline a number of testing lessons I have learned about testing from doing things completely outside the scope of testing.

These include, but are not necessarily limited to:

Being a lacrosse coach

Fixing my dryer

Building a shed

That annoying wobble in the front end of the car

By the end of it, your eyes will be opened to the wealth of ideas that you experience every day, but hadn't noticed before.

Biography:

Adam Goucher has been testing software professionally for over ten years. In that time he has worked with start-ups, large multi-nationals and ones in between in both traditional and agile testing environments. A believer in the communication of ideas big and small, he writes frequently at http://adam.goucher.ca and co-edited the anthology 'Beautiful Testing' by O'Reilly Media. Based in Toronto, he coaches and trains individuals and teams on Agile Testing and Selenium Automation.