Who Are We? What Are We Doing? How Are We Doing It? An Exploration of Testers’ Stories About Test Tools and Automation
Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
After years as a software tester, Isabel Evans decided to expand her horizons by becoming a student and researching testing, She wanted to explore testers’ experiences with the tools and automation they use. Her findings so far provide an insight into the usability and human issues that impede success with tools and automation, and also show the large range of people’s backgrounds before they come into testing.
In this eBook, you will explore and learn about the complexity of testers’ multi-tasking roles means that designing tools for testers, automation for testers, and approaches for testers to use, is not easy. Here Isabel is embarking on the next stages of her research. She is asking simple questions: Who are we testers? Where do we come from? What are we doing? And how are we doing it? The answers are not as straightforward as we might think. However they should feed into development of personas and other models that could inform better tool design, with a better UX for the testers. They also feed into a better understanding of each other, of the diversity in our community of testers, and help us engage with each other – because not everyone doing testing is a tester, and not everyone working in IT is an engineer. Here Isabel shares some of the results that she has gathered from her research so far.
Key Takeaways:
- Explore how test Automators think about Automation
- Learn why people are more important than tools in Automation
- Understand what Testers think about Usability of Tools.
Check out other test management related resources in EuroSTAR Huddle.
About Me!
Independent quality and testing consultant Isabel Evans has more than thirty years of IT experience in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her work focuses on quality management, software testing, and user experience (UX). A published author, popular speaker and storyteller at software conferences worldwide, Isabel is a Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of the British Computer Society, and received the 2017 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award. In parallel with her consultancy and teaching in industry, Isabel Evans is studying part-time as a PhD student at the Department of Computer Information Systems, University of Malta, working with Dr Chris Porter and Dr Mark Micallef on research in human factors for Software Testing. Within that, her current research project is to examine human factors around test tools and the automation of testing, in particular, the UX of test tools for testers. Isabel was programme chair for the HUSTEF 2018 conference in Budapest, and is the programme chair for EuroSTAR 2019 conference which takes place in Prague, November 2019.