Working Ourselves Out of a Job – A Passion for Improvement
Isabel Evans
Independent Software Testing Consultant
This paper asks what is the purpose of a tester?
Are we really needed? Should we be needed?
If everything went well, if no-one made mistakes, if nothing needed improving, then testing and testers would not be needed.
We only need testers because people make mistakes.
What if we concentrated on preventing the mistakes instead of finding them after they have been made?
This paper was the winner of the Best Paper at the EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference Awards in 2010.
Browse all the EuroSTAR Best Paper winners here. Check out this year’s EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference.
About Me!
Isabel Evans has nearly thirty years of experience in the IT industry, mainly in quality management and testing in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her areas of expertise are software quality management, software testing, teamwork, and training. Since the mid-1980s, her quality management work has focused on encouraging IT teams and customers to work together, delivering results via flexible, customer-focused, risk- and test-driven processes designed and tailored by the teams that will use them.
Her work for the BCS SIGiST Standards Working Party focused on quality attributes, especially usability.
Isabel is a popular speaker at software quality conferences worldwide and has been a member of several working groups for industry improvement. Her publications include the book “Achieving Software Quality Through Teamwork” and Chapters in “Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment”; “The Testing Practitioner” and “Foundations of Software Testing”.
Isabel is a Chartered IT Professional and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.