Abstract/Description

Software is full of surprises. No matter how careful you are when writing code, it can behave differently than you intended. Exploratory testing mitigates those risks. Exploring is especially important to detect unexpected side effects on large, complex systems where it simply is not possible to reason through all the implications of a given change nor can automated tests cover all the interesting permutations. This session explains in detail how we use exploratory testing on Cloud Foundry at Pivotal. We have dedicated explorers who rotate through development teams, but everyone on the team explores. Programmers pair with explorers on executing charters, and explorers pair with programmers on feature delivery. We use charters to organize our exploratory efforts; PMs prioritize those charters in backlogs along with other stories. Along the way we’ll contrast the way we explore on Cloud Foundry with other styles of integrating exploratory testing into an Agile team.

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About the Speaker(s)

Elisabeth is responsible for the development of Pivotal's big data solutions. Previously at Pivotal, Elisabeth worked both with Pivotal Labs and on Cloud Foundry. She brings that combination of agile, cloud, and devops experience to the big data products. Under her leadership, the R&D teams have successfully transitioned to an agile, iterative approach, shipping releases of our enterprise-class data products on a frequent cadence. Early in her career, Elisabeth worked at Sybase, where she developed a love of all things Data. Elisabeth is a recognized as a leader in Agile software development and received the prestigious Gordon Pask Award from the Agile Alliance. She is the author of Explore It! from Pragmatic Bookshelf.