Sunday 14 January 2018

CEWT #5 Abstracts

The fifth Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing, CEWT #5, will be on 28th January 2018, hosted by Linguamatics. The topic is
Theory Over Practice or Practice Over Theory? 
and here's the abstracts:

Sneha Bhat and James Thomas, Theoreticus Prime vs  Praktikertron
There is a perceived tension between theory and practice, and between theorists and practitioners. In this talk, we will propose and illustrate using a practical example that practice generates data and theory is the data which we care about. Rather than focusing on theory over practice or practice over theory, a choice of theory, practice, or both is driven by the data needed for a particular task and contextual factors. (slides)

Aleksander Simic, The alternation

Am I more practical or theoretical person? Do I find the theory helpful? Do I know when and how to apply it? How do I learn by doing? These are some of the question I'll try to answer based on the recent events.

Karo Stoltzenburg, Are Your Lights On?

Theory over practice or practice over theory? I won't give you a definite answer to apply (always! in every context!), but rather would like to invite you to explore the question itself with me. We can look into the definitions of theory and practice, wonder what our stakeholders might be, think about analogies in testing activities and question which problem we're trying to solve here. (slides)

Alan Wallace, Practice over training or training over practice?

I’m a competitive Masters swimmer. Swimming is pretty much entirely learnt by doing, most often when we are children. Adults are hard to teach to swim partly because they want to understand the theory, but like riding a bike I can’t really explain to you how to balance your body even if I can tell you the basic mechanics of how a particular swimming stroke works. So, we don’t really spend much time on theory, but we do a lot of time practising skills in the form of training for comparatively brief periods where we are actually competing and try to ensure all that training wasn’t for nothing. Whereas in the work place, my experience has been that we spend most of our time competing. We try to fit in some learning theory, but very rarely do we spend time training. Is this ok? Should we spend more time training?

Milosz Wasilewsk, Theory and practice moving from waterfall to agile

The talk is based on my experience when producing software for mobile phones. It will deal with idea of changing the software development paradigm from waterfall to agile. I will try to compare assumptions and outcome of the change. Social aspect of the change will also be discussed.

Neil Younger, Know one line

I’ll be drawing on my experience learning to ride a unicycle and comparing it against that of teaching others to ride. You might think it’s all about the practice and I’ll be exploring this while posing such questions as ‘does size matter’. This talk won’t give you answers but will aim to make you think about how you learn and how that might not always be the best way.