CEWT #7 Reflections

Posts about CEWT #7:

• In One Sentence, Define Quality, Bug, Testing
• We Don't Know?
• Dirty Testing Secrets: Testing in Half the Time?
• CEWT #7 Lean Coffee
• Dishing the Dirt

CEWT #7 Abstracts

The seventh Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing, CEWT #7, will be on 24th November 2019, hosted by DisplayLink. The topic is

Dirty Testing Secrets

Here's the abstracts:

Mark Bunce, The Secret of Machine Learning

If you believe the hype and media buzz you’d think we have well and truly entered a new evolutionary age of artificial intelligence.  Machine Learning is a hot-topic in many business domains and it is often seen as the magic wand that will quickly solve all problems.

But how do “traditional” practices in software engineering fit with the challenges of delivering this new technology?  Mark will discuss his experiences of grappling with this problem, in particular the dirty testing secrets that evolved and why, when introducing a Machine Learning “Cognitive Investigations” solution that sought to replace the human decision making processes in the Anti Money Laundering operation of a global banking organisation.

Aleksandar Simic, It's Not a Secret

What makes a secret harmful for me, for us testers or for whoever relies on us? How can we reveal the secret? Can the revealed secret become a secret again?

Karo Stoltzenburg, Testing in Half the Time

It seems to me that half of the time, at least, we testers really are not needed; half of the time, at least, the testing we do really is unnecessary; and half of the time, at least, a tester in the team can actually risk destabilizing the team. In this talk I'll explain why and suggest that tester hubris is one of our dirty secrets.

James Thomas, We Don’t Know

There are terms in our domain, terms that are fundamental to our work, terms like quality, bug, and even testing itself, that many testers would struggle to define. I’d say it’s an open secret within testing, but would it surprise our colleagues?