SeaStar Quality Conference 2023

The testing profession, and software development in general, appear to be moving away from good testing. Replacing critical-thinking, creativity, reasoning, and customer representation with fairly simplistic automated checks. This will likely lead to some pretty major disasters. It is not too late to change the direction we are heading, but it will likely only happen after some catastrophic failures.

In this talk, Paul will talk about some of the directions and trends he has seen in his 27 year career; where the industry is now and where it appears to be heading.The good news is that there appears to be a multi-year cycle of good testing being demanded by companies. The bad news is that we appear to be approaching the farthest distance he has seen from good testing.

There have been many trends in the past, some good, most bad. The bad ones appear to have been primarily caused by companies selling testing tools and services. The good ones typically by companies that are looking to make positive changes. Paul will cover some of the historical trends that he has been involved with and how the current trends compare to old trends.

Automation is good and can be great. It is needed for CI/CD and the ability to move quickly with software releases but it can go too far. Deceitful marketing from testing industry vendors have been fooling naive decision makers for decades. It’s time that we had more voices standing up for better testing.

Paul will talk discuss some fairly simple changes to the current drive to CI/CD and the unrelenting push to “automate everything” would allow testing to become much more effective and impactful without going back to having humans do all the testing.