Tutorials

Paul Gerrard

Gerrard Consulting, UK 

Paul Gerrard is a consultant, teacher, author, webmaster, programmer, tester, conference speaker, rowing coach and publisher. He has conducted consulting assignments in all aspects of software testing and quality assurance, specialising in test assurance. He has presented keynote talks and tutorials at testing conferences across Europe, the USA, Australia, South Africa and occasionally won awards for them.

Educated at the universities of Oxford and Imperial College London, he is the Principal of Gerrard Consulting Limited, the host of the UK Test Management Forum and a business coach for Enterprising Macclesfield. He was the Programme Chair for the 2014 EuroSTAR conference in Dublin and for the 2017 ExpoQA conference in Madrid.

In 2010 he won the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award and in 2013 he won the inaugural TESTA Lifetime Achievement Award. He won the ISTQB Testing Excellence Award in 2018.

Problem Solving for Testers

In some organisations, it is perfectly fine for testers to report failure as they experience them. To capture the details of behaviour that does not meet expectations, how to reproduce the problem and an assessment of severity and/or priority might provide enough information to allow developers to diagnose and debug the problem.

But in many situations, this simply does not work. For example, in a company that builds hardware and writes their own firmware and application software to diagnose the source of a problem can be a difficult task. Where a device has many, many configurations or connects to a range of other hardware, firmware or software applications it might be impossible to reproduce the problem outside the test lab.

In these situations – and they are increasingly common – the task of the tester is to look beyond the visible signs of failure and to investigate further: to narrow down possibilities; to identify and ignore misleading symptoms and to get to the bottom of the problem.

In this tutorial, Paul explores how we can be deceived by evidence and how we can improve our thinking to be more certain of conclusions. You will learn more about the design of experiments, recognise what you can and cannot control, learn how to systematically diagnose the causes of failure and work as a team to problem solve more effectively.


Alon Linetzki

QualityWize™, Israel 

Alon Linetzki, Founder and CEO of QualityWize™, an expert in SW engineering, Quality Assurance and Testing with more than 35 years of experience, supporting organizations in improving their quality, development and testing processes, increasing R&D ROI, and implementing good practices in context uniquely tailored to customer’s business, technology and engineering needs.

For the last 10 years, Alon serves also as an Agile Coach, supporting companies in their Agile transition, and implementing good SW engineering practices while so.

A popular speaker at international conferences, founder of SIGiST Israel and co-founder of ITCB™, he is Marketing WG Chair for ISTQB®, co-author of ISTQB® Agile Tester certification and the ISTQB® Advanced Level Agile Technical Tester syllabi. Alon sometimes gives lectures at the SCE university on SW engineering and Quality assurance topics for 1st and 2nd degree students.

Transition from Traditional into Agile Tester 

Many small companies are moving from traditional into agile. That transition has an impact on development of course, but also on testing and testers.

In this workshop, we shall discuss the challenges in agile for the team and for the tester, and practice agile test design and execution techniques - exploratory testing and checklists.

Through discussion, real life examples, debate and simulation, Alon Linetzki will present and practice with participants on the different aspects of testers transitioning into agile within their scrum teams.

This tutorial will include several parts - an introduction; ‘Understanding the challenges of working in Agile’ in the form of a simulation game with self-managed, cross-functional teams, ‘Practicing Agile Testing Techniques’ with some exercise in Exploratory Testing; and ‘Checklists’ with a suitable exercise.


Vipul Kocher

Indian Testing Board, India

Vipul is the President of Indian Testing Board, the ISTQB board for India. He is the founder of TestAIng – the world’s first AI focused testing services company and Verity software – a training company. He is also the convener of the STeP-IN forum, a not-for-profit forum for software testers. He is also a co-founder of SALT.

He has 24+ years of experience in various capacities with leading companies. Vipul is currently part of an International Special Interest Group (SIG) on “DevOps and Testing” as well as a SIG on “AI and Testing” which is developing certifications for respective subjects. He consults companies on how to test AI based systems and is currently engaged in researching and developing techniques for testing of AI-ML based systems.

He has won several awards including the best paper award at STAREast 2006 and the Logica CMG Triple Star Award for the most original contribution at EuroStar 2005. He has been a Keynote speaker at many testing conferences worldwide.

Vipul invented Q-Patterns, a method of capturing testing knowledge and writing reusable test cases. This method has been used by various organizations across the world. He is also the inventor of the Linguistic Analysis technique for the identification of large number of tests from minimal documentation in the shortest time possible.

Basics of AI and AI in Testing

Artificial intelligence and the discussion surrounding it are neither new, nor surprising. However, the fever pitch regarding AI has never been stronger as the current times. It appears, for the first time, that viable AI solutions for what was previously science fiction will become available.

In this half-day tutorial, we will learn about:
1. Basic concepts of AI using Machine Learning (AI-ML)
2. Steps in testing AI applications
3. Different tools which leverage AI in testing for automation and other tasks
4. Different possible career paths of the future that are related to AI and Testing

This tutorial should open up the path for you to know how to learn about AI, the pre-requisites and skills required to create your own AI solutions and the framework on the basis of which you can develop your own understanding of AI in testing and Testing AI. There is no programming knowledge requirement for this tutorial but knowledge of a scripting language such as Python is helpful as some of the code samples demoed use Python.


Olivier Denoo

CFTL (the French ISTQB board), Belgium

Olivier is the VP of ps_testware SAS, the French subsidiary of ps_testware group. His role is business development, recruiting the local expert team, building sustainable partnerships, promoting software testing and ps_testware. He is also involved in auditing test projects and organizations and provides high-level consultancy and support.

Olivier is the President of the CFTL - the French ISTQB Board and also currently is the Governance Officer of the ISTQB.

For 20 years he has been an international speaker who spoke at Test-IT Africa, SQA-days, BA-days, JFIE, TestWarez, ReQuest, SEETEST, STF; Iqnite, JFTL, JMTL, JTTL, Analyst-days, Quality Week, Eurostar, Dasia.

He's also actively participating in the development of new certification schemes, like IQBBA (Business Analysis), IREB (requirements engineering), IBUQ (usability) or more recently the "7 skills for effective teams" (soft skills and team organization).

Agile is Human

Our world is changing and so is our testers’ jobs.

Working in a cross-functional team, with short deadlines, ever changing requirements /user stories and short-term vision, constitutes a challenge to many traditional organizations who need to adapt; but also to new ones who need to focus and streamline innovation and creativity to achieve their goals.

This tutorial – from practical examples ready to take practices - will help you understand what it takes for an agile team to align and deliver when humanity becomes a main driver and a key success factor.


Jan Jaap Cannegieter

Squerist, The Netherlands

Jan Jaap Cannegieter is a leading test, QA and requirements expert from the Netherlands. He has over 25 years of experience in ICT. Jan Jaap did assignments in testing, test automation, quality assurance, process improvement, requirements, and business – ICT alignment, Agile and digitalization. Jan Jaap is Principal Consultant at Squerist, a consultancy company of 100 employees specialized in process management and testing. Within Squerist Jan Jaap is, besides his assignments, responsible for coaching, knowledge management and product development.

Jan Jaap is the well-known author of several articles and books in the Netherlands and is a well-known (keynote) speaker on international conferences.

Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing is becoming more and more popular. But for some exploratory testing is equal to unstructured testing. In this workshop the attendees will learn how to structure an exploratory testing session to get the most benefits out of it. In the workshop different structuring concepts will be explained in theory, you will also practice them immediately. This will be done by testing real life applications. So you will apply the theory immediately, this way we make sure you can apply ET in your organization immediately.

This workshop is meant for testers, test managers and test consultants with basic knowledge of testing and at least one year of experience.


Andy Redwood

Redwood Associates Software, UK

Andy is a senior testing practitioner managing global test teams to deliver pragmatic, strategic solutions. He works all over the world, currently for a large investment bank.

Andy also has a duty to integrate the corporate test strategy, aligning it with business objectives, strategic architecture, and life-cycle processes to deliver tangible benefits both onshore and offshore. He has lead teams that have saved over £30M in a year through removing diversity across departments and subsidiaries, inter-department process, commercial inefficiency and geographic or cultural differences, not just for testing activities, but for the greater corporate good.

Andy has a personal industry profile and is a regular public speaker at international conferences. He was Chair of the UK ISEB International standards Panel in 2003/4, the UK representative to the International Board in 2003. In 2004 he founded the ISEB UK Executive Committee at the request of the Chief Executive of the British Computer Society.

Andy was awarded the EuroSTAR Award for outstanding contribution to the Software Testing Industry in Europe, in December 2005, following a previous nomination in 2003.

Testing Psychology - How should we be thinking in order to test to different risk levels

In this tutorial, as a group, we will examine some basic psychological principals regarding:

  • Identity;
  • Social Interactions and power structures;
  • Perception and interpretation of information;
  • Decision options;
  • How conclusions relate to decisions;
  • Test Management and Tester thought processes;
  • The concept of risk and decision making.

This tutorial is interactive. All audience written exercises will remain confidential to the individual. Please note, you are free to decline to participate in any exercise or test. If you wish to only observe, you are still welcome.


Pablo Garcia Munos

Expleo Stockholm, Sweden

Pablo Garcia started as a tester in 1996 for Ericsson. After passing through roles such as Test Manager, Project Manager, Program Manager he worked as Total Program Manager managing the complete Ericsson Development in India.

Now, over 20 years later he has run over 50 assignments besides running his own test companies. In December 2018 he became the CEO for Expleo Stockholm but still works as a QA Specialist part time.

Pablo has spoken at national and International Conferences like NFI, Test management Forum, many SIGISTS and STARWEST. He has also given Testing courses since 2001. Amongst others, he has educated over 200 nurses in acceptance testing during the last 5 years.

Metrics: Reach your goals faster with a Metrics Dashboard

Metrics helps in measuring quality, changes, productivity and much more. A good Metrics Dashboard can help you reach your goal faster - it can be compared with driving with a GPS, you cannot rely completely on it, but it helps most of the time, especially in places you come to for the first time.

The tutorial will describe how to put together a Dashboard for your organization. It will go through different metrics for different methodologies, organizations and ways of developing.

We will speak about how to develop the dashboard from the start until you get a stable dashboard and you may even see and prevent problems before they occur. One of the most valuable things with a Dashboard is the way you can put numbers on the need for resources, many examples will be shown.

Join Pablo in his tutorial filled with real life experiences and tricks that work.


Michaël Pilaeten

CTG Belgium

Breaking the system, helping to rebuild it, and providing advice and guidance on how to avoid problems. That is Michael in a nutshell. With 15 years of experience in test consultancy in a variety of environments, he has seen the best (and worst) in software development.

In his current role as Learning & Development Manager, he is responsible for guiding the company’s consultants, partners and customers on their personal and professional path towards excellence.

Practical Test Design Techniques

Please test this. Can you have a look at this? Can we put this in production? Does it work?

Questions that anyone in a testing role hears on the daily.

How can you answer these questions from a qualitative and quantitative approach?

This workshop will provide hands-on exercises regarding techniques for designing qualitative test cases, in order to provide detailed responses to the questions above.