F10 – 401: Testing in the Interview

Track: Hands-On Testing Techniques Lab

When interviewing testers you want to know that they can test. Games are fun; logic puzzles are brainteasers; but shouldn’t we exercise the tester’s most relevant skills? Let’s give our test candidates something to test.

This session will provide attendees with a deliberately buggy application to test. Attendees will begin by putting themselves in the candidate’s shoes and testing the application. Following the test session, attendees will revert to their hiring manager roles and evaluate the candidates.

The remainder of the session will be a directed discussion regarding how to interpret test results. Special attention will be paid to the types of defects identified and what those defects mean for your team and for that candidate as a tester.

This session will be highly interactive. Come prepared to do a hands-on test and participate in a directed discussion about results interpretation.


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Session Speaker:

Catherine PowellCatherine Powell – Principal, QA, Abakas
Catherine Powell has been testing and managing testers for about 10 years. She is a manager, tester, author and a formal mentor to testers and test managers. Catherine has worked with a broad range of software, including an enterprise storage system, a web-based health care system, data synchronization applications on mobile devices, and web apps of various flavors. With a focus on the human side of testing, Catherine builds strong teams spanning testers, developers, support, product management, and all the people involved in turning an idea into reality. She emphasizes the generation of information and pragmatic decision making using a myriad of test approaches. With thoughtful techniques that access the strengths of the human testers combined with the needs of the system and its users, Catherine guides testers to be a valuable part of the decision making required to create rock solid software.

Catherine focuses primarily on the realities of shipping software in small and mid-size companies. Specifically, she highlights and works to explicate the “on-the-ground” pragmatism necessary for testers to work effectively with both software and humans from product definition through release, and in the field.