Biography

Having wandered reluctantly into IT about 30 years ago, Phil’s first contact with formal testing came unexpectedly in 2002 when he was told that he would become the Test Manager on the project he was working on. Maybe it was fate, but it seems he found his true calling. He eventually became the guy they called when there was a “problem in testing”. But after a few years of fire-fighting on those troubled projects he began to tire and wonder if there wasn’t a better way. So seven years ago he co-founded a software testing start-up in Prague with a mission to change the testing world.

Talk

Is Testing Like Electricity?

When I asked my colleagues, who clearly have a cruel sense of humor, for some ideas for the subject of a conference presentation, they came up with ‘Is testing like electricity?’ After 10 minutes of consideration, I concluded that the answer was obviously “no” and I would soon hold the record for the shortest conference presentation of all time. However, over the next couple of days, I started to realize that there are areas where parallels between testing and electricity do exist. These include that
the birth of the testing and electricity generation industries are remarkably similar
both electricity and testing are dangerous
they are both expensive
they both make our lives comfortable and enjoyable
our demand for them is highly variable
they both contribute to global warming

You may find some of these similarities hard to believe, but I will do my best to convince you. The presentation’s main message is that the stable, reliable, and quality supply of software testing is vital in the modern world and how, as software testers, we need to understand this responsibility and respond by increasing our level of professionalism. By comparing ourselves to the electricity industry, which has long understood that it is of strategic importance, we can also find some inspiration from their approach.

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