As the end of 2009 comes closer and closer it’s time for a little reflection on 2009. This my first full year as a business developer at the company Andréas and I work at. Last year I started in April and we had one assignment: ‘write a book about BDTM’. But this year started with us doing more various things. We also started this blog (actually it was December 2008) and started to write about the things we come across in our work. Although the financial crisis didn’t really help I did a lot of nice things.
I thought of crowdtesting. Not totally new, but I tried to grasp it with all its potential and weaknesses. I thought of it while I was consulted by a game manufacturer on how their test process was. During the year I did 2 assignments for clients to implement it. One was successful, the other a little less (at least for me). The fun part was that also other people started upon it and we both posted several articles in magazines about this phenomenon. And I am invited to present on this subject on the Swiss Testing Day in 2010.
Evaluations became much more important in software development. Documents need to be checked more and more thoroughly before it can be used in later phases of the development lifecycle. I try to use reading techniques to help streamline this method of checking the documentation. A process that needs to developed even further next year.
And speaking of checking, Michael Bolton addressed this Testing vs. Checking on his blog, whereas I tried to take it a step farther. Software testing is a combination of checking, exploring and accepting. Where the added value of tester lay in exploring the software and coordination of the checking and accepting of it.
This because the new urge for industrialisation of software testing in Europe tends to outsource checking to India or software. Like the opportunities Model-Based Testing adds to automatically create test cases for checking an application. These test cases can from there also be executed automatically to decrease the amount of work testers need to do to check a software program.
Another big topic for me this year was Augmented Reality. This fabulous new technology also needs to be tested and we tried to create a method to test it. But most important was to think about the use of this technology for testing. This became Augmented Testing; a subject I will share with you in 2010.
2009 was a good year, but 2010 has a lot of potential to get even better.



