May 21, 2007

Elisabeth Hendrickson, a thought leader in the software testing community, will spend a week at Atomic Object learning and teaching

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May 21, 2007

Elisabeth Hendrickson will spend the week of May 21, 2007, in the Atomic Object office, learning, teaching, and pairing with Atomic developers. Elisabeth suggested this mutual exchange of practices and ideas after working with David Crosby and Carl Erickson at the Austin Workshop on Test Automation in January 2007.

Elisabeth is well-respected in the Agile and testing worlds. She began working in the software industry in 1984. She has held positions as a Tester, Programmer, Test Automation Manager, Quality Engineering Director, and Technical Writer working for companies ranging from a 20-person startup to a large multi-national software vendor. She’s a regular speaker at testing and development conferences such as STAR, PNSQC, Agile, and AYE. She makes her living as a consultant and recently spent two months working at the premier agile Rails development company, Pivotal Labs.

In conjunction with her visit, Elisabeth is speaking at XP West Michigan. The abstract for her talk follows:

“Pairing, TDD, automated acceptance tests, and continuous integration all prevent defects and provide fast feedback on code quality. And yet, no XP team I’ve ever met produces perfect software. Good software? Yes. But there are still bugs. Sometimes the “bugs” are really new stories the customer didn’t think to add. And sometimes they’re actual bugs: software behavior that surprises even the people who wrote it. In this talk, Elisabeth Hendrickson explores some of the most common types of bugs we tend to miss, even on XP teams doing full-on, dials-to-11 XP. She’ll also discuss ways to improve the automated tests, and how Exploratory Testing can augment automated unit and acceptance tests to uncover such surprises before they sneak into production software.”