SoftwareGR

Elisabeth Hendrickson, Quality Tree Software

When: May 22, 2007, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Where: Work Play Space, 941 Wealthy Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506

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 evern 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.

Speaker Bio

Elisabeth Hendrickson founded her company as Quality Tree Consulting in 1997 to provide training and consulting in software quality and testing. She incorporated the company as Quality Tree Software, Inc. in 1998.

Elisabeth 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.

Elisabeth is an experienced facilitator and trainer. A student of Jerry Weinberg’s, Elisabeth is a graduate of the Weinberg & Weinberg PSL, ChangeShop, and SEM programs. She also studied Experiential Training Design with Jerry and his wife Dani.

Elisabeth is frequently invited to speak at conferences around the world. She has given keynote addresses at conferences in the US, Sweden, Portugal, and Australia.

In 2003, Elisabeth became involved with the Agile community. In 2005 she became a Certified Scrum Master and in 2006 she joined the board of directors for the Agile Alliance.

These days Elisabeth splits her time between teaching, speaking, writing, and working on Extreme Programming teams with test-infected programmers who value her obsession with testing.