The 28th edition of the Nederlandse Testdag — the Dutch Testing Day — will take place in Restaurant Zuiver in Utrecht. For years, the Nederlandse Testdag has been the main event where science, education and the business world share new ideas and insights in the field of testing.
Michael Bolton will be giving a keynote presentation, “Why Testers?”
Keynote: Technology can reduce work, make people’s lives easier, and eliminate human error. Or it can disempower us, mislead us, and destroy our data. Which is it? How will things go? We may have our hopes and fears for the products we build, but we don’t have to settle for unwarranted beliefs and assumptions – we can get facts and hard evidence.
That’s what testers are for. Science helps us learn about the way things work in the physical and social worlds, and testing does the same for software. Testing is to technology what science is to the wider world: a set of beliefs, principles, and practices by which we learn from experiencing, exploring, and experimenting to help us get to truths about things.
A builder must be optimistic to make cool new things. Builders focus on the benefits of their creations. They must have a certain faith in their tools and tech stacks, because otherwise they would be overwhelmed and paralysed by the prospect of having to evaluate them. This presents an internal conflict, because effective testing requires a reversal of faith – anticipating failure instead of envisioning success. For a builder, successful testing means discovering problems, potential loss of face, accusations of incompetence or time-wasting, and the necessity of fixing the problems that have been found.
In his keynote for Nederlandse Testdag, Michael Bolton identifies how to resolve the conflict: dedicated testers, with perspectives at a distance from that of the builder; people who have the time to test because they don’t have to build; people happy instead of embarrassed to find problems. That role is important, because finding trouble is the first step towards making things better.