Conference
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Official Conference Opening and Welcome


Geoff Horne - Editor, NZTester Magazine and Conference Chair, Wednesday 12 August 8:45am - 9:00am

Keynote Session 1 - The 2015 Survival Guide - Lessons for Testing in the Wild


Julie Gardiner - Director, Consulting TQA, Hitachi Consulting, UK 

Wednesday 12 August  9:00am - 10:00am


When we are in dangerous situations, we need a well-thought-out survival guide to help save ourselves and others.

These lifesaving principles and skills provide the basic necessities for life and help us think straight, navigate safely, signal for help, and avoid unpleasant consequences of interactions with our environment.


Julie Gardiner shares her 2015 Survival Guide for testers and test managers living in today’s challenging business and technical environments.


Topics in her guide include:  Turn your job from a daily grind into a passion as life’s too short not to have fun. Demonstrate every day the value of testing, if you aren’t adding value or if others don’t know what you’re accomplishing, you may be toast; Choose your battles, if you try to fight every battle, you will certainly lose often and become frustrated and angry; and most importantly, maintain your integrity at all costs. Otherwise, you won’t be taken seriously and you’ll lose the respect of others. Finally, are you ready for our new role in projects?


Join Julie in this thought-provoking session and take back the important principles, tools, and skills you need to survive and even flourish, as the test professional.

Coffee Break 10:00am - 10:15am

Session 1 -

The Abolition of Testing?


Matt Mansell - Senior Consultant Strategy, Change & Governance, IntegrationQA, NZ

Wednesday 12 August  10:15am - 11:15am


My experience of testing suggests that in many organisations testing is done today much the same way it was done 18 years ago when I first became a test analyst. The classic scenario if developers hurriedly churning out code and tossing it over the fence to the testers is sadly remains all too common. I’ve even seen agile projects where the developers are churning out code and the testers have their own separate test sprints.


Underlying this is a misconception that is generated by the very notion of test as a separate activity. If you carve out a domain and declare that it is something unique people will treat it that way and not always how you want them too. Have you ever heard a developer say: “It’s a tester’s job to find defects”? We are victims of our own success at separating test from development. So much so that now; quality is the testers problem. In this presentation I will make the case that now, more than ever before, the idea of a separate “test” is dead. Modern tools, new processes, maturing capabilities mean that we need to fundamentally rethink the notion of test and of what testers do. Test is dead! Long live test!

Session 2 -

Let The Picture Tell the Story


David Rodriguez - Test Manager, Fujitsu, NZ

Wednesday 12 August  11:15am - 12:15am



You have probably been there. You are parachuted into a project to ‘organise the testing’. There are many hardware components, interfaces and applications. You have to understand how it all fits together and come up with a robust test strategy. All of this will be needed at a relatively early stage in the project - when the design documents are still being created.


You will have meetings with Project Managers, Technical Leads, Business Analysts and Architects to work through the scope. There will be white board sessions to help explain what is required. You may have the luxury of some good diagrams from existing documents – which is fine...well, probably not. But even these diagrams may not be focused on testing.

So what do you do?


Draw diagrams!  I’m a big fan of diagrams – a picture paints a 1000 words……


  1. •To help understand what is going on.

  2. •To explain how testing will be approached.


One size does not fit all. We will look at examples using different types of diagrams to explain testing clearly.

Let the picture tell the story.