EuroSTAR is the annual gathering in Europe for the software testing industry. I gave a keynote address at the November 2011 event in Manchester, and attended it again in November 2012 at the Amsterdam RAI Centre.
I have written about software testing before, and declared an interest � I chair the not-for-profit TMMI Foundation, promoting a process maturity model designed to help evaluate the effectiveness and the efficiency of testing processes in our increasingly complex age.
In this fast evolving era of the virtual, the cloud and mobile, what testing can and should be about is changing. There is a real risk that testing's vital contribution to business performance and business operational risk management is not well understood at board level. It does not help that the testing profession can come across as highly 'techie' in its work.
Yet, as I described in my June 2011 column Testing 101, when Geoff Thompson of the testing consultancy Experimentus and I asked "What is the essential purpose of (software and systems) testing?", we concluded that it was confidence in outcomes. The board needs to have confidence that, when it invests significant resource in new software and systems capabilities, intended outcomes will be delivered, on time and to budget. And that is what testing is really about � assurance.
