The 4-hour Tester Experiment (No Testers Were Harmed In The Process) – Helena Jeret-Mäe and Joep Schuurkes

The challenge of teaching new testers useful skills is something that many testers face - either you’re a manager, a test competence lead, or an experienced tester who coaches other testers. What would you need to learn and practice to become a tester in the first place? How would you pick the things to learn and skills to practice to help a new team member learn the ropes of testing and start adding value? If Tim Ferriss can come up with the 4-hour chef, why can’t we come up with the 4-hour tester?

Armed with the hypothesis that it’s possible to identify the core skills and knowledge for testers and that it’s possible to become familiar with those in 4 hours, Joep and Helena set out to explore and discover what that core consists of. This talk addresses the process of discovery itself, how they found the hypothesis to be or not to be true, and what they learned along the way. They will also present the results of the experiment as a set of heuristics in a framework that can help novice testers to learn testing.