Users are the ultimate judge of the software we deliver because it is critical to their success and the success of their business. However, as a tester, do you really understand their tasks, skills, motivation, and work style? Are you delivering software that matches their needs and capabilities-or yours? Personas are a way to define user roles-imaginary characters-that represent common sets of characteristics of different users. David shares how his team at Microsoft defined and used one persona named “Ellen” to help them design, develop, and test the first version of a new product. David shares before Ellen and after Ellen examples of the product, showing how the product changed when Ellen joined the team. See examples of the robust test cases and acceptance scenarios they defined from unique insights that Ellen provided.

Manual testing is the best way to find the bugs most likely to bite users badly after a product ships. However, manual testing remains a very ad hoc, aimless process. At a number of companies across the globe, groups of test innovators gathered in think tank settings to create a better way to do manual testing—a way that is more prescriptive, repeatable, and capable of finding the highest quality bugs. The result is a new methodology for exploratory testing based on the concept of tours through the application under test. In short, tours represent a more purposeful way to plan and execute exploratory tests. James Whittaker describes the tourist metaphor for this novel approach and demonstrates tours taken by test teams from various companies including Microsoft and Google. He presents results from numerous projects where the tours were used in critical-path production environments.

What do you say when your manager asks, "How did it go today?" As a test manager, you might say, "I'll check to see how many test cases the team executed today." As a tester with a pile of test cases on your desk, you could say, "I ran 40 percent of these tests today," or "At the rate I'm going I'll be finished with these test cases in 40 days." However, if you're using exploration as part of your testing approach, it might be terrifying to try to give a status report--especially if some project stakeholders think exploratory testing is irresponsible and reckless compared to test cases. So how can you retain the power and freedom of exploration and still give a report that earns your team credibility, respect, and perhaps more autonomy? Jon Bach offers ways for you to explain the critical and creative thinking that makes exploratory testing so powerful.

You've heard of orthogonal arrays and pairwise testing. Perhaps you've used a pairwise test case generator tool. Have you ever wondered where these popular and powerful techniques originated? Actually they have been around for almost twenty years. During this time, important test design principles have emerged and choices for test generation tools have improved. George Sherwood, inventor of CATS, one of the first pairwise test tools, reviews what we have learned and how it applies to testing today. He shows the benefits of using pairwise test techniques for selecting configurations and for generating test data. George also outlines important considerations for successful pairwise test designs, including the problems to anticipate and avoid. George dispels the mystery of pairwise test generators with a simplified view of how they work.