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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 - 8:30am to 9:45am

Heuristics to Help You Design, Build, and Choose Test Tools

How well do we design and acquire our tools? Drawing on compelling evidence gathered from a series of interviews, workshops, surveys, and case studies with industry gurus and hands-on practitioners, we’re diving deep into a set of heuristics. Each one is a gateway to discovery, backed by explanations and enriched with engaging exploratory activities based on solid research. As an attendee, you will gain access to resources that can help enable critical thinking and reflection about tools and the problems they solve. We will see how sometimes heuristics can pinpoint when a tool might actually be the wrong answer to your problems; with the main takeaway of this talk being that you are empowered to make smarter, evidence-based decisions in your tool design and acquisition efforts. Isabel will introduce the heuristics and make them available for you to use in design, build, and acquisition of your test tools. You will have access to a repository with additional material including explanations of the heuristics and evidence to support your decision making whether you supply or use test tools.

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant

After over 30 years in industry, software quality and testing practitioner Isabel Evans is now a post-graduate student at the University of Malta. Her research takes people-focused approach to designing tool support for testing. This arose from real-life experiences in industry and led to the academic papers: “Stuck in Limbo with Magical Solutions”, “Scared, Frustrated and Quietly Proud”, and “Test Tools: An Illusion of Usability”. Research continues with modelling and trialling a framework of heuristics to help teams design and assess test tools. Isabel authored Achieving Software Quality Through Teamwork and chapters in Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment, Testing Practitioner, and Foundations of Software Testing. Isabel has chaired EuroSTAR (2019) and HUSTEF (2018), and presented popular tutorials and storytelling keynotes at conferences worldwide. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and received the 2017 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award.