Who is Michaël Pilaeten?

Learning & Development Manager

Breaking the system, helping to rebuild it, and providing advice and guidance on how to avoid problems. That’s me in a nutshell. With over 20 years of experience in test consultancy in a variety of environments, I have seen the best (and worst) in software development. In my current role as Learning & Development Manager, I’m responsible for guiding our consultants, partners, and customers on their personal and professional path towards excellence. I’m chair of the ISTQB Advanced workgroup, author and international keynote speaker.

What will Michaël Pilaeten be discussing?

The awkward truth of software quality

From the moment we recognized testing as an essential activity during software development, people tried to optimize testing. Every so many years, a new hype emerges, promising to be the silver bullet that solves all issues related to software quality. Soon afterwards, disappointment surfaces. If you would be in the driver’s seat, allowed to take any decision that could make your team more productive, more efficient, more effective, which would result in less buggier code, what would you implement? Some agile framework? DevSecOps? A multi-level automation framework? UML modelling? Pair programming and testing? I blueprinted many organizations and suggested improvement tracks. With some degree of success, but never fully achieving all major objectives. Hence the question: “What am I doing here?” or better: “What are we doing here?” How do we predict whether something will solve our problems? We might consult the “experts”, but they typically disagree. Our own experiences are biased and limited, as no one has tried and compared everything. We could launch questionnaires, but there’s a difference between popularity and effectiveness. What we’re missing is scientific study and empirical research. Contrary to popular belief, certain must-haves have no positive effect on software quality. I will highlight what works and what is very likely to fail. Now, repeat. If you would be in the driver’s seat, what would you implement? I’ve ploughed through numerous studies on quality improvement and would like to share these intriguing results with you.