Wim Decoutere

Wim Decoutere began his testing career almost 20 years ago and has since worked at several companies, mostly in the financial sector. 

 

Wim is passionate about quality, not only in his own work, but also in the work of the people he works with. He loves to coach and teach about testing, requirements engineering, analysis, soft skills, and any other subject of his interest. He feels at best if he is able to improve himself, other people, teams or even entire organisations. 

 

As a veteran youth instructor with a passion for learning theories and people management, Wim is constantly seeking new ideas to improve his own performance and that of the entire testing team. 

 

In his spare time, Wim is secretary of the BNTQB, coauthor of the ISTQB CTFLv4.0 and CTAL-TA syllabi and chair of the IREB CPRE Foundation Working Group.

Cem Kamer defined Exploratory Testing as ‘simultaneous learning, test design and execution’. 

 

If you would ask a group of testers to define Exploratory Testing, most of them do fine on the simultaneous test design and execution, but they struggle with the simultaneous learning. This does not come as a surprise to me. If you would ask that same group of testers to define the concept of learning, the result is usually incoherent murmuring. 

 

Even though everybody knows what learning is, it is hard to define or explain it. You can compare it to trying to explain how to walk. Luckily, there are some brilliant people on this planet, like David Kolb et al., that managed to define ‘learning’. They even identified different styles of learning. Every person has a preferred learning style, just like every tester has their own set of heuristics to test an application. Being aware of your preferred way of learning an application helps in coming up with even better tests while exploring. Knowing about other learning styles will even expand your exploratory learning abilities. 

 

In his talk, Wim takes you on an exploratory journey to discover your own preferred way of learning. Based on the recommendations from well-established learning theories, he’d like to point out how you can apply these learning styles to get more out of your exploratory testing and to learn more from your test subjects to improve your testing.