Spreading the Word on Software Testing

I’m Peter Varhol, a new evangelist for TestStudio, and I’m happy to be joining the Telerik team and my colleagues Steven Vore and Jim Holmes.  I’ve done a wide variety of things in my career, including software evangelism, product management and marketing, development and testing, technology journalism, and university teaching.

Among the professional activities I’ve been doing over the past several years is speaking at various conferences and user groups on the subjects of software testing and quality, and I’ve brought some of that with me to Telerik.  At the end of August, I’m giving a talk at the Conference of the Association for Software Testing called Famous Software Failures.  In this presentation, I dissect several well-known and visible software failures from the last 20 years, and look at how more effective testing could have made a difference.

Later in middle of October I’m co-presenting an intriguing topic at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference entitled How Did I Miss That Bug?  This talk is an outgrowth of work that I’ve done looking at how natural biases in our thinking process affects our test planning, test execution, and interpretation of results.  This is a fascinating topic that leaders in the testing community are beginning to take seriously.  I anticipate giving this and similar talks at other conferences and gatherings in the coming months.

Other conferences that I’ll be at include TestKit in Washington DC, and QA & Test in Bilbao, Spain.  At the latter conference I’m preparing a new presentation on how memory management affects the performance of managed code in embedded systems.

I’m based in southern New Hampshire, and also get involved in testing communities in the Boston area.  I’m a regular speaker at the Software Quality Group of New England, for example.  I’ll also be talking to the Connecticut chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis at their monthly meeting in October.  If you attend community functions in the Boston area, look me up and let’s talk about testing.  I look forward to meeting both Telerik customers and testers in general to exchange ideas and stories.

Peter Varhol

About the author

Peter Varhol

Peter Varhol is an Evangelist for Telerik’s TestStudio. He’s been a software developer and software product manager, technology journalist, and university professor among the many roles in his past, and believes that his best talent is explaining concepts and practices to others. He’s on Twitter at @pvarhol.