Free Test – Trondheim, Norway

Jørgen Austvik and Tor Stålhane from our Program Committee have interviewed many of our speakers. We will present these on our website to learn more about their background and on the subject they will present.

The first one to be presentred, is Bernt Marius Johnsen.

Interview with Bernt Marius Johnsen

by Jørgen Austvik and Tor Stålhane

Bernt has been in the software industry for 25 years. He has been ad hoc testing his code from the start, but the last ten years he has become more and more systematic. The first real test tool he wrote put a database under heavy load for a long duration of time, to find resource leaks. It was internally known as "the database killer".

During these 25 years, Bernt has seen huge changes in testing - the tools have become better, and developers’ and managers’ knowledge about testing has increased and so has the status of testing, although there are still some environments that have not caught up yet.

Bernt will talk about automated explorative testing, which might sound like a contradiction. This is actually a general technique that has been used quite a lot and should be used even more, for applications where you can generate the input based on a defined grammar. Bernt works both on creating grammars for input to the tests and running them. The most important application areas for this type of testing are robustness testing and checks for e.g. resource leaks. Another way to run this type of tests is to tests against a “gold version”, which could be another program that implements the same specification, or the previous version of the same software.

When Bernt is not behind the computer, you can find him on the fjord in his home made kayak or just below it when he is doing an Eskimo roll, touring the glaciers or climbing mountains. Expect some nice pictures at this presentation.