Interview with Vegard Hartmann

By Jørgen Austvik and Tor Stålhane

Vegard Hartmann heads the quality and testing group at the Norwegian consulting company Bekk but does not see himself as a tester, but as a software developer that is concerned with delivering software of high quality to his customers. To ensure the quality for the customers, testing and QA are important elements.

In Vegard’s opinion, the best part of working with testing and QA is that they make sure that they deliver what the customer needs. The challenge to always look for ways to improve your process in order to continually deliver high quality software is rewarding when you succeed and you can take pride in the product that you deliver.

The worst part of working with testing is to convince both fellow developers and customers that it is worth the effort to spend time doing testing and QA right from the start of a project. A major problem in the field today is an “us vs. them” mentality between developers and tester where developers see testers as only trying to find flaws in their code whereas testers see developers as not being concerned with the final end-product and the overall quality. It is important to overcome this gap and make developers and testers co-operate to deliver high-quality solutions.

When it comes to tools, Vegard favours test tools that are simple and easy to use – tools that does not have a lot of features for every imaginable need but instead address a specific need and does this well. An example of this is WebDriver, which enables driving and interaction with a browser. He does not like recorders that record interaction with a browser and then replays this. Test suites built using this approach tends to be extremely brittle and give automated web testing the undeserved rumour that it has of being difficult and requiring a lot of maintenance effort.

Vergard’s presentation is about web testing with WebDriver, what you need to consider before starting web testing, and how to build test suites that are solid and easy to maintain. People who are interested in testing their application the way their end-users will use it or have tried web testing and found it challenging should definitively attend this presentation.