Bernie Berger

Bernie is standing for election to the AST board 2024.

I’m a career software tester, manager, and consultant with most of my work experience in the financial services industry. I’m also a project manager and testing service delivery manager with experience in pre-sales, quality assessments and consulting.

When I first entered the workforce, after a few unsuccessful years as an apartment building manager, I got my first corporate job as a QA Analyst in a financial market data vendor by accident. It turned out that I loved it and began learning everything I could about quality assurance and software testing. I read everything I could get my hands on – books, magazines, websites. I attended my first conference (StarEast 99), was invited to the Software Test Manager’s Roundtable (STMR) peer conference, met my testing heroes and became friends with them.

I took all this testing industry experience and brought it to the domain in which my day-to-day job was in and started the Software Testing in Financial Services (STiFS) Workshop. I’m a founding member of AST, and previously served on the AST Board of Directors. I’m also a BBST instructor, having built an enterprise tester training program. Today, with the rapid evolution in testing technology, I feel that the time is right for me to contribute again to AST Board.

1. Please share your vision for the future of the AST, and how would you help to accomplish this vision in case you were part of the AST Board of Directors?

I’m a founding member of AST and had been on the Board of Directors soon after it had been formed in 2004. Among other contributions, I helped amend the AST Bylaws, and was program director for a few CASTs.

We need a professional organization that takes testing seriously and is a home for serious testers. We need to illuminate the modern technology world with the fundamentals of thoughtful testing, honest communication, and scientific experimentation. What I bring to the table: years of experience in fostering collaboration, organizing workshops, SIGs, and conferences, and giving testers a toolbox of ammunition to use when uninformed managers tell them to do things that don’t make sense.

Today we have excellent technology to help run our tests efficiently, shortening the feedback loop and getting bugs fixed sooner. We can run tests quickly, integrate quality gates into release pipelines, and come up with brilliant methods for packaging our testing services. It wasn’t always like this.

When I started, so-called “manual testing” was often done by following inane written test scripts, printed on sheets of paper, telling the tester what buttons to click and what data to enter into which fields. And then repeat steps 1 – 20, whatever they might have been, using different data. And then repeat steps 1-20 again (and again with the different data) under a different configuration setting. And again, and again, and again, each time with a different variant, repeating steps until your head was spinning, fingers cramped, and eyes glazed over. (Office ergonomics was just starting to be taken seriously.)

Test Automation was the purported solution, the “silver bullet” … click a button and watch all your tests run themselves. Magic! Tool vendors were overselling and underdelivering, but still wowing management. The demos worked perfectly.

More or less, this was the state of the world of testing (at least, from my point of view) when AST came along. A professional organization that was based on context-driven principles. Brain-on testing. Thinking as a core competency. These were things I could get on-board with and I was proud to join (and lead) an organization of like-minded serious people.

But despite our progress over the years, we still can do better by remembering the basics. Even with AI generated test coverage (or perhaps exactly because of it) we still need to focus on the Testing aspect of the Testing Industry. And this is my vision for the future of AST.

2. Is there an area where you feel AST is lacking in its role as a professional organization? If so, what would you suggest doing to begin to change that and increase the value to AST members and the testing community at large?

I would like to see AST develop a support system for testing careers. AST’s original members from the mid 2000’s are now 20 years older (and closer to retirement), and many have shifted away from testing or technology altogether. I would like to see AST as a marketplace for members to exchange knowledge, experiences, and job opportunities. It’s as important for the testers in their last 30% or less of their employment timeline learn from those within their first 30% as it is the other way around. AST can be the space where members can support each other throughout their careers.

3. In what ways have you supported the mission of AST?

As displayed on the AST website, The Association for Software Testing is dedicated to advancing the understanding of the science and practice of software testing according to Context-Driven principles.

I have supported this mission in the following ways, among others:

1. When I was on the AST board years ago, I was put in charge of reviewing the AST Bylaws and recommending edits. Bylaws is a legal document that describes how an organization should be run. At the time, the Bylaws document was a mess: vague, incomprehensible, and self-contradictory in multiple places. I came up with a list of suggested edits. They were voted on, passed, and were incorporated.

   As an aside, one particular edit stands out in my memory: If you check today, you’ll find that the maximum number of directors that AST is allowed to have is “the cube root of the number of members, rounded to the nearest odd number”. I came up with that one, and I’m pretty proud of it. The thought was that we wanted there to be sufficient representation of the members. And should AST membership explode worldwide numbering in the hundreds of thousands, we needed a formula that would keep the number of directors linked to the membership but at the same time not get out of hand.

2. The Software Testing in Financial Services Workshop (STiFS), the peer-workshop that I put together was the first peer conference that AST sponsored. The purpose of this workshop was directly aligned with the AST mission: to form a community of practitioners that tested financial software, share experiences, network, and gain and distribute our insights with the wider community.
3. When I was working at a large international investment bank, I developed an in-house training program based on BBST, which I rolled out to employees and consultants. I created multiple online and in-person classes, which advocated for context-driven testing to audiences who were deeply ingrained in factory-style testing methodology.