UM Ph.D. candidate Isabel Evans has been awarded the 2017 EuroSTAR European Testing Excellence Award. The award is presented annually to individuals who have contributed significantly to the field of software testing, by advancing the field and acting as an inspiration to other test professionals. Isabel Evans is an independent quality and testing consultant with over thirty years of experience in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her work focuses on quality management, software testing, and user experience (UX). She encourages IT teams and customers to work together via flexible processes tailored by the teams that use them. Isabel authored Achieving Software Quality through Teamwork and contributed in other books, such as Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment, The Testing Practitioner, and Foundations of Software Testing. A popular speaker and storyteller at software conferences worldwide, Isabel is a Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of the British Computer Society.
Isabel's research with Dr Chris Porter and Dr Mark Micallef, focuses on the user experience (UX) of testing tools and its impact on testers' workload. Dr Porter and Dr Micallef head the HCI-Test research group, a multi-disciplinary group that is seeking to understand human factors in software engineering practices, particularly in the area of software testing where information flows are highly unpredictable, varied, voluminous, complex and fast. Testing is an intensely human activity, therefore investigative techniques from the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) are applied to study core software engineering principles, processes and toolsets with the aim to ensure better workflows, thoroughness and efficiency while lowering error-rates, information-anxiety and workload. The researchers hypothesise that this work would ultimately have an impact on the quality of user-facing products, team morale and overall engineering costs.
Dr Porter is a Lecturer with the Computer Information Systems Department whereas Dr Micallef is a Senior Lecturer with the Computer Science Department, both within the Faculty of ICT.
If you want to learn more, feel free to drop a line at: hcitest@um.edu.mt