PNSQC has a new program chair for the 2017 Conference: Joseph Ruskiewicz. Joseph has one foot in the academic world as an adjunct professor at Portland State University, the other firmly planted in the corporate world in his job at eBay. He’s outgoing, enthusiastic and passionate about lots of things–all good qualities to have in the program chair for one of the most prestigious software quality conferences on the planet.
Your intrepid blogger communicated with Joseph the other day by email, searching for the man behind the LinkedIn profile. Here’s what he had to say on various topics:
Blogger: Talk a little about your history and what you’re passionate about outside of work.
Joseph: I was born and raised in Wisconsin. After achieving a dual degree in Mathematics and Computer Science I moved to San Francisco to work on the Moffett Research base and also to work on master’s degree for Carnegie Mellon. Once in San Francisco I learned the art of fly fishing and have been passionate for it ever since. Moving to Switzerland for my Ph.D. really opened up the possibilities of skiing through the Swiss, French, and Italian Alps.
What informed your decision to pursue your Ph.D. in Switzerland?
I was invited to attend the Ph.D. program at the ETH in Zürich Switzerland. The inviting professor was Prof. Bertrand Meyer, invented the Eiffel programming language and the concepts of Design by Contract. This was a dream opportunity that I could not turn down.
What inspired you to choose a career in QA/testing?
Actually, I was not inspired to choose a career in QA/testing. I am concerned about code quality as a whole, testing is one aspect of this. Advances in tooling and software design also play a role in code quality. My chosen career is to address all of these concerns.
What is your basic approach to the QA process?
As I work on the code base and inspect the patterns used by engineers, I am usually the one saying, ‘Why did you do this this way,’ or ‘Why did you not use this pattern?’ We have focused more on a preventative approach so that we do not need to have hard talks about why something went wrong.
Who are your QA/Testing heroes?
Edsger W. Dijkstra and Jean-Raymond Abrial
What is your vision for PNSQC’s next decade?
I want to see more involvement of software engineering into the quality process. Quality is not an end result to be confirmed by QA or testing. It is a result of the engineering process and the design patterns chosen by the engineer. My 10-year plan for PNSQC is to include more of these discussions and move it from the “Test at the end” to “How can we design and create software that is inherently of good quality?”
