 The focus of Cem Kaner's career is the satisfaction and safety of software customers, users and developers. His work is multidisciplinary—testing is one of the disciplines.
Kaner sees much of software engineering as applied social science. "We create software for the benefit of people. The essential measure of the value of that software is how well it works for the people it's supposed to serve." As he sees it, testing is more importantly about assessing the worth of a product or service than its conformance to documentation. To advance in the profession, Kaner argues that testers must develop and apply technological and cognitive skills, rather than relying on routine processes. He coined the term "exploratory testing" in the 1980's to describe cognitively-engaged testing and distinguish it from scripted approaches.
Kaner is one of the founders of the context-driven school of software testing (http://www.context-driven-testing.com): "Context-driven testers choose their testing objectives, techniques, and deliverables (including test documentation) by looking first to the details of the specific situation, including the desires of the stakeholders who commissioned the testing. The essence of context-driven testing is project-appropriate application of skill and judgment. The Context-Driven School of testing places this approach to testing within a humanistic social and ethical framework." He is also one of the founders (current Executive Vice President) of the Association for Software Testing.
Kaner co-founded the Los Altos Workshops on Software Testing. These meetings bring together 15-20 experienced testers for a few days of in-depth discussion of a focused topic, such as maintenance cost of GUI regression tests or the nature of test oracles. Kaner and Brian Lawrence trained other testers to run similar meetings, leading to the Austin Workshops on Test Automation, Software Test Managers Roundtables, Software Testing in Financial Services, Workshops on Heuristic & Exploratory Techniques, Software Test Managers' Workshops and many others. There have been over 200 LAWST-style workshops. These meetings help participants reality-check and refine their ideas and improve their presentations of them. Especially in the 1990's, these meetings helped new speakers break into the national community.
Kaner worked in Silicon Valley from 1983 to 2000, programming, testing, designing user interfaces, writing user manuals (and managing these functions). As a software development manager, he built insight into his customer base by taking a nights-and-weekends sales position at Egghead Software, selling his competitors' products to his target market. As a manager coping with organizational politics, he trained with Psylomar (an organizational development consulting firm), becoming one of their Associates.
In Kaner's view, one of our industry's critical problems is the lack of foundational standards. As industries mature, societies set expectations for the quality of their products and the integrity of their marketing. These expectations, enforced by law, weed out the worst players and create a safer marketplace for honest businesses and their customers. To learn more about this in practice, Kaner served as a Volunteer Investigator in Santa Clara County's Consumer Affairs Department. After two years, he decided to go to law school, focusing on the law of software quality. He has had some success at this, writing a consumer protection book (Bad Software), drafting legislation, and helping to write the recently published judicial guidelines, the Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. The Association for Computing Machinery recently honored this aspect of Kaner's career with its "Making a Difference Award" which is "presented to an individual who is widely recognized for work related to the interaction of computers and society. The recipient is a leader in promoting awareness of ethical and social issues in computing." http://www.sigcas.org/awards-1/awards-winners/sigcas-making-a-difference-award-2009
In parallel with the legal work, Kaner continued as a software development consultant and a teacher of short professional-development testing courses. As he compared notes with other teachers, Kaner realized there was room for a blending of academic and professional teaching, that might make tester-training courses more effective. He joined Florida Tech as a professor, explained his ideas to the National Science Foundation, and has received a series of research grants that have subsidized development of free instructional videos at http://www.testingeducation.org/BBST and a set of interactive online courses through the Association for Software Testing that have trained students from all over the world. Kaner is currently leading an effort to formalize these courses so they can fit into government-sponsored career retraining programs, to help some recession-hit people find new careers in software testing.
Kaner holds two doctorates, a Ph.D. from McMaster University (experimental psychology) and a J.D. (law) from Golden Gate University. He is senior author of Testing Computer Software and of Lessons Learned in Software Testing.
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