Our services

We're consultants, not a staffing company. We're test experts, not commodities. If you need a tester to do more than simply fill up a chair at your company, then you've come to the right place.

The Rebels

House of Test is synonymous with challenging the status quo. Each member of our team tears down the traditional conventions in their own unique way. Together we are bringing hardcore testing into the mainstream.

Whats going on?

Catch a glimpse of what's going on inside the walls of House of Test and the minds of our consultants. Our blog is where we share our thoughts on the latest developments in the testing world.

Glory to the Brave

Testing is a challenging craft that requires sharp skills. To hone our skills, we reject the status quo and refuse mediocrity. The wild ones dare to be different and think outside conventions and norms. We not only embrace change, we also create it and grow with it. We value our integrity and follow our passion – heart and soul. Because of this, we call bullshit on dehumanizing factory testing, bogus certification schemes, and feeble testing standards. Testing done right delivers valuable information, and we will meet the challenge.

We choose to take the high road because we care about you, our customer.

What we do, we do for the love of testing!

We only settle for greatness, because you expect nothing less from us!

Some call us rebels.

We call ourselves House of Test.

 

Passion for testing

What separates House of Test consultants from the average, run-of-the-mill test consultants out there, is our unstoppable drive and thirst for knowledge about software testing. We pride ourselves on being the number one context-driven testing company in Switzerland, with some of the world’s leading trainers, coaches, and test experts on our roster. Regardless of your testing problem, you can rest assured that House of Test can help you solve it.

Consulting

House of Test consulting is not your common staffing company or resource provider. Our consulting focuses on contributing as much on a strategic level as on the project deliverables. House of Test can offer a complete range of testing services, but we always make sure that our customers feel that working with House of Test means value both for the current project, and for future ones.

House of Test offers competence-based consulting services in terms of shorter assignments and part time assignments such as mentoring, coaching, assessments, and reorganization. We are also able to take on longer, full time contracts, either assigned to teams or with us as project leads.

Our Consultants

At House of Test, we cultivate excellence. We dare claim we have some of the best test consultants in the world. Our consultants are experts at analyzing and getting up to speed in new contexts which means we deliver value from day one. Collectively, we’ve done work in every industry imaginable and are able to excel in any context, from mobile and web, to regulated medical environments or with defense industry contractors.

What truly makes us unique though, is the way we approach skills development within House of Test. Many companies claim to have good knowledge sharing, but very few take it as far as we do. We meet as a group 4-5 times per year for two day long workshops on testing, and in between we do internal status reporting and give feedback to each other on our latest testing ideas or challenges we might be facing. This isn’t something we have to force. It’s simply what happens when you put kick-ass people with a common passion together.

Coaching

House of Test is home to some of the most experienced test coaches in Europe and South Africa. We tailor our coaching to the needs of the organization, teams and individuals, depending on the situation.

A coach’s job is to facilitate the exploration of needs, motivations, desires, skills and thought processes to assist the individual in making real, lasting change. When we coach, we use a socratic approach with questions and answers guiding the individual being coached towards new insights and learnings.

Our coaching is always goal-based and we continously evaluate and adapt to make sure that we’re steering towards the agreed goal after each coaching session. If we’re off course, we adjust the course, and if the goal is no longer relevant, we update the goal.

Mentoring

The difference between coaching and mentoring can appear subtle, and the focus between coaching and mentoring often changes several times during a client assignment. The goal of our mentoring sessions is to pass on knowledge and experience and open doors to otherwise out-of-reach opportunities of learning for individuals and team. Our coaches have decades of accumulated testing expertise between them and are also experienced trainers and educators, which guarantees a highly effective relationship between mentor and mentee.

Test Management

We believe testing is inherently unpredictable and our collective experience backs that up. As a counter-measure we like to spent as little time on planning as possible and instead put most of our efforts into navigating and enabling testing. We do make plans. We do make strategies. But we refrain from burying our heads in them and staying with our knowledge and beliefs as they were at the beginning of the test project. We know that we all get smarter, wiser and better. Not all checks stay valuable. Not all areas stay at the same risk level.

Our toolbox is highly valuable, low-tech and customizable and is generally non-intrusive and complimentary to what tools and methods you may already have in your organisation: we use mindmaps and white board dashboards for overviews. It helps visualising status and goals, while not restricting us in getting new ideas. Whenever possible we like to use either session-based or thread-based testing, as that utilizes the power and freedom of the testers to do amazingly good testing, while still keeping everything in control and to the point.

A large part of test management is logistics in getting people and their skills, software, data, environments and everything else ready at the required time. We tend to focus on the testers, their skills, their professional growth. We prefer to manage people rather than test cases. We use coaching and mentoring, because we do not just settle for average. We think that testers who are confident, skillful and generally shines with pride of their work also performs the best. Who wants to be a commodity, doing average work?

We encourage several ways of reporting test results to you, as different decisions and needs shouldn’t be met with the standard one-size-fits-all form that the local tool can generate. We aim at always being able to report results on time, to the point, on purpose and including the accuracy and insecurities of the testing done. How else can you use our results?

Ultimately it is all about getting trustworthy and understandable information to the right people at the right time.

 

Training

House of Test provides tailored training, mentoring and coaching packages for individuals and organizations who want to further and evolve their testing knowledge and skill within today’s cutting edge testing techniques and methodologies.

House of Test also cooperates with well-known experts in context driven and rapid software testing approaches to further strengthen our training offer. Look out for upcoming training sessions with world-leading test experts, such as James Bach and Michael Bolton.

Public Training can be found here:

https://rebelsof.it

 

The Rebels

Ilari Henrik Aegerter

My formal studies have brought me from General Linguistics and Sociology to Software Engineering and Software Testing. I so much liked the profession that I continued to intensively work on my skills. Being a context-driven tester is the natural outcome and I believe that software testing is not a clerical job but a profession, which needs a high level of proficiency.

I have 10+ years of experience in the field, coming from the medical software domain at Phonak AG and progressing to e-commerce at eBay. I am now the Managing Director of House of Test GmbH and I believe there is still a lot of work to be done for excellent software testing.

In 2013 I co-founded the International Society for Software Testing (ISST), which advocates for bringing back common sense to testing. I am currently president of the organization. In 2015 I was elected into the board of the Association for Software Testing (AST), where I act as Vice President.

Since I like talking, I often present at international Software Testing conferences and I am also frequently invited to speak at company events. From time to time I do workshops on Software Testing, which I enjoy tremendously.

Being in the field of Software Testing does not feel like work and it is a pleasure to do what I like every single day.

In my private time I like to read a lot of books and comics, spend time with my family, test the possibilities of our world with my kids and test good food in restaurants with my wife. I believe that people are generally good and that there is plenty for everybody in this world. All that results in me smiling a lot.

Simon Berner

I started my career in IT as a system engineer/administrator and then later as a developer. I finally stumbled over testing and it stuck with me. I love the burnt smell of deep thinking while testing and to forget the rest of the world while I’m absorbed with awesome testing. I’m very enthusiastic about software testing – especially for those things I don’t know yet. I’m experienced in story testing, performance testing and mobile testing. Besides that, I have also deep knowledge in requirements engineering and agile project- and application management, I’m good at talking to customers and I’m a very good listener and tacit observer. The restlessness drives me, I’m always open to learn something new and like a chameleon I’m able to fit me into every new challenge and situation.

For me House of Test is like being among rock stars. It is the ultimate place to grow, learn, congress, communicate and debate. It’s full of responsibility, freedom, passion and satisfaction, to evolve as human beings and testers. I give all the power I’ve got for moving us forward and getting a bit wiser each day.

Jan Wegner

I entered the professional IT world when studying computer science at the University of Paderborn. Already during my second year I had a job as a system administrator. After working quite a while as systems admin, I was hired as a professional Software Engineer. The first time it became “test-related” was after I’m finishing university and entering into a big German web-portal. Our Team was inspired by Toyotas “Total Quality Management” (well) idea and lean-approach. Still programming I was working at the QA-department, to assure that no software hits the servers, which was not reviewed by our department. We saw early versions of frameworks like Selenium, Spring, CruiseControl and software from e.g. Apache Jakarta which are still in use today – at much later versions, though.

As a matter of fact we were building our own test tools because testing was not yet a discipline by itself. Some may not come to mind firsthand when talking comes to test tools. In the meantime the business has changed a lot and observing, thinking and communicating are the primary tools at hand instead being the human bug-finder. After working for a while on both sides of the ‘front line’ between software development and software testing, I found my first job as a testing (only) position. Having an innovative manager, I had the first encounter with the context driven school of testing.

Providing information about the ‘state of the product’ and contributing to identifying risks is now one of my primary goals. Besides that I enjoy working with a team not only following “The Prozess(tm)” but strive to learn, adapt and change. In that field I am really engaged about showing the agile benefits to those who work with me. Bering thoughtful and risk-aware I am also a hands-on guy, passionate with experimenting. Last but not least I keep my eyes and mind open for the new and noteworthy.

Andrew Orange

My degree is a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronic and Information Engineering.  During my 4 year studies, we covered all aspects of engineering including,  software, electronics, high voltage systems, digital signal processing, analogue electronics and pure mathematics. During that period was 1 year in industry working on designing, building power supplies and writing error correction firmware for spectrum analysers.

Most of my career has been involved in testing one way or another. The first company I worked for was Micro Focus in the UK, where I was automating tests and exploring a COBOL Integrated Development Environment we’d developed for Windows 95. Later, as a developer for the product, we would do our own testing for bug fixes, automate the tests and drop them straight into the build process. The start of CI/CD building blocks perhaps!

In 1999, I moved to Switzerland where I continued as a developer mainly in financial institutions.  Here I would develop my own testing practices alongside my own development work up until many companies started to separate testing from development and commodify the practice. Throughout my time in industry, I’ve seen the most skillful testing work come from testers knowing their products very well, and having the ability to talk directly to the customers and the developers. This is why it’s such a pleasure to work for a company like House of Test who shares the same belief that testing is a skill and not a commodity.

When I finish work, I go home to Winterthur where I find my apartment in the city, my girlfriend and my 2 dogs which we take to the woods for walks.  I read a lot and my hobbies include value investing and bitcoin, mainly from a technical and economic standpoint. In my spare time, I’ve tested equity pricing apps and crypto-wallets. The learning never ends.

Simon Reichenbach

Als ich vor über 10 Jahren in einem Testcenter das erste Mal mit Software Testing in Berührung kam, war dies eher zufällig. Seither hat sich im Testing einiges geändert. Angefangen bei fantasielosem Schritt-für-Schritt Testfällen und halbjährlichen Releases sowie manueller Rapportierung in simplen Tabellenblättern hin zu automatisierter Testfalldurchführung mit Continuos Integration, Daily Stand-Ups, PI-Plannings, automatisch generierten Testreports, zweiwöchentlichen Sprints und Cross-functional Scrum Teams.

Ich habe den Wechsel vom Wasserfall-Modell in die agile Software Entwicklung miterlebt und geniesse seither alle Vorzüge hinsichtlich Eigenverantwortung, die Nähe zu den Entwickler, die Flexibilität sowie die Tätigkeit innerhalb eines Scrum Teams als Brücke zwischen den Entwickler und Business Stakeholder zu agieren.

Da ich grundsätzlich eine kritisch eingestellte Persönlichkeit bin, kann ich dies auch bei meinem Job als Software Tester ausleben. Ich geniesse es Dinge zu hinterfragen, sie aus einer anderen Perspektive zu betrachten und anhand der Findings dem Kunden möglichst konstruktives Feedback zu liefern. Anstelle eines möglichsten hohen Automatisierungsgrades empfehle ich möglichst sinnvolle, stabile und aussagekräftige Tests.

Um meine Erfahrungen und mein Profil abzurunden, habe ich vor kurzer Zeit den Zertifizierungslehrgang CAS Software Testing an der HSR absolviert. Dies war auch der Zeitpunkt, an dem ich mit House of Test das erste Mal in Berührung kam. Die Grundsätze von House of Test sowie die enge Zusammenarbeit mit den weltweit bekanntesten Grössen im Bereich Software Testing motivieren mich jeden Tag aufs Neue mit top motivierten Kollegen zu arbeiten und uns gegenseitig auf ein noch höheres Niveau zu heben.

Ich geniesse es täglich in Kontakt mit den neuesten Methoden und Technologien zu kommen und diese bei Möglichkeit direkt anwenden zu können.

Wenn ich nicht gerade versuche die Software Qualität zu verbessern, findet man mich meist in den Bergen rund um die Welt beim Powder Skiing oder Mountain Biking oder sonstigen meist sportlichen Aktivitäten.

Iván Riera Sánchez

Born to a family in Spain which has been living in Germany in the 1960s, I decided to go to the country myself in 2013 in order to learn the language. Since then, I have not only learned German but also worked in different roles in IT and I+D+i. Eventually, I discovered that testing was the perfect fit for me and my personality, working as QA engineer for a leasing Bank in Baden-Württemberg for almost 3 years.

Searching for ways to improve systems was always at the core of myself. Formerly a computational mathematician with a specialization in logistics and process optimization, I have found in testing my true vocation in which I can work daily on the improvement of the quality of software products. I see myself as a full-stack QA engineer, being able to develop many different roles from the testing spectrum (from unit testing to defect management).

Above all, I consider myself a life-long learner, always searching for new interesting things. Besides IT, mathematics and testing, I’m also interested in economics and management, and I am currently studying the last year of a business bachelor in a distance university. In my free time, I love playing my bass, chess, reading, doing sports and learning languages.

Olga Dietiker

As a Software Test Engineer, I enjoy solving puzzles. Every project offers different testing problems; there is never a „one fits all“ solution. When I find the best test approach, strategy or tool, it gives me the most satisfaction.

My journey in Software Testing started right after university graduation. I was always into exact sciences; thus, I chose Applied Mathematics as my speciality. Once I got into Software Testing, there was no turning back for me. I like to dive into a new project, observe it from different angles, test it with different perspectives. I continuously evolve by broadening my knowledge, experience and skills. I am driven by curiosity and a desire to make things work better. Accomplishment comes when I am untangling some thorny problem threads, whether technology-based, knowledge-based or communication-based.

I believe that a sound Test Engineer has to understand the business to the fullest. I use logical thinking to visualize every possible scenario and consider every possible test data that the actual user might be using. My strengths are flexibility and the ability to adapt to the given context.

I love the world of agile, fast-paced projects in interdisciplinary teams, and I enjoy the art of software crafting from A to Z.

In my spare time, I enjoy hiking, taking pictures, reading and occasionally doing sports.

Natalia Szprega

I am from Poland, where I have finished my studies and also took my first steps in IT. All science subjects like math, physics and chemistry, were always my passion and led me to study the field of biomedical engineering. There, I had my first contact with programming. I found it very interesting and as a next step, I have started a second degree: computer science. 

While studying I found my first job as a software tester. Since then, I have worked in a couple of different industries: microfinance, banking, aviation and logistics and in three different countries: Poland, Austria and Switzerland. For most of my career, I was working as a software tester, but also shortly as a Java developer. I am a big fan of Agile methodology, where in small iterations, I can gain a really deep knowledge of the product. This helps in better testing, which makes the product more reliable and competitive on the market. 

Testing brings trust into the brand and allows me to experiment with the product, without the risk of failing. I simply cannot imagine myself doing anything else but testing. I really love the versatility and flexibility that the IT industry gives. It is never boring! 

In my free time you can find me outside: skiing, running, climbing, swimming, biking, hiking… I could list probably every kind of activity, especially if camping is involved. I love mountains, so Switzerland sounds like the perfect places for me. I’m an outdoor person and for me, there is no bad weather (especially in winter). When I need to rest, I am reading popular science books or cooking.

Jagoda Brzozowicz

Ever since I was a child, I’ve enjoyed developing things from scratch and testing it. This passion, combined with my fascination for mathematics and technology, led me from construction sites over design offices to Test Engineering.

After my Civil Engineering studies in Poland which I completed with a master’s degree, I did my first steps in programming and testing. Civil Engineering and IT testing require extensive analytical skills and the ability to work with complex systems and processes. My technical studies enabled me to evaluate details in systems with many dependencies, helped me to understand applications context and identify potential sources of error in systems before they are released. The last years before joining House of Test team, I’ve worked in a bank in Frankfurt as a QA Engineer, taking care of the stability of a multichannel service platform.

For me, my job is more than a profession. As a tester, I enjoy calling everything in question; I can do this every day. I love tricky tasks in complex environments. Not only running simple comparisons between „how something works” and „how it should work”, but seeing and testing everything from the user point of view and evaluating it within the big picture – not within a single process. For me, testing is what it needs to transform our users from customers into fans.

When I’m not diving through web applications, you can find me on a squash court, travelling across Europe with a backpack or relaxing during baking.

Thomas Bosshard

In Zürich geboren und aufgewachsen, habe ich meine Lehr- und Wanderjahre beim Schweizerischen Bankverein im Portfoliomanagement und im IT in Zürich und in New York verbracht.
Vor 25 Jahren habe ich dann den Wechsel vom Techniker/Programmierer/Projektleiter in den Vertrieb vollzogen, was mich bis Heute glücklich macht.
Nach über 10 Jahren im Ausland (NYC, Mexico DF, London und Madrid) bin ich seit 20 Jahren zurück in der Schweiz und habe hier schon vielen verschiedenen Firmen in unterschiedlichen Branchen mit Management Beratung, Consulting und Software-Lösungen helfen können Ihren Zielen bezüglich Agilität und Digitalisierung näher zu kommen oder diese Ziele gar zu erreichen.
Als ich 2015 bei CA Technologies die Verantwortung für deren Agile Testing Lösungen übernommen habe, bin ich unweigerlich auch mit House of Test und Ilari Henrik Aegerter in Berührung gekommen und habe so dieses tolle Team kennen und schätzen gelernt.
Aus dieser Freundschaft entstand nun eine Bindung in der ich House of Test helfe weitere Kunden zu finden die mit den House of Test – Testexperten eine weitere Verbesserung Ihrer Softwarelösungen anstreben. Gehören Sie auch dazu?
Wir arbeiten auf strategischer Ebene, im Projekt, als Projektleitung, im Coaching und Mentoring oder für ein Assessment. All dies in Voll- oder Teilzeit aber immer ganz und gar ins Kunden-Team integriert.

Norbert Molnár

I am a Linguist and a Software Test Engineer with a degree in Near Eastern Studies – Arabic and Islamic Studies focusing on Modern Standard Arabic and the Egyptian dialect from the University of Vienna.

I gathered around five years of professional experience in various industries in Serbia, Austria, Switzerland, and Oman. After working in tourism, teaching languages, interpreting, and actively contributing to improving the lives of others as an Arabic-speaking career counsellor and undertaking research in the field of asylum, forced migration, and diplomacy at the United Nations, I switched careers to IT driving innovation to improve the way the world works & lives.

Being an exceptional Software Test Engineer requires a broad range of skills. It is partially a coincidence that I ended up in software testing. I was offered a role as a Test Engineer in Zurich as part of my first IT project that I accepted as I was eager to start working, and I was curious to experience living in Switzerland. Currently, I cannot imagine being anywhere else.

I enjoy touring in the Alps by motorcycle, hiking, and meeting my friends and family internationally in my free time. I like exploring the world, sitting at a bar, and starting a conversation with random people – I believe everybody can tell you something you do not know, and everybody is worth being listened to and understood. There are some exceptional individuals out there.

Context-Driven Testers

Being a context-driven tester means that when selecting your testing objectives, approaches and tools, you must first understand the details of the specific situation in which you are set to test. Only then can we as testers, through skill and judgement, apply the appropriate solution.

The opposite of context-driven is to be driven by best practices. A best practice tester will tell you that if you only apply his or her “internationally recognized standard”, all your problems will vanish, regardless of your actual context. Being driven by best practices is the embodiment of Maslow’s Hammer concept: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem in the world will look like a nail.”

Or to put it another way: The best practice tester comes to your company with a hammer and asks what needs pounding. The context-driven tester comes to your company and learns what you need, and then we go to get our tool box to see what tools might be useful.

History

House of Test was founded in 2008 by Henrik Andersson, Johan Jonasson and Georg Lysén. We started the company because we had grown fed up with watching other consultant companies trying to be the one to offer the lowest prices and most exaggerated “best practice” testing solutions. We wanted to fight against the commoditization of software testing and show the superior value of skilled testing, thoughtfully executed.

We built House of Test on a foundation of skill, drive and professionalism and we’ve shown countless times over the years that we excel in those areas.

It’s lonely at the top, but we can’t imagine ourselves anywhere else. And we’re not going away anytime soon.

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