James Christie

This experience has been largely in financial services, mainly with General Accident and IBM (working with a range of blue-chip clients). I hold the ISEB Practitioner Certificate in Software Testing, and I am a member of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA), an international organisation for professionals in the broad family of disciplines that create the user experience and which promote the design and development of usable products.

In 2007 I successfully completed an MSc in IT at Abertay University Dundee. My masters project and dissertation, for which I received an A grade, was "Integrating usability testing with formal software testing models". See MSc Dissertation for the abstract of my dissertation.

I am particularly interested in how the quality of applications can be improved by incorporating usability engineering and testing techniques. I am now providing an IT testing consultancy service, which places particular emphasis on usability issues.

An additional area of interest is testing's relationship with audit and governance. I find this a fascinating area. Having worked as a test manager and a computer auditor I believe that there is often a lack of constructive engagement between the professions. I am a member of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), which is a worldwide association of IS professionals dedicated to the audit, control, and security of information systems.