The year was 2006. James Bach and I were running a workshop at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference (AYE). We were in one of those large-ish, high-ceiling conference rooms with about 15 programmers and software consultants. We were showing them one of James Lyndsay’s wonderful testing machines. (You can find it here, but you’ll need Flash active to run it.) It looked like this: At first, it’s all very confusing. … Read more
For years at conferences and meetups and in social media, I have been hearing regularly from testers who tell me that they must “sign off” on the product or deployment before it is released to production, or to review by the client. The testers claim that, after they have performed some degree of testing work, they must “approve” or “reject” the product. Here’s a fairly typical verbatim report from one … Read more
Michael Bolton – Testing is Testing – Agile is Context / Change 2018
Closing keynote – Michael Bolton – Testing is Testing; Agile is Context
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As a tester, I try to represent the interests of users. Saying the user, in the singular, feels like a trap to me. There are usually lots of users, and they tend to have diverse and sometimes competing interests. I’d like to represent and highlight the interests of users that might have been forgotten or overlooked. There’s another trap, though. As Cem Kaner has pointed out, it’s worth remembering that … Read more
This post is a lightly-edited transcript from a LinkedIn article, which was itself adapted and extended from a recent thread on Twitter. Another day, another story that goes like this. A colleague tells me that he’s working with an organization by training developers in how to do testing. That sounds like a pretty good idea at first, although most developers are already pretty good at the kind of testing that … Read more
Here is an edition of the reply I offered to a question that someone asked on Quora. Bear in mind that it might be a good idea to follow the links for context. If we do sanity testing before release, do we have to do regression testing? What if I told you Yes? What if I told you No? Some questions shouldn’t be answered. That is: some questions shouldn’t be … Read more
Sigma Software
Michael Bolton, Software Testing Coach, author of Rapid Software Testing, consultant and influencer talks about Ukrainian QA specialists and their expertise and shares his ideas on “must-have” knowledge and skills for a good Test Engineer. The interview was taken during his three-day training organized by QA Fest and hosted by Sigma Software in Kiev.
I get this question a lot: a tester who has just learned to program, or who has just learned about a new framework or tool set asks “Now that I’ve learned this, what should I automate?” Some people (mostly men, so it seems) go into hardware stores and see some fancy tool like a compound mitre saw. Unable to resist temptation, they imagine themselves building… something. So they buy the … Read more
As promised, (at last!) here are some follow-up notes on previous installments in the series that starts here. Let’s revisit the original question: Do you perform any exploratory testing on APIs? How do you do it? To review: there’s a problem with the question. Asking about “exploratory testing” is a little like asking about “vegetarian cauliflower”, “carbon-based human beings”, or “metallic copper”. Testing is fundamentally exploratory. Testing is an attempt … Read more
Over the last several years, a set of ideas and activities have been dumped into a big bucket called “Agile Software Development”. Agile development has hit mainstream recognition. Yet there is often uncertainty and turmoil around what “Agile development” means, in theory and in practice, and the confusion affects Agile projects and the people in them. There have been some discussion points, such as Mike Cohn’s Agile Testing Pyramid and Marick, Crisipin and Gregory’s Agile Testing Quadrants, and many people have found them helpful. Yet James Bach and Michael Bolton, authors of Rapid Software Testing, still hear testers expressing a good deal of pain over the role of the tester and the structures of testing activity in Agile projects.
Rapid Software Testing (RST) is a skill set and a mindset focused on doing the fastest, least expensive testing that still completely fulfills the mission. From RST’s perspective, testing is testing and Agile is context. Whether you adopt RST, working in Agile contexts, or neither, or both, Michael Bolton will provide observations and advice on how to adapt your testing to fit mission context you’re in.
Bio
Michael Bolton is a consulting software tester and testing teacher who helps people to solve testing problems that they didn’t realize they could solve. He is the co-author (with senior author James Bach) of Rapid Software Testing, a methodology and mindset for testing software expertly and credibly in uncertain conditions and under extreme time pressure. Michael has 25 years of experience testing, developing, managing, and writing about software. For almost 20 years, he has led DevelopSense, a Toronto-based testing and development consultancy.
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