The podcast that I listened to for this week is from a podcast called Test Talks by Joe Colantonio. In this podcast he has Michael Bolton as a guest, who is a software tester and testing teacher. He helps solve testing problems for people who did not realize they could solve them. He is also the co-author of Rapid Software Testing along with James Bach. Rapid Software Testing (RST) is “a methodology and mindset for testing software expertly and credibly in uncertain conditions and under extreme time pressure”. The first thing the two discuss is the three main points of RST. That is skill set, mind set, and its class. Some of the main things that they focus on when it comes to RST is finding trouble with it, they like to explores the risks of it, what bugs will threaten the value of testing, or the project or the business. Michael also emphasizes the importance of testers being able to express clearly what they are here for, quickly and to the point. Another topic that they then speak about is the nonexistence of manual testing, which he talks more in depth about in his own article on Developingsense. He talks about how manual testing does not exist. Testers need and use tools and they engage with the product.
There were a lot of things that I really liked about this podcast. The first thing is that I never knew who Michael Bolton was, and that he was the co-author of something like RST with James Bach. I also really appreciate what he had to say about manual and automated testing and how they exist and why it had ever existed in the past. I also really liked how he mentioned that when people think too much about what they should be including, the bureaucracy, they forget about creating the actual product and what they want to do. They forget about looking into the problems. People do not spend their time wisely when is come to various aspects of the product. People are not taking an appropriate level of time to review and check their own work. More excessive structure and documentation which displaces the time we actually have to do our work is the biggest problem. A lot of what he had to say was very true and I think that the time does not get taken into account with coding and testing for projects. Overall I really liked the podcast and felt it was different from the usual informational podcasts that are geared more towards how to test and the different kinds of testing and instead on what will make you a better tester.
