In November 2017 I attended the Rapid Software Testing course held by James Bach. Now, this course has been renamed as Rapid Software Testing Explored.
When I was on the train, going to the training, I imagined what I would have written about the course in those days. But I did not do that. After the training, I decided not to write about it and wait for a good period of time, to see how it will influence me in real life. I think this is the most important thing in the end.
I think that the time to write about this course has arrived. I hope you will find it useful.
Premises
There were some things preceding the training which, I believe, are very important and worth mentioning:
– I knew about the work of James Bach and Michael Bolton. Before going to the training I have fully read their entire blogs, and also the book “Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach” written by James Bach;
– I knew about the work of Jerry Weinberg and have read a dozen of his books, especially the book “Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing” ;
– For 2 years, before going to this training, I tried to understand the testing envisioned by Jerry Weinberg, James Bach, Michael Bolton, Cem Kaner;
– I was a software developer and team lead;
– Going to this training involved also personal money/cost contribution. I mention this because I am strongly influenced here by the “skin in the game” concept of Nicholas Taleb;
– I have read the rst.pdf file, which was the course support material..twice;
– I have searched the internet for testimonials regarding this course with enough details, but I did not found a lot of them.
Feelings
I remember the strange feeling I had when I entered the class room. James Bach was there at his desk, but I did not dare to say anything. I can say that I was overwhelmed. It was unreal for me to be there.
After the first 2 hours of course, I realized that I knew so little about testing…
Details about course
I will try to write about this course via 3 dimensions:
-structure: the flow of the course in those 3 days;
-key words: it’s interesting to describe a training via some keywords used in the course, which can be enumerated coherently in a minute or so. I think it can have a good impact;
-pearls of wisdom: these are insights from the training, words used by James Bach. You will see that each of the texts is within quotes and preceded and followed by “….”. This is because the text has a context(story, experience, people, time, history, feelings, exercise, place). Some of those phrases took even an hour or 30 minutes to be described by James Bach for us. So there is a risk, for the reader, not to decipher the real meaning/lesson/message, but I put them there in the hope that it will convince/entice you to go at his, and Michael’s, training and find out more;
Structure
The course was centered around exercises, experiments and interesting surprises. These exercises were not easy at all, it was hard stuff(even if at the beginning, sometimes, for us it felt easy, we found out that it needs to be analysed first and we needed to ask for more information). I saw damn good testers being tricked. But James warned us.
Since these exercises and challenges were hard, he spoke to us about mistakes, about his mistakes. He told us that we should not be scared of them and that we should learn from them.
These exercises were inspired from real life difficult situations that James Bach experienced.
Each exercise was followed by a lesson/message. This was the beauty. If someone would have told me in advance the same lesson, I would have not understood it as I should – I am sure of that 100%. But you know why? Because we struggled with it, because it had put us in a delicate situation…try to imagine social pressure or a hostile environment, it is not enough to read about it, you have to live it.
The explanations were full of metaphors, so the message can be easily understood.
The interaction with James was via the Socratic method.
James intention was to make us learn more rapidly the things he learned in a much slower way.
Although I have read in advance the pdf which accompanied the course, I realized that I have missed A LOT of insights…
Key words
Initially, I was overwhelmed by all the details from the course and I did not knew how to describe it in a short and coherent way. But, shortly after, I realized that I can use some words used in the training. So here they are:
context based risk analysis, compatibility regression testing, sanity check, test strategy, business risk, normalization analysis(from therapy), leader and its attitude toward tester, thinking outside the box, parenting, biases, process of thinking, pattern(s) recognition, efficiency and relative efficiency, sense making, common sense questioning, interview for hiring, diminishing returns principle, fallacies, design tests, cope with complexity and uncertainty, scepticism, risk mitigation, quality, agile, think negatively, tacit test procedures, normalized test sessions, cognitive science, social dynamics, psychology, social skills, qualitative methods, social pressure, functional blindness, hostile environment, data types bugs, boundary testing, heuristics, perimeter assumptions, defocusing technique, factoring, randomness, heuristic test strategy model, professionalism in software testing, hazop, inattentional blindness, audit testing, penetration testing, anchoring bias, mental testing models, adversarial images(from AI) , statistical correlation, product coverage outline, oracles, lifeboat argument, explainability/confusion oracle, person whose opinion matters oracle, defocusing, diffusion limited aggregation, deep testing, exploratory and scripted testing.
Pearl’s of wisdom
As I have already said, it is important to mention that these phrases do not have context around them. This is intentional. It is an invitation, if you like or find it problematic or… to dig more, even to go to the course. So:
-“… Sanity checking means shallow test coverage not deep test coverage. For the purposes of identifying insanities. You are looking for, not just something that is a little bit wrong, you are looking for something that is totally broken. If it’s totally broken I want to know about it …”
-“… All testing problems have a context, and if you know that context you will be able to make a sensible decision about what to do next. And if you don’t know the critical context variables then you will suggest a ridiculous answer …”
-“…. Rapid Software Testing isn’t rapid because you are typing faster than other people. It’s about thinking: Do I really need to do this? Why do I need to do this? What things can I set aside? And what things do I really need to do? …”
-“… What a good leader should say, knowing how delicate and emotional testing is: I want to know if there is a problem. Don’t worry about the ship date. We will slip it if you say we need to. That is not your concern. What your concern should be: Can I find problems in this?. Let me worry about …”
-“… When you teach a tester how to test you are teaching that person to see something, to see things that you have never seen before …”
-“… Testing is an exploration and experimentation process …”
-“… A paradox of RST is that: RST tells you that you should do the right thing. Don’t do anything unnecessary, that will save you time. But how do you know what the right thing is? First you’re gonna have to do wrong things to find out what the right thing is…So the paradox is that in order to get rapid you usually have to start slow to climb the learning curve…”
-“… Testing is an intellectual activity …”
-“… Never say:I tested it and it works. That is always an untrue statement. The truth is you tested it and you haven’t seen it fail yet…I tested it and I know it can work… “
-“…Testing is not about assessing that the product is good enough, it’s about finding problems ….”
-“…Counting tests is pointless ….”
-“…Rapid Software Testing methodology which is a mindset and skillset, but it is not a set of rules, it’s not a set of templates….”
-“… New novice testers don’t need lists. They need experience. How do you give them experience? Sit with them down and test with them …”
-“… Here is what you never do: you never derive tests from requirements, just don’t say that…”
-“… It is not possible to write down a test …”
How it helped me
This course helped me realize/do a lot of things:
– I will do everything I can to have trainings with the best in the industry. With those people who create concepts. If this means paying from my own money, so be it. I prefer to wait a year or two, but to learn from the best out there;
– Online trainings are important and have their place, but they can never ever substitute a live training held by one of the top of the top of trainers;
– At least once per year I would do the Rapid Software Testing Applied training;
– As a programmer, this professional testing dimension influenced me a lot. I can no longer define myself as only a software developer and ignore the tester part in me;
– I understood how and why so much money is lost in IT with superficial testing and the “automation” trend which now is being marketed ;
– I understood how to be a better mentor;
– It helped me by giving me force to write about testing and to defend it;
– I realized that, now, in IT, a lot of concepts currently used are not understood: testing, agile, scrum, OOP, architecture…
– I was able to help/coordonate a student, an experienced developer, for a masters degree in IT regarding testing. It was the first time such a subject was presented in university and it really impressed. I was glad that, finally, the real face of testing was presented in an institution which prepares students for the IT industry. I hope that in the future I will be able to teach a course on testing, but I am not yet prepared, I need help. I think that if testing, the real one, would be taught in University it would help even more the spreading of what real testing is, which in the end will help the industry as well as the people in it.
Conclusion
I liked this training a lot. I never would have thought that it would influence me so much.