Last week I attended the 3 day Rapid Software Testing (RST) course run by Michael Bolton & James Bach.
My motivations for doing so were primarily to help me get better at testing generally, but also to help me to help startups & SMEs who cant afford / don’t need a full time test team.
Overall, I got exactly what I wanted from the course, which was a deeper understanding of what I know about testing, why I behave the way I do when testing and a range of tools & ideas to help me approach the software under test from multiple angles (as opposed to the relatively linear approach I currently adopt).
I’m still trying to fully process the information gleaned from the course & apply it to both my current role in an enterprise company, as well as how I can apply it to startups & SMEs.
What I found particularly great about the course was the fact that it didn’t try to tell us everything about rapid software testing in the 3 days - instead, it scratched the surface of the underlying principles of efficient software testing whilst giving you suggestions of further research & guidance in order to help you form your own opinion.
This suits my learning style of doing, as opposed to listening, & hopefully this means the knowledge is more likely to stick. I’m certainly brimming with ideas of where I need to research next (the one downside is, I need to address the balance of all the other learning going on at the moment, such as learning Java, reading Specification By Example amongst other books & commenting on various forums etc.)
I don’t intend to regurgitate the course notes here, other people have done that for me, but I hope to write a few blogs on what I thought of the different course elements & how I would like to apply them to my circumstances.
Lastly for this post - If you are a Tester, I would thoroughly recommend getting on this course for numerous reasons. If you a Manager of a test team, this version of the course might not be entirely suitable (unless you are a hands on manager). I believe there is a 1 day managers version of the course.