So happy to announce that Taking Testing Seriously: The Rapid Software Testing Approach by James Bach and Michael Bolton has been published and is available to buy!

I’ve been a fan of RST and their software testing training program for a long time and consider it the only serious way to build competent testers.

I was also incredibly honored to be asked to contribute a chapter on “How Testing Looks to Management”, including my thoughts on what’s worked in building credible test teams throughout my career. (Excerpt below…)

I really hope you enjoy it, a lot of people worked really hard for a long time on this, and it’s inspired me to start working on my own book…enjoy!

Cc: Special thanks to Huib Schoots Marius A. Frâncu

How Testing Looks to Management

“Projects suffer from unwarranted optimism because they don’t have good headlights and rely too heavily on biased systems for navigation. If you’re looking for confidence to release something, my experience is that you’re going to see what you want to see.

It’s like when we’re driving: we have all these things to help us understand and control things about the car, all these monitoring systems, and the steering wheel and our eyes and senses. When they’re right in front of you, you’re going to have a bias towards looking at those things. And that’s great—on the assumption that we’re on the right track and there’s nothing in our way, but the dials and speedometer and tachometer don’t show us what’s actually in front of us on the road.

Testing is meant to provide some distance from the dashboard, to help you see what’s on the road ahead of you and around you, not just what’s right in front of you. You want information that’s at some critical distance from your processes or project or the context in which you’re building the system.“