RST = Required for all Software Testers

I’ll start by saying I am sorry the trilogy (http://jarilaakso.blogspot.com/2012/02/reasons-of-illusions-on-testing-part-ii.html) is missing the last part. The last part has been coming up a long time already, but due to some excuses, I have been delaying it. I will focus on it again, but currently I have something more urgent in my mind: RST (held by James Bach) and this whole week in Bucharest.

I was able to convince my boss to send me to Bucharest for the whole week to participate to RST and a peer-conference. I can’t actually take the whole credit for it; my boss is fantastic, really supportive and saw this as a great investment from many points of view. After the week, I’ll say to all the bosses around there who care about testing/quality: make the investment!

Before the RST begun, I made a list of questions I want to ask from James and a list of things I want to learn. Little did I know… but here are a few things I listed: how RST works in my context with projects that last sometimes years, how will this make me a better tester, and how will my reporting skills increase with 3 days of training. If RST would be anything like a traditional training, those would be really good questions, and maybe they still are, but what you get from RST is far more than that.

The whole idea of RST training rolls around doing exercises, showing the weak points of poor testing and challenging everyone mentally. RST gives tools to do excellent testing, including what are important questions and for example why testing nearby some (imaginary) boundaries is just not enough.  Now I’ve read earlier that RST should have more hands-on exercises. I counted we did at least 25 exercises which most comprised of multiple stages, a lot of verbal reporting, discussions with various stakeholders and applying RST in practice. Please bear in mind this is only a part of the training. It’s unbelievable how much of information you receive in these 3 intense days!

James is the toughest teacher I have ever seen and the better you do, the more he will push you. This is because he wants you to learn, not because he is mean. He has incredible skills to read people and activate their minds. Getting an answer from him is sometimes difficult, but if you are persistent enough, he will make you answer your own question! Like I noted earlier, this training gives you much more than you will ever imagine. You will understand even reporting on a whole new level after the course.

Quite commonly I use a lot of safety language and after a training I could say something in the lines of “I think I did pretty well because I had some good ideas”. Now there is nothing wrong in this, but this time I can say “I did really well because I had sharp questions, I talked about philosophy of testing and I showed I care strongly about testers’ ethics.” Why am I so confident, some might say overconfident, to state something like that? Because James is also a rewarding teacher and he Tweeted about it! In my world, this means the people who care about testing just all got to know a bit about me. What other training could possibly have anything even close to that?

If you want to participate in the course, but have hard time convincing your manager to get the funds approved, please send me an e-mail. I will be happy to help. It’s not about if your company can afford this, but more if they can afford not sending you to the training. It is maybe the most important training of your whole professional career. We need to make it happen!

Note: I need to do the training with Michael Bolton, too. Hopefully this year, but latest on next year.