Podcasts on Quality Assurance and Testing In this video podcast, Alex Khvastocvich sat down with James Bach and Michael Bolton to answer a deceptively simple question: What is testing? Alex says A lot of people still reduce testing to “finding bugs.” But if you take testing seriously, it’s much bigger than that. We talk about: What testing actually is (and what it isn’t) And a bit about the future of … Read more
Over the last couple of days, a LinkedIn conversation has reminded me to write about the Productivity Paradox, which appears in Taking Testing Seriously: The Rapid Software Testing Approach, by James Bach and me. (I haven’t written a blog post about the delivery and release of the book. I was on tour when it came out, and then a bunch of online classes, the holidays, some sad occasions in the … Read more
When my daughter was two years old, and when she saw something unusual, she would say, “Dis is weird!”, mispronouncing the word as “weeood”, as little kids are prone to do. Cute as a button. Unrelated to that, the other day I was thinking about what might happen if we had a body of text that we wanted to modify — say, in an article, or a requirements document, or … Read more
How might we use a GPT in testing? Some have suggested that we could use GPTs to generate test data. Randomized test data can help to reduce patterns of certain biases in our testing. We might assume that getting a bot to produce random data based on a straightforward prompt would be easy. So here’s a little one-off, first-hurdle experiment I performed July 24, 2025 using Google’s Gemini 2.5. Here, … Read more
Last week, while preparing material for some upcoming Rapid Software Testing (RST) classes focused on testing AI, I was re-reading Stephen Wolfram’s article What Is ChatGPT Doing… and Why Does It Work? If you want to understand what’s going on it with any form of generative AI that extrudes text, it’s a superb summary. In the article, there’s a section that explains how machine learning works, using a classic example: … Read more
In Rapid Software Testing namespace, critical thinking is thinking about thinking with the goal of avoiding being fooled. We have a quick mnemonic to trigger critical thing: WHeReAS. Ask: Who? Huh? Really? And? So? For a long time, we had only the latter four items on the list. Evaluating an observation or a claim depends on making sure that we’ve understood the statement or idea we’re examining. That’s “Huh?” “Really?” … Read more
In our forthcoming book, Taking Testing Seriously: The Rapid Software Testing Approach, James Bach and I have included a chapter on AI. AI is fraught with risk, but writing about it is too. All through its history (since the 1950s, NOT just since 2022 or 2012), “AI” has not been an engineering term, but a marketing term, without clear notions of what “artificial intellience” really means. And all along, the … Read more
There’s a lot of focus over the last several years on “shift left” testing — that is, testing that happens before we have a product to test. Wait… how can we test a product before we have a product? In the Rapid Software Testing namespace, testing is the process of evaluating a product by learning about it through experiencing, exploring and experimenting, which includes to some degree questioning, studying, modeling, … Read more
That’s a question that people often ask in exasperation when some piece of technology fails to fulfill its purpose, or has some obvious problem. It’s not a question that people on the outside can answer for sure. After all, something can be tested and a problem can be reported, but management might decide that there are bigger fish to fry and that, despite the problem, the product is good enough. … Read more
Over the last 35 years in the software business, I’ve heard the expression “You can’t test quality into a product.” To support that statement, I’ve seen this quote — or a part of it — repeated from time to time: Inspection does not improve the quality, nor guarantee quality. Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product. As Harold F. Dodge said, “You can … Read more