STP Radio

You've probably heard of this guy named Michael Bolton who has flown over a million miles to teach Rapid Software Testing in 35 different countries, who has tweeted more than 62,000 times almost always on software testing subjects and who enjoy's rare whiskies, asian food and playing bluegrass music. For the last 18 years of his nearly three decades in software testing, he has been the leader of DevelopSense, a Toronto-based testing and development consultancy. We had a greatly voluminous conversation on all sorts of subjects from the origins of RST, critical thinking in testing and self-sabotage in our work as testers. This is episode is short - quite edited, so we will be posting the longer, uncut version of the interview on our SoundCloud account: https://soundcloud.com/stpradio

Jason Arbon is the CEO of Test.AI - his company which is the product of his passion for AI-Powered Test Automation. Jason will be joining us at www.stpcon.com to give a workshop, a session and a keynote talk on machine learning and artificial intelligence applied to the software testing disciplines. In our talk he shared a very memorable quote: “Machine learning is fundamentally an automated way to teach a machine to recreate human judgements and behaviors. If you look at it the testing problem is exactly that. We’re trying to recreate production environments, we’re trying to recreate the end user and judge it from their eyes.” Find out more at https://test.ai

Mary and I met almost 10 years ago on project to optimize email marketing campaign automation. So I will now formally apologize for the volume and speed of spam in your inbox. Regardless, Mary is an absolute agile testing guru, author, teacher, leader, manager and mentor. Mary has held VP, director, and manager level positions in various software development organizations. Her expertise is a combination of agile scaling, agile testing, and DevOps that her clients find incredibly valuable. We spend time chatting about her keynote topic and session.

In this episode of This Week in Software Testing (TWiST) we hear from Michael Larsen and his plans for both a workshop on automation frameworks and inclusive design for the upcoming www.stpcon.com conference. If you don't know Michael (@mkltesthead) already, he has been a software tester or worked in software testing capacities for over 25 years. He is a prolific writer, live blogger and podcast producer for “The Testing Show”, a podcast sponsored by QualiTest. He is active as a founder/facilitator of both Weekend Testing Americas and the Bay Area Software Testers Meetup.

After just 30 minutes of interview with Nancy Kelln, you might start asking: "what the hell kind of podcast is that!?" No, not really. Nancy is a passionate Test Manager with 16+ years of diverse IT experience working with teams that are enhancing their exploratory and context-driven testing practices. She has coached test teams in various environments and facilitated numerous sessions, international workshops and presentations. She's an active member of the Calgary Software Quality Discussion Group, Association for Software Testing, and the Software Test Professional community. Nancy and her family live in a mountainous town called Airdrie near Alberta, Canada.

Stacking the Automation Deck is yet another great talk from Paul Grizzaffi, who is a Principal Automation Architect at Magenic (www.magenic.com). Paul and I have a brief chat about the layers of automation framework design and a few architectural patterns that he will describe in detail at his talk. Paul is also an accomplished keynote speaker and writer, having spoken at both local and national conferences and meetings. He is an adviser to Software Test Professionals and STPCon (www.stpcon.com), as well as a member of the Industry Advisory Board of the Advanced Research Center for Software Testing and Quality Assurance (STQA) at UT Dallas where he is a frequent quest lecturer. Paul enjoys sharing his experiences and learning from other testing professionals; his most cogent thoughts can be read on his blog (https://responsibleautomation.wordpress.com)

Dead, testing is not. In this episode I get to chat with Rex Black who has been thriving in the industry for 35 years of software and systems engineering experience. Rex is the President of RBCS (www.rbcs-us.com), a testing leader, providing consulting, training, and expert services. He has worked with clients from small start-ups to Fortune 20 global enterprises. He has experience helping clients apply testing best practices in a wide variety of development lifecycles, including Kanban, Scrum, DevOps, Waterfall, and Spiral. He is one of the most prolific authors practicing in the field of software testing today, having written fourteen books and dozens of articles over the last 20 years. And we get to chattin' about his history in testing, the testing industry evolution, expert services in testing and Star Wars.

What a great conversation with Melissa Tondi who is the founder of Denver Mobile and Quality (DMAQ), a board member of Software Quality Association of Denver (SQuAD) and the lead of the Professional Services at Rainforest QA (www.rainforestqa.com). We chat about how NOT to test and Testing in DevOps and getting out on the water in San Francisco.

Joel has been in testing for 20+ years as tester, a manager, a consultant and now a speaker. He has worked for companies in Israel and the USA and he is now the Chief Solution Architect at PractiTest (www.practitest.com). Joel supports various industry projects such as the OnlineTestConf (http://www.onlinetestconf.com/), the State of Testing Report and a few secret projects he can't tell you about.

Angie Jones is a Senior Developer Advocate who specializes in test automation strategies and techniques. She shares her wealth of knowledge by speaking and teaching at software conferences all over the world, as well as writing tutorials and blogs on angiejones.tech.