Podcast Episodes

All too often, people believe that they have to run all their system tests through the GUI, and that includes automated tests.  However, it is possible to run automated system tests through a variety of interfaces, such as command lines, APIs, data layers, network services, and more. In this webinar, Rex will give two such examples of sophisticated automated system test platforms capable of quickly running thousands of tests with very low false positive rates, flaky test rates, and test maintenance rates. One tested a data layer interface, the other a network services interface.  Each used a flexible and maintainable keyword driven architecture.  Come ready to open your mind to new ways of automating system testing, and leave with ideas you can apply to automating your tests away from the GUI.

The ISTQB provides extensive support for the test professional’s career path. There are so many options, in fact, that some people get confused and have questions.  Well, in this One Key Idea session, Rex is here to make the career path clear and answer your questions.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll understand how the ISTQB career path can support your progress throughout your professional testing life.

In this month’s “Two Points of View at Two” session, Rex is happy to welcome Nivia S. Henry. Nivia fundamentally believes that happy people, working in a healthy environment, will do great things. This philosophy has driven her to build a 15+ year career creating and supporting high-performing teams. Her career path has included agile coaching, enterprise agile transformations, product management, and people leadership. Today, Nivia applies her hard-earned experience as an Quality and Web Engineering Manager at Spotify. In this session, she'll discuss Spotify's perspective on Quality and focus on how the organization has organically grown its test automation practice.

What should testing accomplish and how do we recognize success?  How should we approach testing? What specific activities need to be planned for each release, each project, each iteration?  What risks can affect testing, and how can we manage those risks?  How does lifecycle affect these documents? These are critical questions for testers and test managers, yet often they go unanswered or have answers that aren’t fully thought through.  In this webinar, based on years of experience helping testers and test teams optimize their testing processes, Rex will discuss test policies, strategies and plans.  Join this webinar, illustrated with examples throughout, to learn concepts and ideas that you can apply to your testing processes right away.

As a bonus to our June complimentary webinar, this month we shared with you an interview with Rex about the newly released ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level  2018 Syllabus. Listen to the session and you will learn why the changes were made, what was the process for making the changes and, finally, what are the changes!

The Agile Testing Pyramid is a great metaphor, and it can be very useful when applied properly. However, it can also lead to some serious dysfunctions in organizations that misunderstand, misapply, or misinterpret it.  Are you using the Agile Testing Pyramid properly? Rex will help you answer that question, and help you resolve problems if they exist.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn the rights and wrongs of the Agile Testing Pyramid.

Hiring and managing distributed, international test teams

Phil Lew, President of XBOSoft, an international software testing firm, joins Rex Black to discuss the critical topics of hiring and managing teams of testers who work around the world.  How do distance, culture, and language create challenges, and how have Phil and Rex dealt with those challenges in the past?  You won’t want to miss Phil and Rex’s points of view on these important topics.

Many smart, otherwise-capable testers sabotage their own careers by committing one or more of the seven deadly sins of testing.  Are you your own worst enemy?  Come join us to discuss these seven deadly sins with Rex.  You might recognize your own behaviors, or behaviors of others on your test team.  In this webinar presentation, Rex gives examples of these behaviors through case studies, and tells you how to stop the behaviors and solve the problems those behaviors have created.  For sinners and non-sinners alike, Rex offers ideas on how to become a testing saint.

Technical debt is bad.  It’s smart to carefully manage technical debt. Defects are a form of technical debt.  Do you know how to measure how well you are managing defect-related technical debt? In this One Key Idea session, Rex will demonstrate two simple defect metrics, easily extractable from any defect management tool, which can give you useful insights into what’s happening with defect-related technical debt.  In twenty minutes or less, you’ll learn what these metrics can tell you and how you can use them to manage your technical debt better.

For nearly ten years, RBCS has run a highly successful free webinar series.  In 2018, we’re adding the Two Points of View at Two series to our monthly webinar rotation. In each of these sessions, Rex Black will talk with another software luminary about topics of mutual interest, where the two have some different views, and then Rex opens the floor to questions. 

In this inaugural session, Rex is happy to welcome Maaret Pyhäjärvi .  Maaret’s bio describes her as feedback fairy with a day job at F-Secure, where they call her a Lead Quality Engineer. She identifies as empirical technologist, tester and programmer, catalyst for improvement, author and speaker, and community facilitator and conference organizer. You can catch her latest thoughts on her blog at http://visible-quality.blogspot.fi

In this session, Rex and Maaret will discuss tester-developer collaboration and the relationships between testers and developers.  How to approach developers for collaboration? How do testers-developers ratios affect relationships? What about people who move between tester and developer roles? Join Rex and Maaret to hear their thoughts and ask your questions.