Dear Friends, Colleagues, Clients and Partners,

We want to wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, happy holidays, festive season's greetings, or whatever you are celebrating this time of year.  It's certainly been quite a year, and I'd like to mark a few of the RBCS 2017 milestones.

First, this was a banner year for assessments and other consulting work for clients.  We did  six assessments of various sizes, averaging one every other month.  Each assessment resulted in detailed evaluations and high-value process improvement recommendations for our clients.  We helped a client develop a test policy.  We are working with a client to build their first-ever test process and test team.  We also partnered with Experimentus, the leading provider of TMMi assessments in the UK and Europe, to deliver TMMi assessments using their methodology here in the US.  In 2018, we will be expanding our focus on finding ways to leverage my experience, and the experience of our RBCS colleagues and partners, to help clients evaluate their current testing processes and make significant improvements, through assessments and other consulting work.  If you have a testing problem and you could use some expert advice in 2018, let us know.

Second, we expanded our training offerings significantly this year. We introduced our Advanced Security Tester course.  We also brought out the first-ever Expert Test Manager course, covering the Strategic Module.  Both courses had very successful initial offerings in June.  We also brought out the e-learning version of our Mobile Tester Foundation course.  We also started work on our Advanced Test Automation Engineering course, which will be available in the next few months.

Third, even though I can hardly believe this was possible, we expanded our global reach with client meetings, conference keynote speeches, Foundation, Advanced, and Expert level training and bootcamps, and workshops around the world. Stops included Japan, Peru, Jamaica, Malaysia, Hungary, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, South Africa,  Italy, and more.

Fourth, we had an increase in our social media presence this year. Our YouTube channel and our LinkedIn contacts broke new highs.  Add in Twitter and Facebook and we have thousands of  social media followers and contacts.

Finally, this year was a first for me as a book author, in that I completed three books this year.  Expert Test Manager came out first.  Agile Testing Foundations was second.  And now Mobile Testing Foundations is submitted and in the editing process. 

None of these accomplishments would have been possible without the support of our clients and our colleagues. We hope you had an interesting and opportunity-filled year as well.  We look forward to seeing many of you in 2018.

Happy New Year!

Regards,

Rex Black

President, RBCS, Inc.

Past President, ASTQB

Past President, ISTQB

CTFL, CTFL-AT, CMT, CTAL-FULL, CTAL-SEC, CTEL-TM-FULL, Security+, CFLBA, TMMI-P