• Are you finding it difficult to assess how much time and effort you're going to need to test effectively?
• Are you overwhelmed by or uncertain about approaches to test planning, design and execution?
• Are you working in an environment where some people aren't following "the rules"?
• Are you having trouble finding the right balance between planning, documentation, and testing?
• Are you interested in learning skills and techniques that will help you to become a better tester?
• Are you finding that "industry best practices" are infeasible and a poor fit for your organization?
• Would you like to connect - or reconnect - with your passion for learning and discovering problems in order to defend the value of your organization's products and services?
• Do you want to get very good at software testing?

Rapid Testing addresses these issues.

What is Rapid Testing?

Rapid testing is a complete methodology designed for a world of barely sufficient resources, information, and time. It's an approach to testing that begins with developing personal skills and extends to the ultimate mission of software testing: lighting the way of the project by evaluating the product. The approach is consistent with and a follow-on to many of the concepts and principles introduced in the book Lessons Learned in Software Testing: a Context-Driven Approach by Kaner, Bach, and Pettichord.

The rapid approach isn't just testing with a speed or sense of urgency; it's mission-focused testing that eliminates unnecessary work, assures that everything necessary gets done, and constantly asks what testing can do to help speed the project as a whole.

One important tool of rapid testing is the discipline of exploratory testing - essentially a testing martial art. Exploratory testing combines test design, test execution, test result interpretation, and learning into a simultaneous, seamless process that finds a lot of problems quickly. Read more about exploratory testing here.

How Is This Course Different?

Rapid Software Testing is an intensive three-day, hands-on class, in which you spend much of the time actually testing, working on exercises, puzzles, thought experiments, and scenarios - some computer-based, some not. The goal of the course is to teach you how to test anything expertly, under extreme time pressure and conditions of uncertainty, in a way that will stand up to scrutiny.

The philosophy presented in this class is not like traditional approaches to testing, which ignore the thinking part of testing and instead focus on narrow definitions for testing terms while advocating never-ending paperwork. Products have become too complex for that, time is too short, and testers are too expensive. Rapid testing uses a cyclic approach and heuristic methods to constantly re-optimize testing to fit the needs of your clients.

We also offer an optional, free fourth day whose agenda is set by the client. The fourth day can be used for consulting, coaching, conversations with managers or developers, or hands-on testing; whatever you like.

What Will We Learn?

If you are an experienced tester, you'll find out how to articulate those intellectual processes of testing that you already practice intuitively. If you're a new tester, hands-on testing exercises will help you gain critical experience.