First a bit more about me.Before entering university in 1993, I already had written some software professionally. When I ended my study in computer science, software development was actually the boring part. I was much more interested in the fundamentals and the basic mechanics of networking, cs theory, physics and mathematics. BUT I needed to earn a living, so I started my career as a software developer. In 2005 I was asked to write automated checks (more on this later) for testing. At that time I decided that maybe testing was closer to what I wanted to do. The fascinating part was thinking about how we could automatically check the software product we where building at that time. Nobody was thinking back then about Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a candidate to efficiently do the automated checking (we called it test automation back then). I found 1 book about software testing and "AI",  "Artificial Intelligence in Software Testing, by Mark Last e.a. from World Scientific". At that time I was working for a American Multinational company, but they where not interested in the AI approach (a bit the story of my life). Anyways as a software developer I got already interested in software testing when I discovered XP (Extreme Programming) and xunit around 2001. Test driven development (more on this later) made a huge impression on me (thanks to a collogue at that time ). I found the paradigm of writing a test first, and then filling in the details with "normal" code very powerful. Test first has shaped my thinking about software testing.