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.
Fast forward Rapid Software Testing (RST)
This was the first time some people (James Bach and Michael Bolton founders of RST) said something about software testing that made really sense to me. Before knowing about RST, I got an ISTQB certificate. ISTQB didn't make any sense to me.
The picture at the bottom more or less tells the difference between ISTQB and RST. You could say ISTQB == test case development and RST == where testing is really valuable. I hope that ISTQB certificates and the whole industry around it will be replaced by something where testing is considered a human activity and not something that can be easily automated, by replacing humans by machines.
Fast forward 2026.
Maybe this is really the time where we could completely automate(-me) what a human tester does? Let's see how far we can take this?
To end this post I'm going to quote RST on what for them testing is:
Our definition of testing encompasses humanity, cognition, curiosity, and science. Here it is: Testing is the process of evaluating a product by learning about it through experiencing, exploring, and experimenting with it.
Bach, James; Bolton, Michael. Taking Testing Seriously: The Rapid Software Testing Approach (p. 17). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
