Michael Bolton Software tester, Consultant & Coach, Co-author of Rapid Software Testing

One of the most skilled testers and a renowned coach, he travels the world helping testers learn to test better. Michael has visited India seven times and taught Rapid Software Testing to India's leading software development houses. An exclusive interview with Pradeep Soundararajan.

Q: What skills are essential for greater career growth as a tester?
A: Testers need the ability to think critically about several things, about the product that you're testing, also about your own thinking and testing. The other skills are the ones associated with analysis, science, general systems, programming, computer hardware and software, business, and communication; these are all important.

But you don't have to be great at everything, and testing benefits from whatever you bring to the table. Rapid learning is important, and that depends on practice, not just reading or talk. I think, as testers, we should learn more about social sciences-anthropology, sociology, economics field sciences-than what we have done traditionally.

Q: What problems do most organisations that hire testers face?
A: We write new software to solve a new problem, and that means creating a new design. For that, the testing task is to question and evaluate the design. That's not a rote process, but an open-ended, investigative search for new information.

It's not about getting the right answers; it's more about asking questions that will identify and defend the design's value, both to the customer and to the producer of the software. This requires skills like analytical thinking, critical thinking, scientific thinking, systems thinking, technical knowledge, business knowledge, writing and speaking precisely.
Many organisations have trouble finding skilled testers, so they try to do testing with limited skill. They divide testing into units of activity that they call 'test cases'-highly focused checks of some function or another.

These checks are typically designed by one person and executed by others in a highly linear process. One consequence is that learning associated with either design or execution tends to remain isolated in the person who performs the activity. Another consequence is that the feedback loop between design and execution is unnecessarily long. Unskilled testing is of limited value, yet it can be quite expensive.

Skilled testing doesn't have to be expensive, and it reveals important information. In skilled testing-largely an exploratory activity-learning about design and execution reinforce one another, because they're being done by the same person. That's an organic process, rather than a linear one, and the feedback loop is very fast — it can happen in an instant.

Q: What have you observed about Indian testers? Any recent good news in Indian software testing?
A: The good news: on each visit, I met many testers who are taking responsibility for their own training and skills development. I've been invited to give presentations and teach testing, and often those requests come from the testers themselves, rather than from their organisations and their managers. The Weekend Testers movement is something that I'm very, very excited about.

Q: Your advice for wannabe testers...
A: Test! Practice. Start anywhere you like, with something interesting or fun or useful to the community, or something that you might like to learn about. Use personal contacts, and use the Web to help you make them. People who are genuinely interested in their work will want to help you if you express a similar interest.

Watch, do, learn, teach, and repeat the cycle. Grab a copy of Lessons Learned in Software Testing, or Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing, or Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar. Connect what you're learning to stuff you already know, and reinforce the cycle by logging on to Developsense.com.