Different Takes on QA (URLs for those who came to a meetup that didn't happen)

Best QA speakers/writers:

Michael Bolton

• https://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/1509
• We have long understood and taught that all testing is exploratory...
• Exploratory Testing 3.0 - Satisfice, Inc.
• Others have already made the point we make here: that exploratory testing ought to be called testing. In fact, Michael said that about tests in 2009, and James wrote a blog post in 2010 that seems to say that about testers. […]
• https://hexawise.com/posts/smarter-software-testing-with-michael-bolton
• I wish that more testers understood that?test cases are not central to testing. To be an excellent tester means to explore, to experiment, to study, to model, to learn, to collaborate, to investigate. To discover.?None?of these activities, these?performances, are captured in test cases.
• Testing Smarter with Michael Bolton - Hexawise Blog
• An interview from our "Testing Smarter with..." blog post series with Michael Bolton, an extremely influential consulting software tester and testing teacher who helps people solve testing problems that they didn’t realize they could solve.
• https://www.developsense.com/resources.html#exploratory
• Testing is?"the process of evaluating a product by learning about it through exploration and experimentation, which includes: questioning, study, modeling, observation and inference, output checking, etc."?If it's not exploratory, it's not testing.
• DevelopSense: Resources and Unpublished Articles
• Evolving Understanding of Exploratory Testing. It might be a good idea to start at the end and work towards the beginning. James Bach and I currently view exploratory testing as... testing.. For us, testing is "the process of evaluating a product by learning about it through exploration and experimentation, which includes: questioning, study, modeling, observation and inference, output ...

James Bach at CAST 201408 or so Keynote - Test Cases Are Not Testing by Association for Software Testing at YouTube

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Marcus_Bach
• James Marcus Bach - Wikipedia
• James Marcus Bach is a software tester, author, trainer and consultant. He is a proponent of exploratory testing and the context-driven school of software testing and is credited with developing session-based testing. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Software Testing. Lessons Learned in Software Testing, a book he co-authored, has been cited over 130 times ...

Other QA folks:

• Jonathan 'Jon' Bach, James' brother
• Ingo Philipp of Tricentis 2016 or so

• An automated tester who used to talk a bit about manual testing is Joe C. Here is one of his interviews:

https://testguild.com/podcast/automation/196-rapid-software-testing-michael-bolton/

A Quote:

I have heard it repeated that Quality is fitness for use (from J. M. Juran's Quality Control Handbook, I've been told) and Mike Cohn uses that definition.?That is, high usability, performance, and good features... superior caliber, excellent software.

I don't know what else they say about software quality, but durability is also important.?Not that it is fit for use for a long time, as software can be updated, but that the software is of high reliability and will be around for a good while.