Rahul Verma: My Petty Bits

Dear Testers,

I am a student of testing. I have learned from a lot of teachers at different stages. If you like my work, all pieces of it most likely have their origins somewhere in the great minds I have come across. Here are **some of the names**, that I often mention when I answer, “What next?”.

James Bach & Michael Bolton : Amazing body of work for those who think of testing as a thinker’s profession (who wouldn’t?). I do. I am a long time student of their work.

Suggestion: You want to learn more from their work? Decouple their concepts and ideas. For example “exploratory testing” -> “Exploration”, “context-driven testing” -> “Context” and so on. Now, take these core concepts and apply everywhere.

Cem Kaner and Robert V. Binder : Interested in learning test design? IMO the best content out there is by them especially for systematic test design. This alone can keep you busy for coming years.

Vipul Kocher: Seek his time, get his attention. I wish he had written books on testing for a wider reach, but you can always converse with him or attend his courses. No bucketing here for what you can learn. An explorer of ideas in testing? -> Get in touch.

Roy Osherove: Follow his work including The Art of Unit Testing series for learning white box testing (along with Robert V. Binder‘s Testing Object Oriented Systems).

Scott Barber and Alberto Savoia: Dig their past work on performance engineering – absolute gems. Supplement this with the work by Connie U. Smith & Lloyd (Patterns and Anti-Patterns), Neil Gunther (Maths as applied to performance)

Dafydd Stuttard: Stepping into security testing? Although his primary work is in web security space (BurpSuite, Web Application Hackers Handbook), it’s a good start (and beyond) for test engineers. I am very thankful.

Tariq King, Jason Arbon and Subbarao Kambhampati : A lot of relevant contents for those exploring testing of LLMs/AI and using LLMs/AI for testing.

PS: I think of them also as students of respective engineering areas. This helps me in not treating their work as absolute and not holding it to impossible standards. I also actively look at merging their work into my mental models of testing.

PS 2: This is a slice of my story. I’ve more slices. With so much testing done in India, for example, I realised after writing the post that there are only 2 names from India. You might also see the mix skewed in another way. This post is not a generic post on who to follow. It does not have the intent of passing any bigger messages on equality. This post is simple, honest and quick recall of which knowledge sources came my way in my story at different points in my career timeline. I encourage you to write your slices. In the totality of what we capture together, we’ll find a better mix of names emerging.

PS 3: This slice is from 2005-2010 and from last few months.