For many organizations and educational systems, there's a need for testers and testing talent but there isn't a clear path for someone to go learn about testing and become a software tester, at least not in a traditional education sense. There may be a school or two that has some testing curriculum specifically but for many educations systems, it's taught superficially if at all. How does a potential tester learn what they need to and how can they be encouraged to pursue software testing in the first place?

Dave Harrison and Simon Prior join Matthew Heusser to talk about the need for software testing to be considered a viable path for colleges and universities, the type of education that would be helpful for institutions to teach, what types of people and educational background would work well as testers, and how to help them get the best leg up if/when they decide to make that decision.

What does test management mean in today's software development world? Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome Gwen Iarussi and Lalitkumar Bhamare to talk about the differences in test management of previous decades vs. today's needs and requirements. Finding that "what is the value driver for our business?" is a critical piece among many.

Have you ever wondered what happens when something like a nor'easter, a tornado, a blizzard, or a wildfire comes through your area? How to critical systems like utilities, hospitals, and emergency services deal withy these situations? How can they help ensure their IT capabilities will remain intact, or as intact as possible? Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome Kimberly Humphrey and Scott Swanigan to talk about Storm Readiness Testing and how organizations can plan for the worst and be up and running as quickly as possible.

In todays fast paced and ever more complex software development landscape, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are more important than ever. Testing them has their own unique challenges. This week, Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen talk with Beth Marshall, Ben Dowen, and Andrew Knight about the unique challenges testers face when working with and testing APIs and the variety of methods to make those challenges a little less daunting.

Once upon a time, testing was about creating the right documentation, making sure requirements were correct, be the quality police, and tell everybody else to do their job well. Lagter, we focused on specific testing, diving in to find defects and problems, and act like an insurance policy so that if there's a problem, we find it, but stop telling people how to do their jobs.

Have we gone too far from that original focus? Is it possible for us to give generalized observations about the quality of the software we are delivering? How would we do it? To answer those questions, Rachel Kibler and Chris Kenst join Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to discuss where testing and quality interact and make a case as to which is more important and at which point in time.

On today's show, Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome Johanna Rothman, long time management author and coach to talk about the changing roles in management, the ways in which traditional management culture is not well suited for the Information Age, and ways in which thinking about managing oneself and managing others can be improved for the realities of today's workplace, specifically in the area of software testing and testing management.

For many software testers, it can be challenging to build up a portfolio of work that can demonstrate skill, knowledge, and expertise. Having GitHub account for coding skills is one approach but many testers work on proprietary systems where people outside their company cannot see what you are capable of. Open source projects are a way to get involved in an externally visible way but where does a tester start and what can they actually do?

Dr. Jessica Ingrassellino from InfluxData joins us Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk about her initiative to make open source projects more available to testers and testing and ways that testers can get involved and why they would want to in the first place.

Many of us are familiar with the idea of negative testing, where we feed bad data or inputs to a program or application to see how it behaves. That works for a program or an app but how about an entire infrastructure? A discipline that has come to be known as Chaos Engineering is where this level of "testing" comes into play. Intriguing but what is "Chaos Engineering?"

Claire Moss joins Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen to discuss the good, bad, ugly, and just plain odd aspects of a discipline that is not readily understood but bears a resemblance to Exploratory Testing. It is also available to any organization that wants to implement it, provided they are ready and willing to go down a rabbit hole or ten.

Now more than ever, the idea of working for one company and doing one job for our working life is an outdated notion. For many of us, curating and developing a career is a job unto itself, especially in today's ever-changing job and career landscape.

Raj Subrameyer comes back to discuss his new book "Skyrocketing Your Career" and we all talk about our personal journeys and how we have arrived where we are and hope to go next.

In this day and age, everything is becoming code. It used to be just the applications but with the proliferation of software to create software (think of Jenkins pipelines) or the aspects to Terraforming servers in the cloud (and Terraform being just one way to do it), there is ever more code being written to set up and deploy software. Who tests all that, and how does one get to play in these extensive sandboxes?

Perze Ababa and Gwen Iarussi join Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk about these areas of recent and new development, the skills needed to be successful, and ways to make sure that you get to be in "The Room Where it Happens", to borrow from Hamilton.

Software fills many niches and does many things for individuals and businesses. Some software is designed and developed for mass user interaction, while other applications are designed for specific purposes and markets. Some software is literally developed to work within a company for the benefit of its staff and is never seen outside of the company it serves. Still, it feels as though the testing advice that is given and received often focuses on big players and customer facing software.

Perze Ababa, early show alumni, joins Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen to discuss his role in software initiatives that reach both to customers and those projects that are specific to organizations and their workers to be productive and effective. He explains how one size definitely does not fit all.

The title this week may seem odd but it is indeed correct, as Michael Larsen participated in and in effect helped to test out the various challenges and solutions that go with putting on a virtual conference in this current period of time.

In this episode, Michael talks with two long time veterans of the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, Philip Lew (Program Chair) and Bill Opsal (a long time volunteer and troubleshooter) about the ups and downs of putting on a virtual conference, things that went well, challenges faced and some lessons learned that may help anyone with putting on a virtual conference in the future.

As organizations get larger or infrastructure/software becomes more relied upon, testing itself can have its share of risks. For this episode, Matt and Michael chat with Simon Evans about how to approach larger systems (and perhaps not so large systems), make the needed decisions to focus on important areas and make QA a less risky proposition altogether.

It's safe to say that 2020 has introduced challenges into people's lives in unprecedented ways (at least in our current times). Some are thriving but many are feeling the results of burnout. Raj Subrameyer joins Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk through common issues of burnout as it relates to tech workers and some approaches and methods that can be used to deal with said burnout if not banish it entirely.

There have been record and playback tools available for the past few decades, with varying results and reputations. They often over promise and under deliver. Today, Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen are joined by Rex Feizi of Subject7 and Leandro Melendez (Señor Performo) to talk about the latest generation of record and playback tools, how to leverage them effectively and use them in spaces where they are intended (as well as explore other areas where they can be beneficial) and get some good advice about how to make the best use of these tools both now and into the future.

It may feel that your team may be doing a lot of testing but how do you know if you are doing the right testing or the needed testing and not wasting time on areas that are not as important or add little value to your efforts?

Aviram Shotten joins us to have a conversation about optimizing QA efforts and putting those hard-earned QA dollars and cents to best use.

As software testers, we are often told that we need to check our biases at the door, to not go in with preconceived notions, to look past logical fallacies, and prevent them from entering into our daily work. As our guest Rachel Kibler helps us see, that is easy to say but much harder to do.

It's one thing to apply Agile principles to a new project or to a small initiative. It's another thing entirely to apply these principles to a large organization with many moving parts, focused teams, and existing products. How do larger companies take agile and actually "make it scale?"

In today's show, Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen go in-depth with Yoav Ziv to discuss the advantages and pitfalls of applying Scaled agile approaches to an organization and examine how these changes are having an effect on organizations and testing teams.

As the weeks turn into months and COVID-19 infections continue in many places around the globe, plans for Career Development and conferring with others are transforming to meet the unique challenges. In this episode, Smita Mishra and Anna Royzman join Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen to talk about ways that conferences and other providers of learning opportunities are coming together to address ways in which to create meaningful learning opportunities and the fact that going to a conference in person and attending a conference online from home are not at all the same thing. We also bring back the immediate news portion of the show with a quick discussion of both the technology and ethics of contact tracing and happily announce that The Testing Show will be moving to a two-week format starting in July.

It's tempting to think that, in an area like Software Testing, "it's all been done" in some ways or another. To say that there's some "secret weapon" out there can raise some skeptical eyebrows. Yet Maya Ben Lerner and Leandro Melendez both say that there is indeed an area that can unleash great power if approached from the right angle. We don't want to spoil the surprise... well, OK, we do a little bit. That angle is infrastructure automation. Even with that, there's a lot of meat to discuss, so join Maya and Leandro as they talk with Matthew Heuser, Michael Larsen, and returning guest Mike Lyles on how to make your environments stand up and help you take control of your testing.

In this "COVID" edition of The Testing Show, Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome James Back to discuss the state of testing and the push towards DevOps. Are we missing something with this push? Are we losing the actual testing that is needed? Are there testers legitimately excited about these changes? Have a listen and find out!

With Shelter at Home orders in place in many cities and entire countries due to COVID-19, we are experiencing an experiment not yet tried in our history. Many are working from home who have not had the opportunity to before and it is creating some unique challenges.

Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome back Yadira Arevalo and Elle Gee to have a frank conversation about the stresses and realities of working remotely. We talk about both the challenges and opportunities with so many working remotely, as well as ways to do the best work possible and cope with what may be a new normal.

In what is proving to be a challenging month for most of the world, we decided to tackle the topic of SAFe, basically the Scaled Agile Framework.

Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen have a chat with Jennifer Fawcett about SAFe. What is it? Why does it matter to your organization as a whole and to testing and testers in particular?

We've heard of Performance Testing but what is Performance Assurance? In a One on One conversation, Matt Heusser talks with Leandro Melendez about the difference between Performance Testing and Performance Assurance and how the changing landscape of systems and infrastructure makes Performance Assurance an area worth paying attention to.

As it is a new year, we decided it would be interesting to discuss the hiring of testing talent as well as being the testing talent and looking to be hired. What do recruiters actually look for? Do I have the right skill set? What do hiring managers actually look for? How important is a culture fit and why does it matter? Also, what are the areas that we can't fake on our interviews?

These questions and many more are being asked by Matthew Heusser and Michael Larsen as they talk about the details of interviewing testing talent with Yadira Arevalo and Elle Gee.