RST Peer Advisor Marius Francu has created a YouTube playlist of insights from the online RST Explored and RST Applied classes. For those who haven’t yet taken a class, these offer a little taste of some of the lessons that you might learn. For those who have taken the class, they can be helpful reminders of some of the important points.
Go to the RST YouTube Channel
Live Astronomy w/Rob Bach
Live Astronomy w/Rob Bach
How to Think About Biases (For Testers)
Jon and James discuss ways of learning about biases and why that ...
Jon and James discuss ways of learning about biases and why that matters for software testers.
Stories From My Time On The Microsoft AntiTrust Remedies Trial
For first time, James Bach speaks publicly of his experience as an ...
For first time, James Bach speaks publicly of his experience as an expert witness in the Microsoft Antitrust Remedies Trial.
It was the most dramatic project of his life.
Humans In The Way #3
We look at the problem of AI generated analyses and consider the ...
We look at the problem of AI generated analyses and consider the "analyst's dilemma." To what degree should an analyst personally collect data, versus trusting others to collect it. This ...has big implications for using AI to help with analysis.Show More
Rapid Software Testing Live Stream
Illustrating Pareto Principle in Automation in Testing
What I was showing Jon is a simple mathematical argument that it is ...
What I was showing Jon is a simple mathematical argument that it is better to "automate" in testing by focusing on "biggest bang for the buck" rather than "low hanging ...fruit" (low cost first) or "Biggest win" (high value first). You should consider cost vs. value on a case-by-case basis, which will give you the so-called Pareto solution (20/80).
However, on a different level, I was showing him the difference between doing a spreadsheet "manually" vs. using Co-pilot. Note that, though Co-pilot did okay at the task, we stumbled into a big bug-- a bug that I suspect Microsoft doesn't know about because this is the sort of thing that is difficult to automate...
The bug was that when we set Co-pilot to performing a task, then navigated away to another Excel window and then navigated back, we found it not only stopped performing that task, but lost all of the context and transcript for everything that cam before. Damn it, Microsoft! Then, when we tried to ask Co-pilot about saving the history, we found that there is no automatic or in-built way to save the history automatically. WHY DO AI VENDORS THINK WE DON"T EVER WANT TO LOOK BACK AT HOW THE WORK WAS DONE?Show More
Humans In The Way #2
In this episode, we look at the problem of AI summarization. For ...
In this episode, we look at the problem of AI summarization. For instance, the accuracy of a summary of a science paper.
We refer to these papers in the video:
Gomes, S., ...Lopes, J. M., & Nogueira, E. (2025). Anthropomorphism in artificial intelligence: A game-changer for brand marketing. Future Business Journal, 11(1), 2. https://doi.org/10.1186/s43093-025-00423-y
Peters, U., & Chin-Yee, B. (2025). Generalization bias in large language model summarization of scientific research. Royal Society Open Science, 12(4), 241776. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241776Show More
Humans In The Way #1
We discuss AI-based writing, the dimensions of authorship, trying to ...
We discuss AI-based writing, the dimensions of authorship, trying to use AI to write a love note for James' wife, and James' policy for AI writing.
Live Testopsy with Jon and James Bach
Thinking Out of the Bachs #1
In this video we analyzed several memes/quips and re-worked them. Our ...
In this video we analyzed several memes/quips and re-worked them.
Our goal is to practice systematic critical thinking. We are partially successful.
Question Hospital: Testing and AI #1
Question Hospital is an event where we take a question from a client, ...
Question Hospital is an event where we take a question from a client, colleague, or student, reframe it to its best form, and then try to answer it.
This is the ...question we tackled:
"My boss frequently encourages us to use AI and I get more and more angry and demotivated by this. He basically says "Use more AI" without any details, rejects criticism (paraphrased: "Sure, the pollution environment is a problem, but we need to go with the hype. Our customers ask for it." )
While a test coworker agrees with me on the criticism he acts like my boss asks, trying out AI at every possibility. He even doesn't try to understand what the actual problem is, but just tries to throw AI at it. Which makes me mad.
One dev coworker is totally into agentic coding and I and other devs perceive his performance as dev as very poor. He doesn't try to understand context and the bigger picture. We have the impression he just asks to get input for his prompts. I cannot stand this person and distrust most of their output development wise as much as communication wise. From what I heard this AI dev is even paid more than me and gets more appreciation by our boss.
I have one also very critical dev coworker who is deep into AI/LLM and luckily shares my criticism. He also sees the limits problems of agentic coding. This makes me happy."Show More
Responding to a Critique of Taking Testing Seriously
Michael Bolton and James Bach respond to Oleksandr Bolzhelarskyi. ...
