Introduction to Rapid Software Testing

01 / Feb / 2016 by Rohit Ojha 2 comments

Rapid Software Testing introduced by James Bach, a well known human personality in software testing industry. RST is a growing need for software development, it is all about early, and efficient testing in today’s fast-paced software development environment. RST is a unique and complete methodology of testing. As the name suggests some of us may refer it as a quick testing, but it is not at all a quick testing. It is like exploratory testing.

What is Rapid Software Testing?

“The basic meaning of Rapid Software testing is a way to find a critical problem in a very short span of time under a difficult condition.”

Rapid Software Testing , a user testing type, is something when we think in our mind that how we can find most critical bugs in a very quick time and it requires knowledge, skills and ability to think. Many of us have knowledge, skills, and ability to think, but in spite of all these things we always follow traditional methods of testing. RST is nothing but a practical experience. RST is not a set of rules it is just a heuristic way of testing. It is lean documentation.

RST is a set of fact finding methods which lives closer to the absolute results, sometimes it may not work but sometimes it may work very well. In other words, in our daily testing, taking a heuristic decision with the ability to think and finding important bugs is Rapid software testing.

How Does Rapid Software Testing Works?

Rapid Software testing requires lots of practical experience and ability to think. Rapid Software Testing is like exploratory testing which is also known as expert testing. It is not a sense of testing in urgency, it’s all about thinking critically that what has to be tested and ensuring the work is done which reduces unnecessary works. Rapid testing can be done in our daily testing under the following conditions:

  • When ask to test something in less time.
  • Before any release.
  • At the time of sanity testing.
  • At crowd testing.
  • If you are a solo tester.
  • If you are a manager.

Why Rapid Software Testing?

Rapid Software Testing is all about Heuristic way of testing by applying explicit knowledge and practical experiences we can build our thinking ability and increase our confidence on testing. In the traditional way of testing when a defect is identified, lots of time spends to investigate and document it which reduces the time available to find other defect, so we may fail to find the serious defect if we spend so much time on reporting less important issues, but in Rapid Software Testing we may reduce unnecessary work and can think to find important defects and speed up the project.

FOUND THIS USEFUL? SHARE IT

comments (2)

  1. Vikas

    Nice blog Rohit. Good to read about this concept and James Bach giving it a name. But most of the QA community is using this idea, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Most of the PMs expect “Quick Testing” from his resources and wants to have confidence in their app rather than new bugs. But by this definition, RST brings in bugs and that too calculated ones.

    I have one question for you : “How different is it from Ad-hoc Testing?”

    Reply
    1. Rohit Ojha

      Thank you so much Vikas, i certainly agree with you point we are unknowingly using this in our daily testing life.
      Answer to your question is as per my understanding Rapid Software Testing is an advance version of Ad-hoc Testing which requires more skills and ability to find a critical problem in a very short span of time.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *