55 Months, 1 Day

My new book, Taking Testing Seriously, is headed for publication. I’ve done everything I can do for it. I am proud of it. The rest is up to the publisher.

Here are some fun facts:

• This is the first authoritative description of RST, in print, since I began developing this methodology roughly 35 years ago.
• From the first email about it to the delivery of corrected proofs was 55 months and 1 day.
• The intense part of the project was the last two years, when I started trying to write down RST.
• It came in at just over 500 pages. About half of that is the description of the RST methodology.
• I missed the contracted deadline by about thirteen months. Wiley was very patient with me about that. At one point they said I was only in the 80th percentile of difficult authors. It felt good not to be the most difficult person, for a change.
• Other than perhaps a second edition, this will be the last book I ever write.
• The book is dedicated to Marius Francu and Huib Schoots, whose personal energies got the project started and also helped make it end.

This book essentially summarizes and culminates my life’s work. But it is also a deeply collaborative product. I wrote or edited every word of it, but most of it was also edited by Michael Bolton, who engaged in hundreds of Zoom sessions with me over the course of the last several years. A good analogy is stainless steel: I feel like I brought the iron (since I wrote almost all of the first drafts of the first half of the book), and Michael brought the chromium, which created a much stronger alloy. I scoured each contributing chapter and in most cases challenged the authors on their ideas. Michael Bolton also conducted two interviews which he then painstakingly edited.

Michael and I were quality assurance in the true sense of the term: we postponed the release until we believed the product was good enough. We debated each other relentlessly. The main challenge was taking a set of ideas that live mainly in a dynamic form of exercises and examples and transforming them into a static, detailed account.

The result is good. Certainly good enough. But not as good as it could have been if we’d had another couple of years to work on it. So, perhaps there will be a second edition and I will have the chance to add another 50,000 words!