---
title: "Interview: James Bach – The role of the tester"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/interview-james-bach-the-role-of-the-tester.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/interview-james-bach-the-role-of-the-tester.html"
published: "2010-04-19T22:53:16.515000+00:00"
updated: "2020-03-20T22:04:53.331000+00:00"
tags: ["Audio"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "A 75-minute audio interview with James Bach from ACCU 2010 on the role of the tester, exploratory testing, interviewing testers and sapient testing."
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Interview: James Bach – The role of the tester

During the [ACCU 2010 conference in London](https://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2010) (at which I am still stuck due to the ash cloud while writing this), I got to speak with many interesting people, and even recorded some of those conversations.

One of the talks I enjoyed the most [was with tester James Bach](http://www.satisfice.com/blog/), who gave a thrilling keynote about **the role of the tester** in the organization, and the idea of exploratory testing.

In this recording I talk to James about what real testers need to be, how to interview a tester for a job, the idea of exploratory testing, automated _checks_ vs. manual, _sapient  tests_ and many other things.

**James Bach Interview - The Role of The Tester**75 min

[Audio](https://www.5whys.com/audio/JamesBach.mp3)

[Download the audio](https://www.5whys.com/audio/JamesBach.mp3)

James has taken a clear leadership role in changing the perceptions many of us have about what testers are and should be, and what testing should be like.

![JamesBachSuperman_thumb](https://www.5whys.com/img/posts/5a8d77eb-WindowsLiveWriter-JamesBachTheroleofthetester_E1A.jpg)

_image: QAInsight.net_

James really made me change some of my points of view about what and where we might need testers, and how unit testing and “sapient" testing” go together, and don’t cancel each other out.

## Read next

- [Interview: Patrick Kua : Agile Coach](https://www.5whys.com/articles/interview-patrick-kua-agile-coach.html): A 29-minute audio interview with agile coach Patrick Kua on types of tests, the definition of done and team leader versus team manager.
- [Kevlin Henney – 3 things every programmer should know](https://www.5whys.com/articles/kevlin-henney-ndash-3-things-every-programmer-should-know.html): A 20-minute audio interview recorded at ACCU 2010 in which Kevlin Henney, editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, names three essentials.
- [A bunch of (old) audio interviews on management and agile methodologies](https://www.5whys.com/articles/a-bunch-of-old-audio-interviews-on-management-and-agile-meth.html): A collection of older audio interviews by Roy Osherove with Johanna Rothman, Kent Beck, Juval Lowy, Charlie Poole and others on management, agile and TDD.


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

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- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/