PODCAST FRIDAY: TWiST Turns 50!!!

For the past year, I have posted a weekly update about the TWiST podcast and my take on producing that show. Now that we've been actively producing the show for a full year, I've decided to retire that format in favor of just promoting the show directly as well as featuring other podcast to appear this week that I have found helpful or useful to testers.

First off, I would like to celebrate a milestone... TWiST turns 50 this week. Our 50th episode went live on Thursday and features the second part of our interview with Adam Yuret. In this weeks interview, we get to hear Adam discuss the idea that context-driven testing and Agile need not be exclusive of one another, and laments the fact that process and procedure and codifying of methods goes against the goals of both approaches. While we sometimes do “Plus” episodes as small segments, there was enough meat here to warrant it s own standalone show, hence the two part interview. Anyway, you can go here and check out TWiST's 50th episode for yourself.

As I reported earlier this week, I'm excited to see that Trish Khoo and Bruce McLeod have started up a podcast from Australia called TestCast. Their most recent episode is related to the evolution of software test automation along with Behavior Driven Development and Testing. It’s definitely worth a listen.

The ASP.NET team up at Microsoft does the Coding QA podcast, with a focus on automation and specifically .NET setups, but they cover a number of topics that would be worthwhile to any tester. This week in episode #57, Mark and Jim talk with Anton Piskunov to discuss automation and how to create effective and high quality test setups.

It's been awhile sing Pragmatic Publishing has pushed an episode, but The Pragmatic Podcast is back this week. Avdi Grimm is the guest and the subject is the new book "Exceptional Ruby" and handling exceptions and failures. This will likely be seen as interesting to anyone who programs in Ruby, as well as those of us who do testing or maintain sites that are based around Ruby and Rails.

As I've mentioned a few times, one of my current favorite podcasting hubs is Dan Benjamin's 5by5 network. The show that I give most of my "suck up" time to is "Back to Work", but there are a bunch of podcasts Dan produces or syndicates that cover a lot of interesting areas. My picks for this week are:

Back to Work #20: Muscle of Failure. I dedicated a blog post to this one on Wednesday, so take a look there for more of a review/discussion of these ideas.

Build and Analyze #29: The Way Siracusa Buys a Toaster. Dan has a lot of shows, and a great rapport with his guest hosts, so it's not uncommon for comments related to one show to appear in another (John Siracusa is Dan's guest host for "Hypercritical"). Outside of poking fun at John Siracusa, this show spends some time talking about the Twitter API, and what iCloud will be bringing to the web services arena.

The Talk Show #47: Nice Shirt, Handsome. If you are an Apple fan boy and want to know more about what's happening in the Apple universe, then Dan Benjamin and John Gruber should be on your regular rotation. This episode covers a lot of time talking about WWDC and the reason why Apple has managed to become the juggernaut who has emerged triumphant after a decade of staring down oblivion (few younger people realize that Apple was at one point in time seen as just a few quarters away from going down for the count around 2001). Also, the second half of the show is the continuing long form review of every James Bond film ever made, and this week they cover “The Living Daylights” (note, you certainly don’t have to listen all the way through this, but James Bond fans will probably greatly enjoy it :) ).

Finally, for those who would like to keep track of all testing podcasts, or at least those that we know about, please go and put testingpodcast.com in your podcast aggregator (or just add it to your bookmarks if you want to roll old school). Zjelko Filipin maintains the site, and I go in from time to time to do updates as well. If you would like to recommend podcasts for us to track, or podcasts you would like to see me add to my weekly roundup, by all means drop me a line. I'm always on the lookout to see and hear more from our fellow testers and want to encourage even more podcasting among our testing brothers and sisters. As Seal one boldly said... "Bring It On!"