On 7 May, join a special edition of our AI Testing Talks webinar series, featuring a fireside discussion with Michael Bolton, a consulting software tester and testing teacher, co-author of Taking Testing Seriously: The Rapid Software Testing Approach (Wiley, 2025).
Presented in a conversational format, the session will be structured around a series of questions exploring the principles, practices and underlying philosophy of Rapid Software Testing (RST), drawing on Michael Bolton’s extensive experience and contributions to the testing community, including his books and publications.
We will discuss how these ideas have influenced industry approaches to software testing and address questions raised by practitioners, including common challenges, differing viewpoints and ongoing debates within the testing community.
Invited Speaker
Michael Bolton
Software Testing Coach, Consultant, Author
Bio
Michael Bolton is a consulting software tester and testing teacher who helps people to solve testing problems that they didn’t realize they could solve. In 2006, he became co-creator (with creator James Bach) of Rapid Software Testing (RST), a methodology and mindset for testing software expertly and credibly in uncertain conditions and under extreme time pressure. Since then, he has flown over a million miles to teach RST in 35 countries on six continents.
Michael has over 30 years of experience testing, developing, managing, and writing about software. For over 20 years, he has led DevelopSense, a Toronto-based testing and development consultancy. Prior to that, he was with Quarterdeck Corporation for eight years, during which he managed the company’s flagship products and directed project and testing teams in-house and around the world.
(More at DevelopSense)
AI Testing Talks Host
Anna-Maria Lukina
Marketing Director, Exactpro
Bio
Anna-Maria Lukina is the Marketing Director at Exactpro and Outreach Director for Exactpro’s AI Testing Training programs. In her Marketing Director role, Anna-Maria is responsible for global brand and business development and management of industry events. Coming from a technology background herself, Anna-Maria also wears an Outreach Director hat to bring a strategic vision into Exactpro’s professional development activities such as the award-winning ISTQB®-accredited AI testing course for enterprises and individual learners.
Anna-Maria has co-authored Exactpro’s latest book – ‘Introduction to AI Testing: Guide to ISTQB® CT-AI Certification’ released in September 2025 by BCS Publishing.
With a deep understanding of information systems and technologies and extensive experience in global marketing, Anna-Maria has successfully led the Exactpro brand through product launches, the acquisition by LSEG and the following buyout, countless international and local industry gatherings, as well as the accompanying social media campaigns.
Moderator
Iosif Itkin
CEO and co-founder of Exactpro
Bio
Iosif is co-founder and co-CEO of Exactpro – an independent provider of AI-enabled software testing and related development services for financial organisations. Founded in 2009, Exactpro has a client base of major exchanges, post-trade platform operators, banks and technology vendors across 24 countries.
In his professional career, Iosif has held many technology roles: software developer, performance testing department lead, technology architect – on a number of global financial industry initiatives. Iosif’s expertise at the intersection of high-availability systems and capital markets has enabled him to successfully facilitate technology transformations within exchanges, investment banks and clearing and settlement organisations in London, New York, Milan, Singapore, Sydney and other major financial centres.
Iosif is a co-author of ‘Introduction to AI Testing: Guide to ISTQB® CT-AI Certification’ released in September 2025 by BCS Publishing.
About Exactpro
Exactpro is an independent provider of AI-enabled software testing services for financial sector organisations. Our clients are exchanges, post-trade platform operators, and banks across 20 countries. Our area of expertise comprises protocol-based testing of matching engines, market data, market surveillance, clearing and settlement systems, payments APIs. We help our clients to decrease time to market, maintain regulatory compliance, improve scalability, latency and operational resiliency. Exactpro is involved in a variety of transformation programmes related to large-scale cloud and DLT implementations at systemically important organisations.
Our approaches leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to help harness the power of exploratory data analysis and big data analytics to assist in the generation of test ideas and the interpretation of test results, supported by advanced execution capabilities of the th2 frameworks suite.
Founded in 2009, the Exactpro Group is headquartered in the UK and operates delivery centres in Georgia, Sri Lanka, Armenia, and the UK and representative offices in the US, Canada and Italy, and as well as a global distributed network of consultants.
Are you interested in gaining a deeper understanding of your system, reducing costs, accelerating time to market, while maintaining operational resiliency and regulatory compliance? Visit us at exactpro.com.