Michael Bolton is a software testing educator and consultant best known as co-developer of the Rapid Software Testing (RST) methodology alongside james-bach. He studied with gerald-weinberg from approximately 2003 to 2008, attending aye-conference sessions and weinberg-and-weinberg workshops including the Problem Solving Leadership workshop.
Bolton is credited with sharpening the distinction between "checking" (automated verification against known expectations) and "testing" (skilled human investigation), a distinction that echoes Weinberg's long-standing insistence that human judgment cannot be automated away. Bolton explicitly drew on Weinberg's quality definition—"quality is value to some person"—and extended it in his teaching and writing on context-driven testing. cem-kaner is another key figure in the context-driven testing school, whose work complements Bolton's and Bach's approach.
His work carries forward the tradition of programming-as-human-activity that Weinberg established in the 1970s, applying it specifically to the testing domain. Bolton has written and spoken widely about Weinberg's influence on the testing community and on his own thinking about what it means to do skilled intellectual work in software development.