Tales of a tester
What we love in testing
This list is coming from the linkedin conversation in the Software Testing & Quality Assurance (QA) group. Thanks for all the people who contributed there!Link to that topic is here.
The list items are grouped based on subjective decisions. All comments welcome!
If you have more items to add, just ping me!
Team:
- Helping the team forsee possible problems
- The people I've met
- The opportunity to coach and mentor those who are developing their careers
- Team work
- People
- Influencing team mates and colleagues
- Seeing people grow into awesome testers
- Seeing people grow into awesome developers
- Going out for drinks with the team- Training the teams
- Learning from the teams
- The test team dynamic
- Those head scratching moments when the whole team come together to get to the bottom of an issue
- Mentoring and teaching about test
Learning:
- The capacity for learning new stuff is vast, almost certainly endless
- Not knowing everything.
- The endless improvement opportunities
- Ever evolving => Kaizen
- The huge amount of stuff I don't know and I want to learn
- Always learning new technologies
- Learning what the software does, or is supposed to do, as well as anyone can
- The opportunity to constantly learn
- Learning new things every day
- Innovation on new techniques for testing
- In automation, working on the latest tools and technologies
- Constant learning
Appreciation:
- Being valued for having a warped and twisted mind
- Noticing the first subtle signs of the bug that nobody else noticed
- Using test results to track down and isolate elusive errors
- The pride from releasing stable, functional and user-friendly product
- Finding a bug that nobody else knew existed
- Finding gaps in requirements even when its in testing stage
- The satisfaction gleaned from problem-solving
- Finding high severity bugs
- Finding performance issues
- Finding missing links / broken links
- Finding UI problems
- When you are the one who is asked the last question before the release, is there anything else we should do or are good to go?
- The project go live date is dependent on testers work. In fact the system go live date is indirectly decided by testers
- Two words, challenge and appreciation
Challenge:
- The almost daily problem solving.
- The sheer variety of problems to solve.
- Being challenged regularly
- Technical challenges
- Having a foot in many shoes
- Working "To Deliver" to UAT, etc on time even after many internal delays
- Scavenger hunt through the code to find out why its broken
- Thinking differently and finding design problems that others didn't find
- Increasing complexities between and within systems
- System building is a creative job, but one need even more creativity in finding defects of system
- Two words, challenge and appreciation
- Learning the unknown Factor
- Challenging work
- Building the system by breaking it
- Trying out weird workflows
Customer:
- Working with the customers
- Customers smiles
- Bringing user point of view to the product
- Contributing to the design of the product by thinking like the customer
- End-user's perspective - lot of fun actually
Fun:
- Never a dull day
- My 4 processor 8 core with loads of ram workstation
- Having fun
- Shippers remorse: The night after releasing a complex product wondering "what did I miss?"
- The sheer thrill of breaking code
- Helps me build out-of-box thinking
Developers:
- Making the developers who think outside their bubble
- Proving a developer wrong when they can't see an issue on their 'local machine'
- Bringing in a different view which sometimes opposite from what developers have thought
- Developers serious about providing any help that can make testing better
Etc:
- Seeing the big picture
- Communicating with a variety of people
- Being invited to product road map planning meetings
- Unrelenting focus on quality
- Testing as a professional career choice
- Most important thing required in testing is people management skill. One need to interact with different vendors involved in project for testing activity. I love interacting with new people
Learning:
- The capacity for learning new stuff is vast, almost certainly endless
- Not knowing everything.
- The endless improvement opportunities
- Ever evolving => Kaizen
- The huge amount of stuff I don't know and I want to learn
- Always learning new technologies
- Learning what the software does, or is supposed to do, as well as anyone can
- The opportunity to constantly learn
- Learning new things every day
- Innovation on new techniques for testing
- In automation, working on the latest tools and technologies
- Constant learning
Appreciation:
- Being valued for having a warped and twisted mind
- Noticing the first subtle signs of the bug that nobody else noticed
- Using test results to track down and isolate elusive errors
- The pride from releasing stable, functional and user-friendly product
- Finding a bug that nobody else knew existed
- Finding gaps in requirements even when its in testing stage
- The satisfaction gleaned from problem-solving
- Finding high severity bugs
- Finding performance issues
- Finding missing links / broken links
- Finding UI problems
- When you are the one who is asked the last question before the release, is there anything else we should do or are good to go?
- The project go live date is dependent on testers work. In fact the system go live date is indirectly decided by testers
- Two words, challenge and appreciation
Challenge:
- The almost daily problem solving.
- The sheer variety of problems to solve.
- Being challenged regularly
- Technical challenges
- Having a foot in many shoes
- Working "To Deliver" to UAT, etc on time even after many internal delays
- Scavenger hunt through the code to find out why its broken
- Thinking differently and finding design problems that others didn't find
- Increasing complexities between and within systems
- System building is a creative job, but one need even more creativity in finding defects of system
- Two words, challenge and appreciation
- Learning the unknown Factor
- Challenging work
- Building the system by breaking it
- Trying out weird workflows
Customer:
- Working with the customers
- Customers smiles
- Bringing user point of view to the product
- Contributing to the design of the product by thinking like the customer
- End-user's perspective - lot of fun actually
Fun:
- Never a dull day
- My 4 processor 8 core with loads of ram workstation
- Having fun
- Shippers remorse: The night after releasing a complex product wondering "what did I miss?"
- The sheer thrill of breaking code
- Helps me build out-of-box thinking
Developers:
- Making the developers who think outside their bubble
- Proving a developer wrong when they can't see an issue on their 'local machine'
- Bringing in a different view which sometimes opposite from what developers have thought
- Developers serious about providing any help that can make testing better
Etc:
- Seeing the big picture
- Communicating with a variety of people
- Being invited to product road map planning meetings
- Unrelenting focus on quality
- Testing as a professional career choice
- Most important thing required in testing is people management skill. One need to interact with different vendors involved in project for testing activity. I love interacting with new people