Do you ever feel testing is boring?

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Do you ever feel testing is boring? Why?

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No. But if you are doing the same thing over and over again and not introducing innovations in the process, that will be boring. What we usually do is to add automation in the repetitive cases or explore the app through pair testing. This makes testing exciting and enable us to do more things.

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I feel seen.

  • Running up to a Release means running “real eyeballs” checks manually that the automated checks intentionally will not detect. This is only offset by the fun of some “exploratory” session time.
  • Fixing yet another automated test failure that has been festering in the dark for a long long time, yet nobody choose to address before you.
  • Waiting for full regression test suite runs to complete.

So yes, it’s often not an exciting job, but the challenge to improve it all, is why I do it. Becoming a tester exposes you to a lot of rituals, a thing I do not enjoy at all; but being allowed to observe the ritual instead, is a privilege we should take up often.

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No one ever took up testing for danger and excitement and wild things happening. But there are always going to be times when the tasks to hand are routine and something you’ve done a thousand times before. The challenge there is not to fall into a rut and carry out your test tasks as if they are routine, because that’s when complacency can creep in, and that’s when you may miss something - say, a design issue or an intermittent bug caused by environment or some other transient effect. It’s knowing that these things can happen that sustain me when I’m doing a regression cycle for the fourth or fifth time…

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No, not really, I mean, I can get bored of being on a certain project, or get bored by the way a company is doing things, but those can easily be remedied by changing your project/company. But as far as testing itself is concerned I never get bored of exploring and snooping around!

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I wonder if other roles like developers, product owner, business analysts have the same question. any job becomes a routine after few years. It depend on how we explore ourselves and keep our excitement on.

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Things only become boring when you are not adding anything new to your learnings. And the same goes for testing. For example, if you are only involved in manual testing of websites or web apps and are not taking any initiatives to understand the latest tools and technologies in the market, it becomes very likely to turn into a boring task.

On the other hand, if you are taking out your time learning automation testing, new tools, methodologies, practices, and innovations, the job is very likely to stay exciting and fruitful. It is only your effort to learn something new and keeping ahead of time that makes the difference between boring and exciting.

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When it gets boring, you are not taking on the right responsibility for your abilities.
Just as an example:

  • Start taking over some of the release process or the publishing process, anything that causes your friction in your job as a tester, start taking interest in that area and taking responsibility there.
  • Start finding way to triage errors quicker, and crate log analysis tools. who knows you might be able to help the support team directly either with a tool, or with some insights.
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Hi Raghu,

If you are not learning anything new and doing the same thing again and again, anything could get boring. So, it’s not ‘testing’ that we need to be worried about getting bored, but not learning anything new that would contribute towards our objectives.

Thanks for asking.

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Never!

I love to break down things. #Always
As a consultant I can move from project to project to learn new platforms & technologies and new ways to break down applications.

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Most definitely. Some tasks are dull to do but they need doing.

  • We lack decent automated test coverage so release involves a week of following the same old test cases on different operating systems. Boring as ought.
  • Installer testing in general can be really tedious, especially when you’re installing dependencies as part of it so there’s a lot of twiddling of thumbs. Similarly I work with devices so there’s re-imaging and firmware upgrades that can be complicated but also dull.
  • I find reviewing and writing documentation to be dull.

I am fully aware that a lot of the times that testing is “boring” it is because I’m doing work that ideally would be automated. I’d love to fix that but there’s no way I’d get the thumbs up as it would probably take months to get good coverage (its a big, complicated beast) and our product goes EoL “soon” (2021, 2022, 2023?)

Also I think that I can get bored easily and life isn’t all-action, all the time. I’d be exhausted if that was the case.

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