Your place of work has a new fantastic product for you to test… a time machine. You have a once in a lifetime opportunity to go back in time, but there is one serious defect with the machine currently – it will send you back to when you first started your career in QA, and then no longer work for you. Was this a defect, or possibly a philosophical self-reflective feature that was inserted by a particularly thoughtful dev?
Who knows, but here you stand in front of yourself. The time machine ticks behind you, in only a short while you will be pulled back inside of it, and inevitably trapped back in todays date.
What do you tell yourself?
If you could tell yourself to care less (or more) about something QA related, what would it be and why?
Somehow lottery numbers and the results of sporting events are escaping you…
I’ll quote Damian Synadinos’ response when I told him my life story: ‘Quality doesn’t pay’
One will not get much recognition, go up the career ladder as a tester, get a high salary, make many friends at work, and be relaxed - without stress and pressure.
Software QA isn’t the field that seems like a perfect choice for my ambitions and goals, even though I’m quite good at it and I like it There are other things in life that I consider more important than my career. So, it would probably be better to be more pragmatic and develop skills in a different field, such as cybersecurity, or completely change the industry and build a career in finance and investment, or even better - to become a professional showjumper in horse riding
I would tell myself to: Care more about the user experience: the common actions they take, the knock-on effects outside of the one feature I am testing, how easy it is to do what they want to do. Care less about the fine details, but only a little: still dig into weird behaviour to find the cause, that knowledge is useful, but don’t expect every tiny issue to be fixed. Care less about other people getting things wrong: it’s inevitable, and sometimes people need to see something fail before they’ll believe you. Care more about yourself: you’re gonna do great : )