Iโm running a 28-day challenge throughout February where I post a daily testing question or prompt. The goal: get testers talking about the real stuff: how we work, what we struggle with, and what actually makes QA better. Anyone can join in. Hereโs Day 1.
A browser opened by itself. Input fields filled in. No human touching the keyboard.
I watched it happen and thought: I want to create these โbotsโ for the rest of my life.
But let me back up.
I trained as a system admin. Turns out I was terrible with hardware. Software was my thing. One department had me testing custom extensions against new Office versions. ๐ก๐ผ๐ฏ๐ผ๐ฑ๐ ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น๐น๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ถ๐ โ๐๐ฒ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด.โ Nobody called me a โtester.โ I just liked breaking things and seeing what held up.
Later, a startup hired me as sysadmin. Again. But my CTO saw what I actually loved doing. He gave me a word for it: ๐๐ผ๐ณ๐๐๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐๐๐ฒ๐ฟ.
That moment changed everything.
For most of my career since, Iโve been the ๐ผ๐ป๐น๐ ๐ค๐ ๐ผ๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐บ. No one to check my thinking. No one to say โyou missed this.โ I found communities eventually: Ministry of Testing,TestGuild and mentors like Daniel who gave me the chance to publish my first article.
But that took years. And a lot of figuring things out alone.
๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ญ. ๐ฌ๐ผ๐๐ฟ ๐๐๐ฟ๐ป. How did you end up in testing and are you the only one doing it on your team?
My falling into testing was pure accident. I worked somewhere doing written test cases for some financial software, and in my spare time I learned how to code my own automation tool, not just use one, with a page-object style DSL in Ruby (before page objects were cool). I began exploring, because Iโm not a great rule-follower when I donโt understand the rule. There I was on my own.
I took those skills to my next job, where I offered to build such a suite. But hooking into their weird proprietary code-making code was impossible - watir couldnโt get its teeth in anywhere. I took a look at their over-formalised test case suite and I knew I was damned if I was going to do that on the regular, so I began researching. Surely this wasnโt how testing was done? It didnโt sit right with me, I just knew that they must know more than I did. I found James Bach at an MoT event, where I won a book, and where I found a whole new approach to testing based on scientific fundamentals - basic precepts of scientific philosophy applied sensibly to testing. And thatโs where testing really began to excite me - that it could be done with respect to reality and situation, based on exploratory skill and not formulae and paperwork. I worked there as the only tester for most of my career there. For that Iโm grateful as it really gave me the opportunity to find my way and apply testing however I saw fit. I could define how testing was done, build tools, learn skills, take courses and make myself good at what I do. Not every tester is afforded that sort of freedom. MoT was a big part of the space I could use to explore new ideas, and for that Iโm also grateful.
After that came working with other testers. I was well-positioned to join groups because I had to prove to myself I could be a good tester (and Iโm a harsh judge of specifically me), and I could speak about it and answer questions on it and appear to be good at it - which is important when you want other people in a team to take you seriously. I tried to take comments like โyou could even be a developerโ as a step in the right direction.
I would never have stuck with testing if I couldnโt do it with respect to reality and context. Which did limit where I would work, but luckily I always found people brave enough to accept someone who wanted to improve processes and work their own way.