People fall in to testing - but where from?

As of 2018, I have been testing software for thirty years. I never really intended to.

My degree was in mathematics, and I did not know where to go with that. But I had been working part time during college at a local health insurance company, so naturally I checked to see whether they had any jobs I could apply for… and they had something called “the model office.” They had bought a big software package to be customized and installed, and my business knowledge would apply, so I got the job. There was no training for it, really, but they gave me a copy of Boris Beizer’s Software Testing Techniques, IIRC. I had to figure out how to devise and document the tests, how to store them… everything was on paper at first. Eventually we used Paradox (does anybody remember that?) and Lotus 1 2 3.

And now I’m on a semi-agile team. I’ve been meaning to learn test automation for about, I don’t know, 15 years? But nobody I’ve worked for wants to spend the time/money to do it, so… I still don’t know it.

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Graduated form Uni in History and Politics. Joined an aviation company as a load planner. After 6 months a visit to HR to find out which department was paying best salary, resulted in me moving into IT. Trained as a developer, then moved on to Analyst Programmer. Found myself doing more and more testing, so gravitated towards 100% test role.

Now if I could just remember those dates in History …

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I started out as a Developer but was made redundant when our project overran. Apart from testing each other’s work I hadn’t any experience as a Tester but managed to get a job as a Tester with the aim to move back into Development.

That was 12 years ago :blush:

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Worked as a trader for nearly 5 years, doing nights and weekends. The company was looking to expand their test team so offered me the chance to move to mon - fri 9-5 and I jumped without knowing anything about testing.
So I fell into testing from being a user of the tools I now test and 5 years later I have never looked back and it turns out that I really rather like testing.

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Think that is what should happen to everyone connected with a project that overruns :grinning:

I’ve been lead here totally unwittingly by my general fascination of computing.

I was always drawn to computers and computing, then I discovered the internet and started building websites and managing forums, because I just had to know how they worked. At that time I was working in an office as an administrator, which became unofficial IT support, which then led me through various other jobs, software support, problem analysis, a bit of systems admin, until I was asked to do a bit of UAT testing… it was definitely the most interesting thing I’d done in a long while, and so I started down that path. My husband always told me it would be perfect for me, but at the time I was unconvinced until I actually got involved, and here I am!!! When I look back, it’s like my whole life has lead here except I’ve had zero conscious clue or direction!!

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I love that you followed up with a blog post about this :grin:

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@heather_reid Haha, thanks for the promo :slight_smile: Seemed like a natural way to start the blog.

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A few months ago I wrote a thing for a local job site about how I got into tech, specifically testing. You can find it here:

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I got on campus placement in one of the service company. There I got training in IT support and my first project was for support. But eventually to move closer to my home, I got transfer and landed into a testing project for storage company. Since then, learning is on.

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