Share your biggest frustration with testing tools – 30 Days of Tools, Day 16

30 Days of Testing
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#1

Hey, it’s Day 16 of the 30 Days of Tools challenge. Now’s a good time to get it all off your chest, with kindness in mind!

Share your biggest frustration with testing tools

  • What’s one pet peeve with testing tools in general?
  • How can we as a community have greater empathy for the people behind the tools?
  • How can we learn from each other through our frustration in a kind and constructive way?

Feel free to reply to this post and share wherever you like, on the MoT Slack, LinkedIn, Twitter using #30DaysOfTools, Racket, your blog, with your team and any place you feel might inspire yourself and others to do the same. Let’s learn from each other throughout October. Visit the 30 Days of Tools page and select the “Subscribe to Topic” button to receive each daily challenge direct to your inbox.

:point_right: Have you seen the amazing schedule and registered for Test.bash();?

It’s on October 28th, 10am-10pm UK time. Available with a Pro Subscription or you can purchase a ticket.

2 Likes
#2

  • What’s one pet peeve with testing tools in general?
    They’re not easy to pick up!

  • How can we as a community have greater empathy for the people behind the tools?
    Realise they might be testers too! Always be kind to each other.

  • How can we learn from each other through our frustration in a kind and constructive way?
    Help with forums/ community to assist others use as you want to

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#3
  • The biggest frustration: When the tool is not working on my laptop! :face_with_symbols_over_mouth: It is not working! Why? Is it my installation? My OS? Me?
  • One pet peeve with testing tools in general: How can I SHOULD use it (not CAN use it)? Ok I can do that but is it the main purpose? Example: automation tools is the tool fitting right with my company/team test strategy?
  • Empathy: one team, one strategy. Tools can not be design just for me :crazy_face:
  • We can give advise/feedback to others on how we use the tool: “it it a good tool for that but not for that, XXX is better if you want to…”
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#4

There’s just so many tools to chose from, and a lot of them seem to offer almost identical capabilities.

Provide useful feedback, and maybe take some of our time to take part if surveys and UX research conducted by the tool makes, things like that.

By taking part in 30 Days of Tools challenge! :smiley:

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#5

People who say the tool is bad or don’t like the tool… without actually trying it.

People should respect others choices more often, Example: some people prefer low-code tools, some prefer full coding tools and both are fine. Both get the job done. It doesn’t matter what you pick as long as you get the job done.

People should sometimes listen to more podcasts or conference talks or just people in general. Listen to their opinions and accept them.

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#6

I am not sure if jira could be considered a testing tool, but I got frustrated by its inconsitency at times. To the point when I created a meme about it.

world-of-workarounds
world-of-workarounds2552×1426 140 KB

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#7

Too many options and it isn’t clear what the difference is between them and what fits well in my case. You have to literally try them all out and with that comes the problem “Why isn’t it working on MY machine?”.

If you find something which doesn’t work send feedback or create an issue. The problem you encounter might not be known but is easy to fix.

Share, share, share, and listen, listen, listen. We are all one community and we can, should, and try to learn from each other.

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#8

Lack of documentation.

Many are just a single person team just like many of us are a single QA team, or single QA on a team of devs.

Encourage the product owner to open source the documentation for the tool, and help by contributing to the docs.

2 Likes
#9

My biggest frustration is with low/no code testing tools. They take away flexibility, don’t have proper debuggers, their “code”/output is hard to reuse;version;refactor etc. I prefer to avoid them as mentioned in my posts below. The clueless management types seem to like them very much, especially after they get dazzled by the slick marketing teams of such tools.

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