What brings you joy when you test?

So many reasons to celebrate what we do.

The little flutter of excitement I get if I find something interesting while playing. If I’m not in a timeboxed exploratory session, I go where the rabbit hole takes me, collecting as much info as possible along the way. The little joys I get in following a “huh?” to conclusion.

I really love getting into the ‘zone’ with deep work and really thinking during exploratory.

It’s a big game in my head where I try to optimize the expanse of what needs to be tested with my own efficiency in covering it all. That’s the good stuff for me.

When someone I respect tells me “good catch”.

And plenty more!

What could you add? What brings you joy when you test?

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I get a special joy when I’ve had my suspicions about some anomalous behaviour that I think I’ve seen, or said to myself “Hang on - did I just see it do…?”, and being able to replicate the behaviour is neither straightforward nor obvious.

I get a major sense of achievement when I am finally able to replicate the behaviour (and even more when the dev says, “Yes, that’s a bug” as opposed to “It will do that when you do X, but no-one will ever do X anyway.”) (Of course, we know that someone, somewhere will do X at some point and it will seriously impact their experience of the product, but some devs won’t believe it until they get the ticket from tech support. Testers are allowed to say “I told you so” under those circumstances. :grinning:)

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Right now the things that bring me joy are:

  • When I have to try hard to find any bugs

  • Exploring the product and learning valuable info about it

  • Discussing potential improvements to the product

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  • Literally when I break things, find loopholes, security issues… it brings me joy :smile:
  • What also brings joy is testing a new feature, completely new
  • What also brings me joy when I test a feature of a junior developer :imp: :upside_down_face:

Sorry not sorry <3 #TeamEffort it’s fine but you can’t deny it doesn’t bring you joy.

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Any kinds of Developer engagement in the checking process itself.

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I remember a time when I sat with a developer and they asked “What are all these smiley faces on your notes?”

“These are all the cool things I found during my exploratory testing session,” I replied.

The look at that developer’s face was amazing. They couldn’t quite believe I was also finding “good things” as well as problems.

Those types of moments are moments that brought joy. When I’ve “connected” with a developer on a 1-2-1 basis.

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  • Pulling on threads to either find a new bug or get reproduction for something tricky. Being able to not just say “a bad thing happened” but give meaningful analysis.
  • Being involved in a tricky looking feature / user story from the beginning, helping identify the challenges early and seeing it come through without any bugs, knowing that we’ve worked together to achieve this.
  • Getting my hands on something new - or that hasn’t been looked at by myself in a while. Playing about with it, learning its behaviour then tearing it apart.
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