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?
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. )
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.