What mistakes have you made that were painful at the time, but made you a better person, tester, or leader?

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We all make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes can knock our confidence or change our direction. In my new MoT article, “6 leadership mistakes that made me a better leader,” I share the toughest lessons I’ve learnt and how they helped me grow. For me, it’s been about summoning up the depths of your character to look back on these situations where you made the wrong call and making sure you never make those mistakes again. No one is going to be perfect, but we can use these moments to reflect, learn, and be better.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Having the right leadership mindset
  • Protecting your culture
  • Building loyal, collaborative, fun and caring teams
  • The right way to measure performance
  • Career choices for the right reasons
  • That you can keep the faith in your career, the knocks are just part of the journey

After reading, share your thoughts:

  • What mistakes have you made that were painful at the time, but made you a better person, tester, or leader?
  • Have you ever lost confidence in yourself as a professional? How did you get it back?
  • Have you mentored others to overcome their mistakes so they keep the faith in themselves?
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Mistakes, I’ve made a few, but then again, too many to mention. I like to think I’m a pretty good tester, and that didn’t happen without making a LOT of mistakes. I suspect that most were the result of making assumptions that turned out to be wrong. Plenty were the result of trusting “common knowledge” instead of checking authoritative sources.

The ones with the worst outcomes were probably unavoidable because they involved factors I didn’t know about. I would argue I couldn’t realistically have known about them, but that’s of little consequence when a company is looking for a scapegoat. I have written about some of those mistakes in posts at:
Epic software bugs - major business losses and heavy user impact - #3 by steve.green,
Epic software bugs - major business losses and heavy user impact - #4 by steve.green
Your failures, not failures you've prevented? - #4 by steve.green

I only lost confidence once, very early in my career around 2003 when I started going to conferences and realised I wasn’t doing testing like anyone else. From 1995, I had been self-taught and was doing what I later found out was exploratory testing. The little training I received from ST Labs in 1999 reinforced that. But at the conferences, it was all ISEB/ISTQB, IEE829, test scripts, test documentation, UML, model-driven testing etc. Surely they couldn’t all be doing it wrong, so it’s got to be me?

Fortunately, I met Alan Richardson at a SIGiST conference and he introduced me to James Lyndsay and James Bach, who helped me realise that everyone else was indeed doing it wrong.

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