The year 2023 is almost up! 
What are your top 3-5 testing things you have learned and grown from this year?
[Hereās an X , LinkedIn and Bluesky version of the same question]
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I think keeping up with using AI-assisted tools in testing will become increasingly important.
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Lesson #1 - Being a bit ADHD or whatever your own personal hang-up might be, is a thing that can be a superpower
Lesson #2 - Your own context matters, but itās an abuse of imagination to not see the context of others
Lesson #3 - Risks! Clearly document even well known risks in your test strategy and in your test plan document. See lesson #2
Lesson #4 - Be a bit open to more process changes, you might be surprised by what you learn from thinking of any change as an optimisation experiment
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After a tour of dozens of job applications and several interviews for testing roles (manager, lead, engineer, automation, tester), in a few countries, I learned that:
- testing in the sense of technical empirical evaluation, experimentation, exploration, and investigation is almost non-existent; I canāt remember having seen job descriptions or beeing asked a single testing question by interviewers;
- companies struggle with many bugs in production due to a lack of testing, so their solution is to hire automation engineers to code the hundreds of test cases that the testers execute regularly, so that the testers have more time to write even more detailed test-cases.
I made peace with the fact that I will have very few opportunities to test products(after a period of career depression) and that the testerās role reshapes into something else; which doesnāt include testing but it is around managing many quality related tasks: validation, gate keeping, quality engineering, technical writing, tech support, operational agent, coder of some sort, specifications creator, code reviewer, ci/cd pipelines creator, ā¦
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Iām pondering how to keep up with it, do you have any thoughts or preferences on it?
One thing we are doing is dedicating a day to AI at TestBash Brighton. We have some loose plans for some online stuff too.
I like this focus on using imagination to see the context of others.
Are there good ways/process/models to help us see things in the context of others?
Definitely can echo this @ipstefan . It started happening probably year 5 through year 8 for me. Iām now thinking I might even move into a devops role at some point
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This is disheartening and makes me think of the conversation I was having with Richard Bradshaw the other day about how the Testing Tools could help change some of this. He mentioned on a LinkedIn post to be in talks with one provider.
Perhaps this is the oldest question about āwhat came first: the chicken or the eggāā¦ How come have we arrived at this stage? and how do we change it?
Can/should Testing Tools enforce better testing processes and systemsā¦ or do we need to go through the slow and lengthy process of mindset-shifting?
If tools consult with real and good testersā¦ would we be able to have testers doing what they love and are absolute pros at doing? (proper testing) instead of being in roles where they seem to be changing 3 flat tires in a moving vehicle on fire?
P.S.: sorry for the rant.
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My role switching happed as well in the past 7 years, while being hired as a tester. I was doing requirements engineering, business analysis, and project management. Then I switched jobs and went technical so was doing quality engineering, operational management, release management, tech support. Then I switched jobs and Iām supposed to do automation, specification, tech support, business operations support, technical writing for the app.
The work itself doesnāt bother me, but donāt call it testing.
I might be a better fit in operations or release management, if no testing is in the horizon.
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A TLDR long story about 'the grass is always greener...
āThe grass is always greener on the other sideā is where the imagination journey started for me Rosie. As part of my self-diagnosis with a bit of ADHD I had struggled to accept that I see the world differently to how many people do. And because, for all your life you just want to be normal and conform, a person who is not ānormalā will continuously mask and mimic just to cope and get by. I was continuously feeling misunderstood and that everyone was against me. Alone in my situation. But nobody is unique in suffering, any personal struggle you have impacts your ability to achieve good. We tend to see people who overcome their struggle in those feelgood news stories that often come out on a Friday. Stories about people who found themselves on the āwrong side of the fenceā where the grass is brown. But these people donāt make a success of their lives by adding fertilizer to their grass or by watering it, they also donāt move to another greener field either. So many people like to explain that saying incorrectly.
Been listening to a bit of psychology podcast and trying to have 10 minute calm times (meditation if you like) and it dawned on me that itās hard-wired into us to desire things and work for things that we like. The āgreener grassā, and far too often we want what other people have, things that we perceive as āgoodā, but when you realise that āgoodā like having money and power, all those things actually require a lot of hard work. We donāt always see the work that people put in to the nice things they have in terms of skills or possessions. Take the lotto winner who finds themselves in money suddenly. 50% of them have already lost every penny 5 years later, and are right back to where they started, because they did not work for it. Green grass that stays green requires continuous work.
So behind every personal success is someone who has accepted their lot in life and started to work hard with what do they have available instead of giving up and loafing because everyone else has it easy. Everyone else actually has worked for that. People who donāt work for it loose it quite quickly, like the lotto winners, even pro footballers find they get into debt literally 5 years after they stop playing. When you imagine yourself as a footballer who trains hard, it makes sense why their lives appear to be so wonderful.
So the short of it: When you think your situation or context is uniquely bad versus a good situation you can see in another product. Itās more often that you are just not seeing all the detailed hard work that went into making that thing that was great and worth showing off. Itās a lot of hard work, and you have to be honest with yourself about how badly you want a thing to be a certain way. You cannot have someone elseās ānice green grassā as well as your own at the same time. The effort required is too big. The other team just had a completely different goal to yours and we have to stretch our minds around just how hard it is that other people work for good things, is probably, pretty similar to how hard we ourselves work for a good thing. Nobody is superman. Nobody is that special.
Call me crazy, butā¦ My framework is still evolving but for now listening well and meditation has taught me that every single thing I experience is merely an input into a huge machine called the brain and that all my senses are just thoughts. The brain is really just an interpreting machine. Just realizing that my thoughts while writing this themselves are again just thoughts triggered by an activity. So , take colour. Colour is an interpretation, any 2 random people do not really see the same colour, a negotiation happens and we come to an agreement. That negotiation happens differently in each persons brain. We know this because more than 1/10th of us are colour blind in some way during our lives. The brain makes hundreds of these negotiations and alterations to our world every day. I was acutely aware of this when my vision started to fail 8 years ago. My brain was able to fake words on the page for a while, just to survive until I got spectacles. My brain lied to me about my failing near distance vision because my far vision was still perfectly fine.
When I started to see my brain as just being a simple signal processor, I can start to see how my decisions on a matter can differ very vastly from someone elseās.
- I would like to believe that it comes from the fact that basic product quality is acceptable to users or clients.
- I donāt see companies being seriously affected by the problems their products have(financially), so they have no reasons to be concerned or reflect in any way.
- Testing as defined in the context driven community, is a technical empirical evaluation of a product to find problems about quality for people that matter.
- If thereās no people that matter who care about the quality in a way that it affects their position in the company, then thereās no one to stir things up.
- Testers are generally powerless to VPs, C* level, IT managers who lead them and tell them what to do, when and with that tools and technology.
- Testers themselves are, willingly or without a choice, accepting their task/fate, and become irresponsible in regards to their work, testing as a professional career.
- This allows a perpetuation of bad decisions towards ranks of testers, new employees and into the profession.
Iām a bit worried about how a switch to DevOPS will make me have to take more responsibility maybe or have to work weekends even. I donāt mind the technical writing, but tech support sounds dreadful, even though itās probably a bit of what we all do as testers all day anyway, but just internally. Iām mostly worried that I need to learn more about linux monitoring, scripting and security too to go into DevOPS.
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Better tools can never make you a better carpenter, you might produce stuff faster, but thatās a false economy and we all know it. So yeah, we all need to relax about your tool choices and advice a bit. Go where the reshaping takes us.
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