My biggest fear is authoring a bug that leads to bajillions of dollars in theft!
Same fear can be present if company is dealing with a lot of personal information. Leak can lead to avalanche of personal lawsuits.
Monotony tbh. There’s nothing more boring and draining than a monotone development job (for me at least). No challenges and no change is a recipe for burnout and nightmares.
I thought, maybe I could ask a similar question here.
And then I wondered, how might these nightmares be turned into opportunities?
For example, perhaps the person who fears a monotone development job could put important checks in place to ensure that never happens. Or maybe that person who worries about authoring that bajillion dollar bug could start helpful conversations with testing folks about risks and quality.
How about you, what’s your biggest fear as a tester and how might you turn them into opportunities?
I don’t think there’s a fear as a tester. Different perspectives of what I dread:
not being allowed to test
not having enough challenges
the testing and hundreds of bugs found are almost useless(except for informing about the quality of the product); it results in no change in the product due to a lack of resources to act
not finding a bug that gets into production, due to pressure from others to finish testing in high-risk areas, cause we need to release now;
Yikes. That sounds familiar. I once worked at a place that had that very problem. I was brought in as the first QA to “fix it”. We eventually got in a better place as a team.
My biggest fear is always causing harm, and as I’m currently working on a Health app, that is a real risk I often work to mitigate.
The opportunity is the chance to work with Doctors and other medical professionals. Especially pairing where I bring technical knowledge and they bring medical domain knowledge. Together, we can build confidence that we reduce the risk of, and where possible totally avoid, harm.
That some of these jobs I apply for will actually hire me.
for example:
FOOCORP is hiring its first QA Engineer to help migrate and build consumer facing high traffic products (Plural! - MSH) from the ground up
What You’ll Do:
Own the whole QA process throughout the projects (again, plural!), including end-user requirements, writing and executing automated test cases, monitor testing progress, reporting status, logging defects, track and test defect fixes, etc
Perform regression testing every week using automation Scripts
be part of sprint planning, estimates, Retro and Demo
Play lead role in certifying releases with highest quality (gatekeeping the releases - MSH)
Validate product configuration settings on each environment (dev, integration and Production) (when an environment acts up, you are the one who has to stop all of the above and fix it, patch it, update it - MSH)
Be the company-wide SME on test automation practices using Cypress and/or PlayWright (You will own the QA process. But we have already decided on the tooling - MSH)
Ability to handle stressful situations and multiple projects (you dont say? - MSH)
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But hey its remote! Well I should hope so because this person is going to be chained to a desk until burnout or infarction
Ah yes, good old “we don’t know what we want, or what is realistic to ask of a Tester, so let’s just list everything we might ever want them to do ever as the job description”, very intimidating! And setting people up to fail.
The funny/scary thing is that, knowing myself, I would try to take it on. Ive done it before. I was the sole QA resource for a team of 8 developers who had the all too common habit of slipping into the “the tester will test it” thinking. To be clear I dont think it is typically intentional or malicious of them; its just an easy habit to slip into when their focus is on coding the solution to the problem in front of them. It took a long time and a lot of effort to help them to learn how and to get into the habit of testing as much as they could before I took a turn. And it was where I learned to work more as a QA Resource rather than “that tester guy” because there was no way I could do it all. It was a digital marketing team so the UI layer was much of the focus. One thing I did was to gently nudge them into at least runnning through some smoke tests on different browsers. They all hated Internet Explorer/Edge. SO the first thing I would do was run the change throught that and then file a bunch of defects (it was pre-chromium edge) then gently chide them in a friendly way…
Anyways enough war story, back to the scary stuff.
(fun fact: when Knight Capital melted down, I was actually working as a QA for a hedge fund. And I had made a mistake once that did affect production trades. I deservedly took it on the chin for that and learned from it. So the Knight Capital scenario gives me the sweats like no horror movie ever could)
