I’m hoping to understand something I’ve seen across a few companies I’ve worked at, and I’d love your insight.
Why do some internal QA/test teams seem completely uninterested in testing as a craft?
Things like sharing testing articles, discussing new practices, or exploring how we can improve test design or quality conversations often get ignored or dismissed.
The focus seems to stay on delivery only — doing just what’s required internally, nothing more. Not trying to expand their testing knowledge. Not part of any testing community extra. Sometimes i wonder how they work on their testing craft if they do at all. They are good at their product knowledge and testing the product, but lack of learning more about testing seems to be there.
I’m not sure if it’s a case of:
feeling like they already know enough,
not having time or space to grow,
being burnt out,
or just being in environments where curiosity in testing isn’t rewarded?
Have you experienced this? What do you think causes it?
If you’ve found ways to re-engage a team like this, I’d really love to hear how.
How you can help:
→ Share your perspective if you’ve seen similar behaviour
→ Let me know how you approached it — or how you’d wish it was approached
→ Or just tell me I’m not going crazy
Everyone, is an individual. You have to respect that each person has been shaped to some degree by their backgrounds, organisations, experience and their own moral compass.
You also have to understand the organisation you’re in. Whats the reality of the environment? Are they enabled and encouraged to seek learning opportunities? If they do the learning outside of work, are they enabled and encouraged to apply that learning in their day to day role?
Of course there are individuals, that are happy to clock in/do the work/clock out. I don’t see many of them, but in my opinion you should embrace them. You need diverse team of people that think differently and are excited by different things to create a truly collaborative team of people.
So if you see a problem with that type of personality in your team doesn’t fit the culture, you have to do the work to understand them as individuals and not judge them. There is no generic answer in my opinion.
Some people just view their job as a job. Nothing more, nothing less.
This means that once the clock hits 5pm (or whatever time they finish), they switch off from testing until the next day.
I know this because I used to be the same .
It’s great when you work in a team with people that are genuinely interested in the industry but this isn’t guaranteed.
Don’t let that dampen your interest though. Keep getting involved and keep sharing things with your team.
Unless they’ve directly expressed that they don’t want you doing this, I see no harm in continuing.
There might be a day when some of them suddenly want to get more invested in the industry and that’ll be much easier if they can see all the resources you’ve shared.
I completely agree about the point about everyone being an individual and shaped by their unique experiences — and I absolutely agree that diversity in thinking, background, and personality is pretty important in testing and valuable.
But for me, this isn’t about dismissing individuality or forcing everyone into a mould. It’s about questioning why, in a discipline like testing — where curiosity, continuous learning, and diverse viewpoints are so essential — we sometimes see a lack of interest in growing the craft itself.
Just as we’d expect developers to care about writing cleaner code, using modern practices, or participating in dev communities, I find it odd when testers don’t show a similar passion for their field. Testing isn’t just a job—it’s a craft that thrives on shared learning, critical thinking, and challenge.
Of course, people clock in and out for different reasons, and not everyone needs to be deeply embedded in the testing community. But when theres little curiosity or initiative to improve their testing practice, I think it’s valid to ask why. Especially in environments where learning is encouraged but uptake is still low — that’s not necessarily a company culture issue, but potentially a mindset one.
So I’m not judging people’s personalities — I’m questioning how we create a culture where mastery of the craft is something we take pride in, not just tolerate. Testing, more than many disciplines, needs a wide range of perspectives, but surely we also need to get better at our craft?
You are not going crazy Richard. I have seen such people and individuals with different level of disengagement. I have been it myself at some point.
I was out of community and not learning much when I become a parent. I did my job well, it was required, nothing else.
I am full time working mom with no help from relatives (they are not around), so when I put my son to sleep, I just wanted to fall into my bed and wake up next morning only. So I lived that way for 3 years. Weekend were the same story.
Most likely, it’s not them, but their life situation, different priorities, environment, lack of inspiring leadership in the company, lack of awareness of testing community to be part of and learn, testing work is taken for granted, QAs are not valued, their value diminished, there is no one to uplift their value and voices in the company. Some of them might not enjoy what they do, but they do, because they need work and money which is fine as well. It’s life.
There are literally millions of reasons that lead to disengaged people.
What I was doing in the past and would do now also:
talk to everyone individually on coffee catch up and 1-on-1, ask them questions that would help me understand their life/work situation, motivation, dreams.
build relationships with everyone, so at some point I can ask questions directly to get that understand faster
lead by example - provide workshops to open up learning opportunities, sharing articles, pairing up, being active member in the company and community
understand the whole situation about QA function in the company. Is there something that keeps them where they are, is there narrative that keeps them low
also people might feel unsafe to open up for new learning; people need to recognise they don’t know everything or do things so-so; no everyone is ready to do that. You need safe environment for people to open up.
It takes time to bring people on board. Months of sharing articles, workshops, taking about quality, community, uplifting QA function, giving them space, safe place to fail and learn from it.
I read these things differently as a leader I suppose. I still think it’s all about working to understand people and not trying to change them to exhibit behaviours that we would “expect” of them. That is what I call a judgement.
As leaders, we have to understand the people we’re coaching. We have to adapt to them so we know where we’re starting from. If you do have a team that are all “clock in/out” (never experienced that but I’ll go with it), then the heavy lifting is going to be done by the leader. But to drive a change in thinking within the team then the leader can coach people into decision making, asking opinions and be the catalyst for generating ideas.
As ideas start to generate you can start with a “hey thats a great idea, try it out and share what you find out with me”…that could lead to “hey thats a great idea, try it out and share what you find out with the team”. Once the confidence grows then there will be some people that start to become comfortable with investigating new ideas/techniques without prompting or seeking approval, but still sharing with the team.
But there will always be those, that aren’t comfortable doing that for any number of reasons. I’m saying thats fine, you need them, they’re the stable dependable ones that just like to get stuff done and they’ll look to the innovators for ideas. Maybe one day they will change, but my warning is don’t make it an expectation of everyone.
To add to other already excellent responses, I can’t speak for others, but I can speak about past me, that hasn’t always engaged:
Earlier in my career, I didn’t know the benefits of shared and consuming with the community, or where to go to do so anyway. I was ignorant of the opportunity.
In my first role, I was learning a lot from a few peers and leaders internally. We did things in a certain way, and I didn’t feel the need to grow outside and beyond the boundaries of my internal community. Because we “Did it better”, I was arrogant, and missed out on opportunities because of it.
Numerous times, I’ve disengaged because I didn’t have capacity to learn and grow with external input. I needed to work on immediate problems, fight fires, or handle a different aspect of my life at that time
I’ve sometimes focused on very specific, often technical, learning and growth that didn’t look a lot like growing the craft of testing. Sometimes others learning and growth might not fit your expectations, or not be visible to you. It might still be happen in it’s own way.
Occasionally I’ve reduced my investment in learning and growth, especially related to the craft of testing, because either I wasn’t insensitive to grow, or I was outright distinctivised. I was outright distinctivised told to get on with my job and leave learning and community until later… Thankfully this didn’t happen often and I found ways to re-engage anyway.
There are numerous factors. A few that come to mind are:
ISTQB lobotomised several generations of testers over three decades.
Although some things are always wrong, nothing in testing is always right. Everything is context-dependent, but most people can’t handle that - they want rules to follow.
From the outside, testing looks easy, so it attracts people who are not suitable. When they find out it’s really difficult to do well, they keep their head down and hope to cling on to their job.
Most people in most job roles are lazy and/or untalented.
Hiring managers are hopeless at recruiting good testers, let alone enthusiastic ones.
The way that agile development is done creates constraints that make good testing all but impossible. Testers are not given time to experiment or investigate new ways to do things.
Management demands for “complete testing” means that “doing more testing” is always prioritised over personal development.
Developers have too much influence over how testing is done, even though they know literally nothing about the subject.
Just yesterday, I was talking to Michael Bolton, bemoaning the fact that in the 30 years he and James Bach have been advancing our profession, almost no one else has emerged to take things further when they retire (he says that’s not happening any time soon).
When we had a test lab, we put a huge amount of effort into developing our exploratory testing methodology and new testing techniques. We only recruited testers who were intelligent and enthusiastic and wanted to learn. But around 2016 the market for skilled testing collapsed and all that is now history.
Here’s my 2 cents based on my experience as both a tester and a leader.
Testing is widely becoming an activity to be carried out, rather than a discipline. Senior management and leadership, especially those with no dedicated testing experience, view testing as something anyone can do. A lot of them believe that business analysts and end users can create and carry out functional tests. Programmers can automate tests. And with the rise of lo/no-code test automation tools they believe anybody can create and execute automation tests. As a result no effort is put into establishing testing as an internal service discipline, with its own development structure and career progression path. Testing CoEs are gutted. Anyone not actively contributing to delivery 100% is let go. In such environments even the most enthusiastic entry level testers can get apathetic or disincentivised when the organisation they work for appears not to value or respect what they do.
Contractors have it slightly better because their survival relies on their ability to demonstrate their value differentiation. But as they have little influence over organisations, their ability to support the development of others is limited.
