(In)famous testers
img source:http://leitesculinaria.com/recipe-testers
So the new year of blogging has just started. I’m really happy about how things stand at the moment (especially after the recent switch to Bloggerwhich cut my maintenance work to a minimum). I’ll keep the same frequency of new posts (1-2 per month) on both blogs. It’s good to set goals for the new year and write them down in public, so here they are:
1. Put some extra effort to make technical posts better. I had a really nice idea with Ansibleoverview but didn’t go deep enough. The test detective seems to be doing it much better. At least for now… :)
2. Fix bug on personal www (have you found it already?).
3. Do some SEO/marketing work to make my sites easier to found. Currently, I don’t advertise outside my social media pages and polish Facebook testing group(which is worth joining btw.)
I had observed one more thing since I started blogging. My intrinsic motivation level is constantly very high. I read a lot of twists, blogs, and books which help me to keep up with the latest IT market trends.
Today I’d like to write a few things about branding. You probably realised already how crucial your opinion among coworkers is. A lot of times this opinion is influenced by the predecessor in the same position. This means that we ( testers/QAs) share and are responsible for the same testing brand in IT. It’s in our interest to educate each other, meet, share experiences, etc.
I’m mentioning this because in the book I currently read -Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development polish ISTQB testers have very poor press:
We were giving an introduction to agile development at a client in Poland. Most people appreciated the ideas we introduced but there was an unusually strong resistance from the testers—which puzzled us. At the next-day workshop we had the opportunity to dig deeperinto the resistance and found one difference between them and other groups…they were ISTQB-certified testers.
I know there are quite a few testers who are comfortable doing manual regressions only with absolutely no desire to improve their technical skills. Unfortunately, managers sooner or later realize that this is ‘bottleneck testing’. Let Yahoo be a perfect example of how those QA departments end eventually.
In my twitter feed, I shared recently nice Kate Falanga presentation ‘ 5 Problems In Test … And What We Can Do About Them’. The second problem she identified are bad testers:
Bad actors within our craft depreciating our brand and not helping lack of understanding.
So… are you a tester or a bad actor? :)
Tags: agile, istqb, lean, testing thoughts, testing
Categories: Testing thoughts
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