A series of unconnected things:
- I’ll be at the Liverpool Tester Meetup on 4th August! Come say hi!
- I’ve got more interviews coming up and that is my plan for August – start reaching out for interviews.
- 30 days of testing! This is a thing that Ministry of Test is doing, and though I got off to a strong start, I’ve started to flag a bit. I need to get back on course!
- I’ve started working with selenium! I’ve picked python as I assumed a language I knew would be less of a learning curve, but that may change as we figure out what works for us.
- I’ve been listening to a lot of creepy podcasts – The Magnus Archives, Archive 81. Highly recommended if you like creepy fiction!
I want to talk about getting into testing.
My session at Testbash will touch on getting into testing in less than ideal circumstances and learning testing in those circumstances, but today I just want to discuss getting into testing.
So many testers say they just ‘fell’ into testing, that they either didn’t see testing as their career, or that they didn’t even realise testing was a career, and I’m intrigued by it. I am a tester that did the same, and I’m sure there are other careers where people also just fall into it, but as a tester, it’s testing I’m interested in.
I’d be interested in collecting experiences of how people got into testing; not necessarily their background, but maybe the moment you realised this is what you wanted to do, or the moment you shifted to testing almost full time – whatever you want to think as the moment or series of moments you got into testing, I want to hear them.
I got into testing by saying yes. I was working as a customer support person in a digital agency. My co-worker, who was our only tester, had moved into release management but that meant there was less time for him to test (we were ostensibly a start up, so profit margins were slim). As the person who had bugs reported to them, and the person who had the most free time, relatively speaking, it seemed obvious that some of that work would come to me. I was still new to the job, and pitching in and helping out had never really gone wrong for me before so why not?
My testing was weak, relatively speaking. I mean, I have a science degree and can be pedantic about things, so you know, I wasn’t completely in the wild, but looking back I know I missed some things I would’ve caught now.
We were working off spreadsheets of test cases, which I actually found a useful starting off, because they gave me the foundations I needed to feel comfortable. There was nothing saying I couldn’t go off script, but we wanted to make sure we had everything down (incidentally, I think I only ever used the ones handed over to me, never ones I’d made myself. Seemed like a lot of faff for little reward).
I don’t remember the moment I became a tester, but I remember a moment I realised maybe I could do this.
I wasn’t happy with an implementation. It’s hard to describe without jumping into details but it was wrong. Firstly, I was proud of myself that I’d got enough knowledge of the system to know it was wrong. We pointed out the issue and got it fixed. However, the problem was twofold (maybe three). Firstly, we had offshore devs that had no real interaction or onboarding of the site. They were treated like code monkeys, and this led to a lack of investment and knowledge of the system. Two: the feature request had had no discussion, really. It came from the client, through the account manager, straight to said offshore dev, with no other input. So the feature hadn’t been technically planned, no real AC was on the ticket, nothing. Just ‘make this happen’.
That was the failure in my eyes – there was no guidance from the developer, and there wasn’t clear lines of communication on this stuff, so he didn’t ask for clarification. He was new to the system, so didn’t have the time or knowledge to really figure out what knock-on effects there were. So I started stepping in a little bit and trying to make sure we had a list of requirements and edge cases.
And I started to google. I wanted to see what other people did, how other companies handled this stuff (at this point our tester had left, leaving me as the go to tester person – did I mention the company was not so slowly going bankrupt?), and I found the testing community.
I think those two moments – realising I’d picked up a bug in the system and then finding the testing community (or the bits I inhabit anyway), were the moments I decided this is what I wanted to do.
And I think a lot of people get pulling into testing because ‘anyone can do it’, and for me it was realising that it goes deeper than that that brought me into the career properly.
I would absolutely love people to let me know how they got into testing. I can’t promise any fancy R scripts and graphs like Rosie Hamilton did, but I can promise at least a blog post on it!