Let’s see what kind of tester you are, answer the 3 questions below and find you profile description at the bottom.
You start testing and the product has obvious problems even with the “happy path”, both cosmetic and very obvious bugs are everywhere, what do you do?
- I send the product build back and don’t touch it because it is not testable and back to facebook for the day!
- I log 124 bugs in extreme detail, one for every problem I encounter. If somebody after 3 days asks me why I am not finished yet, I respond that I am logging bugs and testing is not complete.
- I go talk to the developer that made the last check in and ask him why he didn’t test his product. If he says, “because you are supposed to do that” I talk to him about the incredible amount of waste he is creating by delaying the feedback on the product and not testing it himself. I sit down with him, ask him to test the product and fix the issues we find together in a continuous loop until we both are quite happy with the result.
I then explain to him that if the feedback for each of the issues has to come from a different party (me) the delays in the detect fix retest rate will create a massive amount of waste. I encourage him to test his application before sending it to me and as we are at it I suggest the next time we test it and fix it together. - I tweet to the world how idiotic my developers are and include screenshots of the errors. I spend 2 hours defending my point on social media and catching my interlocutors on inappropriate use of terms to prove my point.
You have been sitting idle on your chair for over an hour because there is a delay in the build you want to test, what do you do?
- Yippee I have time to browse the web and watch some videos on youtube! I hope their problem persists for a while, the new Game of Thrones season is awesome!
- I look at my test plan, change it a bit, add some graphics, get a coffee and start reading that testing book I always wanted to read.
- I have been out of my desk already for 50 minutes. 10 minutes idle time is waste, our customers are getting our product later than they should.They say there is a problem with the build, let me see if I can help out. I go and offer my help to my teams’ developers. They might need me to rebuild a machine to check something or to try something quickly to debug the problem. I get stuck into it, wow, I even learn something about it! I might even resolve the problem altogether using my strong critical thinking skills and looking at the problem from a different perspective. I help, we solve the problem and, yes, now I can test it! Chances are that while troubleshooting the problem I have already gathered a lot of information on the product that will support and supplement my testing.
- If developers are idiots there is nothing I can do, I will spend this time blogging about how to become a better tester and how testing is the most important thin g in the universe, much more complex than development by the way.
Developers have nothing to do because the analyst has been sick and there are no refined user stories in the backlog, you just finished testing, what do you do?
- BINGO! I might as well re-start House of Cards
- I start complaining and moaning about how this company sucks and about how better it would be if I was the decision maker here. We need to hire more analysts and testers of course! I then go back to writing more test cases even if there is nothing to test. I might also create some fancy SQL query to extract lovely bug lists to show to management with graphs and all.
- Great opportunity for learning a bit more about how business analysis works. In the previous weeks I have been helping the analyst and I think I can get the job done. I organise a meeting with the team and we start breaking down user stories, as soon as we have a couple ready we can start working. I will replenish the backlog until the flow is reestablished, using WIP limits will help me understand how much work I need to do on this.
- There is nothing to do, if development activities are foreign to me, imagine how I feel about doing something that is even further away from my testing world. I am here to find bugs and provide information to stakeholders, not write user stories, hire more analysts if you don’t want this to happen.
RESULTS
If most of your answers are 1, you are a slacker that happened to be doing testing. Why don’t you find a job you enjoy doing instead of trying to avoid the one you have?
If most of your answers are 2, you are an old time tester that spent the last 15 years in a bubble far away from the evolving world. Nothing outside your little testing world is worth consideration, after all you know better than anybody else and why should you improve?
If most of your answers are 3, keep on doing what you’re doing, you and your company will be OK
If most of your answers are 4, I know who you are 🙂
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