The Insperation

As I mentioned in the last post I was having some students over for a visit. They just started their first semester learning about testing. Their assignment was (I think, it was quite fussy for all of us) to visit a company and study and learn how testing worked at the company.

Just a small disclaimer; I think it is great that we have vocational education in Sweden. But I was a bit scared of what they learned.. I met eight young men whom in less than two months have been taught that to be a tester you have to be curious, driven and alert. So far, so good. But they were also taught that you as a tester have to; go over requirements, write test cases and test plans, and from what I understood from them, that would take about 95% of the time. The students seemed a bit concerned that 95% of their working life would be really boring. I get that. It sounded to me that they were told that you should be great! And then do boring ISTQB stuff and test 5% of their time. Needless to say, I had something else to tell them. I told them of how I run my apartment at Blocket, three testers supporting more than 40 developers in eight teams. I told them how I got fed up writing test cases that made no sense at my previous job and introduced Session Based Test Management.

But I also told them that my way of working will perhaps not work in every industry, and not at every company. And that doesn't mean that those companies are  doing it wrong. There are all sorts of reason why a company work the way it works. Sometimes you are forced e.g by government to deliver certain things. Or the company just don't wont to be agile. That is not wrong. It is up to them. But you as a tester has to decide; Do I want to work that way?

I think, and hope that the students saw that there are so many different ways of working with test. No one can judge and say "this is better", YOU have to choose what rocks your boat. In the same way you as tester can focus on exploratory testing or performance testing, you can go to a company that is crazy agile or steady waterfall. None of them are wrong, they are just different. People are different, and need different things. I think it's good that you can choose. The responsibility to choose the right place for you to be the greatest you can be, it's up to you.

After almost three hours the group went home. I hope I inspired them to see that when it comes to testing, you have options. Not everybody has to get on my crazy super agile boat, there are others. But I think I might get a few applications of intern-ships in a near future.  I hope ;)

Over and our, Happy testing!