Joy of Test

  There is currently a discussion on the STC site asking Can Software Testing be Fun? So I decided to share the things about Software Testing that I personally enjoy:

  Creativity - I get a lot of fun out of designing and thinking up tests to perform. Exploratory Testing is especially good for this since it involves a very rapid feedback from the test idea to the test result, meaning you can fire test ideas out very quickly.

  Casual Coding - I am not a programmer by any means, but I do get enjoyment out of coding, especially when you overcome a particularly tricky problem, but I couldn't sit in front of  a screen all day just spitting out code. Testing allows me to get enough coding done to enjoy, but not so much that it wears me out.

  Community - There are two parts to this. First, is the community of the people I work with. I have been very lucky to work with a lot of intelligent, articulate and understanding Developers, Project Mangers and, of course, Testers in my time.
  Secondly, there is the wider testing community. Membership of the STC has expanded my horizons in the blogs I read, the discussions I have and the people I meet. The community as a whole has shown me many ways in which I can learn more about the craft, as well as feel that I can participate to make it better as well.

  There are of course things I dislike about the job, but that is depressing and not the point of this post.

  So what things do you find enjoyable and fun about testing? Head over to the STC discussion and share. You never know, your enthusiasm may cause somebody to start their own testing career.

Google Vanity

  I quite often find myself opening a browser window with no intention of actually looking at anything. During one of these moments, staring at the Google.co.uk page with no plans to actually do anything, I was struck with an idea. How many pages into the results will I find the first entry that refers to me?

  I started by searching for this blog, using the words Testing and Chef, without any quotes. 29 pages later and frankly wondering what the hell I was doing continuing with this charade, I found the first reference to this blog.

  Then I tried adding quotes around the words. This was better, with me having a result at the bottom of the first page.

  My final attempt to find the blog was to use testingchef as a single word. This returned the most results, including my twitter profile, but I had to make Google search for what I asked, it deciding that I must have meant to search on Testing and Chef again.

  Lastly, I thought I'd see where my first entry is when using my name. As you can guess, with a name like Andrew Morton there were a lot of results tedious books of royals and other 'celebrities'. I found my first mention on page 8, which happened to be my Software Testing Club profile.

  My plan (assuming I remember) is to repeat this next year and see if the results have dramatically changed.

...

  I'm so sad.

Indispensable

  I believe that one of the signs of a good tester, is somebody who makes the job of software tester indispensable to their company, but does not make themselves indispensable.
  Sharing information is key to a testers role. If you find yourself garnering information that is not being shared with others, you probably aren't being an effective tester. With a myriad of quick and easy ways to share information, from wikis and instant messengers, to e-mails and blogs, as well as good old talking to someone, you should have no excuse not to.
  Remember as well, if you make yourself indispensable you limit your own chances of moving forward and learning new things because the company cannot afford to have you do anything else. That is not my idea of career satisfaction, but YMMV.

Do I Join the AST?

The last couple of months I have been umming and ahhing about joining the AST. I'm hoping that replies to this will convince me finally, one way or the other.

More Than Just a Bug Reporter

  What is the output of testing? Since I believe testing is the act of providing information about the system under test, then the answer is 'Information'. This information can be imparted several ways, the most notable of which is a bug report. It is not the only avenue, nor is it the only information that testers gather. However, I do find that is seems to be the only information that is requested/expected from other project members. If they are only interested in bug reports, this leads to holes in the stakeholders understanding of the system. But what do you do when the people you are supposed to provide information to, do not tell you what information they require?
  Leading on from this is the idea that the only time we can give useful information is during the system testing phase of a project. However, many times I have discovered issues with the design of an application that would have been recitfied mcuh earlier if only I was involved with the design phase. What is particularly annoying though, is that in numerous project reviews, it is stated that testers should be invovled earlier, and it is always forgotten/ignored for the next project. And so the cycle continues.

*Sigh*

Inconsistencies

Being a bit anal retentive (which is why I refer to myself as a Test Analyst rather than Test Engineer), one of the things I look for when testing software is that there is consistency throughout, e.g. that same colour scheme used, buttons are in the same place between windows and that the grammar is the same.
  So you can imagine my annoyance when I noticed this in Blogger's new Stats page:

UPDATE: 11/11/11

Blogger has made another update and now the words are consistent.

Sharing Knowledge

One of my colleagues has set up an internal wiki and I decided that this would be a perfect forum with which to note down my knowledge of various systems (particularly the things I have done with the Work Items and Process Templates in Team Foundation Server) and other esoteric knowlegde I have gained thoughout my career, with a view to help others in the company, and especially those testers that will come after me.
  The problem I'm having is, since no one has asked me to do this, I have no idea as to what information is going to be useful, or how best to present it to make it clear and informative even if I did.
  Which leads the question:

    Is what I'm trying to do actually going to be useful to someone?

  It is an important question, since if this idea falls under YAGNI, should I be spending the effort to do it? So far, the only answer I have to it is that I will probably find it useful, at least to practice being able to put my ideas down into words.

 I'm not sure that is enough, since I have a blog for that sort of thing.