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The journal of becoming senior tester (10) - be open and be broad

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​Once you stay in one group for long time, you obtained very deep knowledge about the
area and the testing methodology for the area you own. In this case, we tend to
be comfortable on what we are doing now, and sometime want avoid change.
However, as a professional tester, we should always think broadly, thinking
about what new techniques we can use, thinking about what about the future
testing technique for your area. In general, a good
tester should think ahead of what we current have, and have some plan to adopt
changes.

 
Why? The reason is the technique changes rapidly, if we
don’t think ahead and prepare ahead, one day when changes happens, you will find
that you are suddenly facing so much challenge. For example, I
always read www.infoq.com and www.dbms2.com to enhance my skill. Once our team
decide to do Column Store for data warehouse scenario I already know why we
should do this, and what is the hotest technique for this are.

 
In order to build such skill, we need be open and be
broad. We need to know what happen inside the company and what
happens in the community. We should be open to listen and learn
ideas from others. I strong urge our senior testers be closely
communicate with members from other team, especially other groups
in Microsoft, and build the ability to learn and adopt techniques
quickly. At one day, you will feel that the invest of learning
will have big return to your work.

 
I can give you one example of how I achieve this. In my
case, I subscribe a couple of very active blogs inside and outside
of Microsoft. So that I can receive news from others. I also
attend talks and training to grow myself. The talk can be very broad, such as
service engineering, scenario focus engineer, etc. By attending
such training, you will have a board knowledge about the technique.
Also, you know what happen inside the company.

 
I attend two $99 training outside in the past year, and I brought ATDD
and Personal Kanban into our team. A couple of team members inside SQL are using
the techniques. You can see the value of be open and be broad to
help you grow as a senior tests.

 
Feel free to ping me if you want details about what group and what alias
I joined.