Thoughts on becoming a professional tester

"If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. "- Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

As I was growing up my parents taught me the value of working for things I wanted, and to how to bear the burdens associated with responsibility. When I was a teen we moved to the country because my mother had become very active in horseback riding and my father wanted to stop boarding the horses. So, we moved out of the suburbs and away from the upper Chesapeake. I was not really happy about this because I love the water. As a young boy I spent a great deal of time with my friends hanging out in the marinas where I learned a lot about boats, hard work (from the brightwork to the bilge), and life in general. As I young lad I remember listening intently to the trials and tribulations of old blue crabbers, fishermen, and sailors. I loved swimming in the tributaries of the upper Chesapeake, fishing for yellow perch, sunfish, and going crabbing and walking the riverbeds at low tide for soft-shell crabs. I also was not really looking forward to the change because it meant getting up very early in the morning to feed horses, and cleaning stalls after coming home from school. But, since I also opted to get a horse, that is burden of responsibility I had to bear.

Throughout life our environment changes. That's just the way it is. New 'doors' open, and some 'doors' close. I often recall my first manager at Microsoft telling me that it is up to me to control my own destiny at the company. But, I had been around long enough to realize that life also sometime throws us curves or unexpectedly changes direction, and Microsoft is certainly a dynamic company. It is often during times of change where new and exciting opportunities present themselves. Even during times of change I believe we still control our own destiny (at least somewhat). When our environment changes (as it always does) we generally have many choices. For example, often we can embrace the change and dynamically adapt and/or rise up to new challenges that life presents. Or, we can choose to wallow in self-pity, pretend we are a victim of some evil plot, hypercriticize the change with dogmatic arrogance, and incessantly bemoan the dubiously negative aspects of the change from an often overly emotional narrow-minded perspective. This latter choice is usually not an especially productive one (personally or professionally), and generally only demonstrates one's extremely biased, and limited view and their incapacity to grasp the "big picture."

Let's face it; we have chosen to work in one of the most dynamic industries in the world. Change is all around us, although some things remain relatively the same. For example, the techniques medical doctors use in the initial screening of certain maladies have remained relatively constant for decades, but at the same time advancements medical imagery has made tremendous technological leaps forward. Likewise, the practice of exploratory testing has been used extensively in software testing for decades, but the effective application of combinatorial analysis (pair-wise, triplet, n-wise) of interdependent or semi-coupled parameters has only recently become a mainstream best practice.

The testing discipline is undergoing tremendous change these days. There are many people around the world who are serious about maturing and advancing our profession. Some ideas are great, some still need to be refined, but at least they are seriously investigating at ways to advance the profession. As a tester working in a rapidly changing industry we must constantly re-evaluate our skills, and increase our professional knowledge of software testing and computer systems in general in order to provide the best possible service to our employer.

I think if someone chooses testing as a profession, then they should strive to become a professional in the discipline, and develop and refine the skills and knowledge that entails.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 21, 2008
  Nice Quote of Martin Luther King ... I believe there is a difference between "doing a thing" vs "doing a thing (so) well". I think a "professional" tester should not stop at "just doing things" (process, domain, techniques etc) and go beyond it  - create a master peice out of it. That requires a diverse set of skills beyond what is being articulated as "mostly" a factory oriented approach. Good post... Shrini

• Anonymous
  January 21, 2008
  Hi Shrini, Yes, the quote from King, and my message essentially implied that if we choose to do something, we should do it well. Of course, the word professional in the context of my post denotes someone who is expert at his or her work (which, to me implies that a professional does whatever they do very well). When I state that a tester should develop and refine the skills and knowledge necessary to become a professional in the discipline, I mean exactly that. The only limits on skills and or knowledge in my statement are essentially based on the readers inability to consider the vast realm of the skills and knowledge required to become a professional tester. Nowhere in the post do I refer to "just doing things" in the context of processes, domains, or techniques. In fact, I don't see any references, or do I articulate a set of skills at all. (I suspect that you may be reading something into the post due that I clearly do not address or articulate in this post.) So, disregarding your completely out-of-context reference to some artificial classification scheme (factory oriented approach), I suspect that we fundamentally agree.