The act of changing jobs is interesting. It makes you stop and think what, at it’s core, your career is all about.
I thought that my career was all about testing.
It is, but it is about something more profound than that as well.
It’s about change. Working as a testing consultant, it was pretty obvious that you were performing one of two roles. Putting a bum on a seat, and filling a headcount that was required to do a task, or you are there to effect change.
Now nobody calls it that, they call it process improvement, or implementing a methodology, but the type of work that I have done in the past is all about implementing change.
- Changing from crappy commercial testing tools to better, open source or home grown ones.
- Changing the way that people report on their testing.
- Changing developers minds so that they understand that letting testers review EVERY check in actually makes life EASIER.
- Changing the start of a project from a waste of time creating plans are never used or followed to something that adds value.
- Changing customers minds about fixing a really trivial bug so that they can actually hit their ship date.
- Changing young pliable minds so they understand that there IS a career in software testing in Australia, and it is full of great like minded people.
So as I see it, there are two things that can change. Either YOU can change to follow the way a company operates, or you can act as an agent of change to improve the way that things are done to produce better outcomes.
You don’t need expensive tools. You don’t need management approval. You don’t need some complex testing process.
All it takes is some knowledge, chutzpa and passion for your craft.
Are YOU ready, to be an agent of change?
True words. You (and your colleagues) certainly changed my mind on the real and present contribution testing makes to the delivery of software (and that ‘testing time’ doesn’t really just mean ‘contingency’). If only a lot of other people in various organisations would get on board life would be better all round.
The biggest thing is change of attitude. It shouldn’t just be about “getting things done”, it should be about “getting things done right first time”. Besides, if you do the latter you get more time for beer in the longer term – how can that be a bad thing?
The only thing I hate you for is that I now live in the “where the hell are my testers” phase of your process
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