“Add Positivity Into Your Testing”

There is something that keeps hunting me in the last couple of days and I was trying to give it more and more sense. It is a sentence that Richard Bradshaw put together at Romania Testing Conference this year:

Add positivity into your testing.

When I heard it, I was “hmm, come on, I cannot just be happy or positive all the time at work”. But you need just a bit of time to reflect to realise that it’s not all about bubbles and butterflies and that the sentence is deeper than it sounds.

We all tend to let ourselves moved back and forth by emotions during the day at work. Sometimes is a testing environment that is not working properly, might be a lack of information in the specifications, a miscommunication, some application behaviour we’re struggling to understand or some tools that are not helping us much.

Let’s think about a tester’s life guide: to find bugs, to report them to the developers to be fixed, to create metrics and reports illustrating how many bugs (one more severe than the other) were found during the testing activities and to give feedback about the squashy quality of the application under test. Some testers, the more bugs they found the most appreciated they feel.

But is it testing all about reporting just the bad behaviours of an application?

No, it isn’t. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

It should be about continuously caring about the application’s quality, to give a constructive feedback on the requirements if you as tester feel that they’re lack in information, to develop a good relation with the developers you’re working with and with the stakeholders you’re reporting to.

Testers are said to be critical people, that’s why it might be a hard exercise in trying to see the good parts of the application you’re testing when it’s full of bugs and weird behaviours. But it’s important to bring the good things up to light whenever you encounter them.

I encourage you, as tester, to work more on improving the bad rather than ignoring the good.

I would like to give a checklist on how to bring positivity into your testing, but I don’t have one. I’m also in the boat of the ones struggling to always see also the good parts of their work, but working on managing my emotions in a constructive way.

Happy testing, folks!