Six out of Ten

Warning – this is an old man shouts at cloud sort of post. Just let me get it out of my system.

I’ve never seen anyone actively talk about this but I’ve noticed that as a tester, if you put a bit of feedback in a ticket, review the odd pull request and add an automated test or two, I have wildly surpassed expectations. On a particular team, it came as something of a surprise that as I trundled along at six out of ten everyone thought I was a wizard. I was having a rough time and needed to just exist for a while, but apparently this was enough for glowing praise. In fact, one developer said I had demonstrated what being an effective technical lead looked like. I was a bit baffled after that feedback session. I wondered what kind of technical leadership he had been exposed to in the past.

There are a few things at play here:

• Low expectations for testers in general – perhaps a sufficient amount of developers have worked with testers who were perceived as not adding any real value. I mean, I have worked with plenty who have spent their time checking for pixel perfect designs while developers crafted security problems, infinite loops, null pointer exceptions and many other basic problems. These are experienced testers as well, but who have yet to learn where to focus their efforts for most impact.
• Organisations move slowly – the crawl at which most organisations move makes any momentum at the right hand side of the board a minor miracle. Even if it just means that the feature just goes into the release testing sausage machine, which is where good testing goes to die. I have a blog in me about release testing and how much it offends me, but this blog by Steve Smith already exists.
• Most testers can’t test – this one makes me squirm a bit but again experience has taught me to pretty much assume that any tester I test with can’t really do it. They can’t think about risk, generate test ideas, design a charter or scenario, do some valuable exploratory testing and then automate appropriately (by which I mean your developers should be doing that). Prove me wrong everybody, but the last four or five testers I’ve worked with thought automating what the system does was testing, with only a passing thought for the problem that needed solving.
• Most leaders of testing within organisations are a bit rubbish – I remember my first testing job, it was for my brothers company, he was on the same gig as me. He had a vision. Deliver as much business value as possible, as fast as possible, where what was tested and what problems remained were the subject of iterative discussion with the customer, with the explicit agreement that moving fast comes at a cost. The advent of quality engineering and the like has also brought about a very vague sense of what testing is for, or even a desire to not talk about testing, well ever.
• Consultancies mostly suck at testing – I should charge more for the amount of time I have spent sorting out consultancy messes. I could easily be retired by now. See the points about release testing (consultancies default to this for hard to test problems) and testers not being able to test (consultancies run strange bootcamps with little focus on testing well, mostly tools and technologies). If you are used to certain consultancies providing you a tester, a Six out of Ten Ash will seem like a wizard.
• It’s me – I am a bearded middle aged fella credited with some wisdom. Therefore even my slightly half arsed efforts are met with enthusiasm they quite frankly don’t deserve.

I’ll stop now.