Why do I love software testing, and helping others find their own testing joy? The latest book we are reading in the DevOps Book Club, led by the awesome Tristan Lombard and Niranjani Manoharan, is Start with Why by Simon Sinek. Starting with “why” has always made sense to me. Gojko Adzic’s Impact Mapping was one big influence on me. When our product person brings our delivery team a new feature, the first thing to ask is, “Why are we doing this? What is the goal? How will we know we succeeded?”
I’m only through a few chapters of the book so I reserve judgment on it. My thoughts are already provoked, though. It’s made me wonder about myself. Why do I do what I do? What has motivated me to join meetup groups, participate in conferences, co-facilitate conference workshops, write books and develop training courses with Janet Gregory? Why did I love being part of a team building a great software product for my 40+ year career? What drives me nowadays, to seek clients who want help solving their testing and quality problems?
That’s a lot of questions! I recently guested on the awesome DevJourney podcast with Tim Bourguignon. He asks his guests to tell the story of their software career. Answering his questions about how I got into software and what made me realize I wanted to stay turned a light on in my brain.
I realized I wanted to stay in software as a career when I got into testing. I loved working together with teammates to prevent customer pain and solve customer problems. My career has suited my love of being a generalist – learning a little about a lot of things. Pursuing my passions, like my recent interest in DevOps, continuous delivery, and observability, ticks my boxes.
And – I wish everyone could feel joy in their software journey. That’s why I’ve shared my experiences and helped others share theirs. That’s why I am keen to keep learning, even when the firehose of new technology wears me out! Sadly, I think that the majority of teams out there are, at best, ok with what they are doing. They’re not allowed to manage their own work or try experiments to improve. I can’t save the software world, but I can help a few people, a few teams find their agile and holistic testing joy.
Why do you do what you do? I’d love for you to share in the comments here. Or just contact me directly and we can talk about it.
4 comments on “Why I love testing, and love helping others find testing joy too”
I’m also looking forward to yet another book club call, and I’m surprised that I hadn’t read “Start with Why” previously. I’m currently about halfway through, and it applies to leaders and test analysts all over, while some examples are a bit dated and US-centric.
Most of my writings (blog, book) are about how Seemingly “testing best practice” methods fail again and again to fail to address why.
I feel happy when I see physical expressions of stress leaving other people’s bodies: the sudden grin, the eyes lighting up, the shoulders collapsing in relief. I like to know that I’ve helped them see choices they didn’t know they had. I like to know that they can literally breathe more easily when they work or even think about their job.
Oh, that’s such a nice observation! Thanks!
Interesting! I need to catch up on your blog.