It’s true.  Our job rocks.  Huff Post called it the 2nd happiest job in America this year.  Second only to being a DBA…yawn.  Two years ago, Forbes said testing was #1. 

But why?  Neither article goes in depth.  Maybe it’s because all news is good news, for a tester:

• The System Under Test (SUT) is crashing in QA, it doesn’t work, it’s a steaming pile of…YES!  My testing was valuable!  My life has meaning!  My testing just saved users from this nightmare!
• The SUT is finally working.  Awesome!  It’s so nice being part of a development team that can deliver quality software.  I can finally stop testing it and move on.  Our users are going to love this.

See?  Either way it’s good news.

Or maybe I just spin it that way to love my job more.  So be it.  If you think your testing job is stressful, you may want to make a few adjustments in how you work.  Read my You’re a Tester, Relax post.

As soon as you hear about a production bug in your product, the first thing you may want to do, is volunteer to log it.

Why?

• Multiple people may attempt to log the bug, which wastes time.  Declare your offer to log it.
• You’re a tester.  You can write a better bug report than others.
• It shows a willingness to jump in and assist as early as possible.
• It assigns the new bug an identifier, which aides conversation (e.g., “We think Bug1029 was created by the fix for Bug1028”). 
• Now the team has a place to document and gather information to.
• Now you are intimately involved in the bug report.  You should be able to grok the bug.

Shouldn’t I wait until I determine firm repro steps?

• No. Bug reports can be useful without repro steps.  The benefits, above, do not depend on repro steps.
• No.  If you need time to determine repro steps, just declare that in the bug report’s description (e.g., “repro steps not yet known, investigation under way”) and add them later.

But what if the programmer, who noticed the bug, understands it better than me?  Wouldn’t they be in a better position to log the bug?

• Maybe.  But you’re going to have to understand it sooner or later.  How else can you test it?
• Wouldn’t you rather have your programmer’s time be spent fixing the code instead of writing a bug report?

When I turned 13 years old, my Dad said, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”.  I already knew the answer.  “A software tester” I said!

Yeah, right. 

In fact, even in college I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be.  I had enrolled in a new major called “Communication System Management” and was studying to be the guy responsible for company telephone and computer networks.  However, my internship put me to sleep.  All analytics and no people got boring fast.  The job interviews during my senior year were just as boring, despite getting flown around the country on several occasions.

So when a buddy of mine found me a job teaching software, which I had done part-time at Ohio University’s computer lab, I packed my stereo and clothes into my ‘85 Jetta and headed south, from Ohio to Atlanta.  It was good money back then. People were getting personal computers one their desks and they needed to learn how to use things like…email.  I went on to teach VBScript and AutoCAD and eventually taught proprietary telephone-office-update software for Lucent Technologies. 

As the new versions of the Lucent software rolled out, I trained the users, which put me in a unique position.  I could see first hand, which features the users liked and which they hated.  I was among the first to observe the software performance under load and capture the concurrency issues that occurred. 

This was in the late 90’s.  The programmers were doing the “testing” themselves.  But they realized I was getting good at providing feedback before they put their software in front of the users.  To better integrate me into the development team, the programmers asked me to write a piece of working software.  I wrote the team’s personal-time-off (vacation request) software in classic ASP and was officially accepted as part of the development team.  My main responsibility…was quality.

Thus, a software tester was born.  And I’ve been loving it ever since.

How did you become a tester?  What’s your story?