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Home > Detail: Bumper Stickers for Testers
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COLUMN: Career Development for Computing Nerds
Author(s): Payson Hall
Summary: Computing nerds bring value to any company for which they work. They bring knowledge and an understanding of systems and projects that can help managers avoid bad decisions. But the computing nerd in this stage still has room for growth. In this week's column, Payson Hall says there's a higher level of value computing nerds can achieve. And, in today's economic environment, this level is far more valuable than ever before.
COLUMN: Deconstructing Our Tools
Author(s): Danny R. Faught
Summary: Does your team need an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool? What is an ALM tool, anyway? Since this term was coined a few years ago, Danny Faught hasn't quite gotten comfortable with it. ALM covers a broad set of possible tools. In this week's column, Danny maps out some of the various things that tools actually can do to help you. Once you understand which components you'd like to use in your work, then you can start to evaluate which bundles of features are a good fit for you.
COLUMN: Not Wanted on the Voyage
Author(s): Fiona Charles
Summary: Back in the day of cross-Atlantic boat travel, luggage that wasn't needed during the long journey was labeled "Not Wanted on the Voyage" and stowed away below decks. In this week's column, Fiona Charles suggests that testers can also be viewed as heavy baggage and not exactly welcome by some parties during the journey of software development. To understand why others might think this way, Fiona takes a good, hard look at what testers do that could possibly make them undesirable team mates.
COLUMN: New Year, New Level: What’s Next in Automation
Author(s): Linda Hayes
Summary: Sometimes we get so focused on solving the problem in front of us that it doesn't occur to us to ask if we are solving the right problem. Linda Hayes finds that starting a new year makes her think less about what has been and more about what could be. In this week's column, she offers her thoughts on the validity of the way we approach the most variable of all factors: the user.
COLUMN: Doing More with Less
Author(s): Bryan Sullivan
Summary: We may be in the midst of an economic downfall, but that hasn't staunched the efforts of cyber criminals. In this week's column, Bryan Sullivan reviews the importance of making sure your software and organization remains secure. He also offers advice on how to keep security in the forefront of your development process without straining your project's budget.
COLUMN: Testers from Another Planet
Author(s): Danny R. Faught
Summary: Software professionals are prone to classic nerdy behavior, but a few of them may be suffering from something deeper that interferes with both their work and their personal life. It may feel like they are from an alien culture and speak a different language, even though they're using the same words as everyone else. In this column, Danny R. Faught describes how this problem has affected him and how you can better integrate into the alien culture if you or someone you know is affected.
COLUMN: Manual vs. Automated Code Review
Author(s): Bryan Sullivan
Summary: It's a battle between human and machine—a theme that could be ripped straight from a science-fiction story, but it is not. This is a reality many testers face when trying to determine if human expertise and intuition can detect more security flaws than automated tests. In this week's column, security expert Bryan Sullivan weighs both sides and offers his verdict.
COLUMN: Reusability vs. Usability: Where to Draw the Line?
Author(s): Linda Hayes
Summary: Arbitrary reuse of code components could deteriorate overall usability. In this week's column, Linda Hayes explains the good and bad qualities of reusability and five factors one should keep in mind when managing reusability to get the most of it.
COLUMN: Simple Strategies to Keep Quality Visible
Author(s): Jeff Patton
Summary: In most projects, testers are the keepers of quality. Sharing the vision of quality with the entire team helps everyone involved in a project play a more active role in determining the state of quality in a product. In this week's column, Jeff Patton shares several innovative ideas he's seen in practice lately that have helped an entire team own up to the quality of its software.
COLUMN: Five Tips for Retrospective Leaders and Meeting Moderators
Author(s): Esther Derby
Summary: Before you schedule or moderate another retrospective meeting, read this column by Esther Derby. In this week's column, Esther offers five tips that will help improve the productiveness of retrospective meetings. You'll also learn how letting the meeting participants run the conversation will solicit more feedback and ownership than traditional moderation methods.
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Viewing Item 29 of 4266
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Bumper Stickers for Testers
By Harry Robinson
   
Summary: Why is software testing perceived as dull? How many other jobs can list "crash," "hang," and "death march" in their daily vocabularies? In this week's column, Harry Robinson encourages testers to embrace a little pride and excitement in what they do, and Harry has just the mottos for bumper stickers that announce Tester Pride. Author's note: Feel free to add your own favorite slogan in the comment section at the end! | | |
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The other day I ran across the following passage while reading a physics paper:
"Two particularly useful books for readers who want to acquaint themselves with the vast subject of SQA testing are by Beizer and by Kaner, et al. The differing viewpoints in these books add interesting nuances to a subject as seemingly dry (to practitioners of computational physics) as SQA testing." (Oberkampf, Trucano, and Hirsch, page 27)
"...a subject as seemingly dry (to practitioners of computational physics) as SQA testing"?
Computational physicists think software testing is dry? Wow. That's bad news. I mean, I don't wish to point the fickle finger of dullness at another profession; but the last time I checked, computational physics was not listed anywhere near the top ten exciting jobs in the world. So, when computational physicists think software testing is dull, testers have a real problem.
Perhaps we need to embrace Tester Pride and let the world know about the contributions we make. Do your friends and neighbors know what you do for a living? Do they know of the contributions you make? Probably not. As far as I know, the only tester in the world who advertises his profession to total strangers on the street is James Bach with his well-known "TESTER" license plate.
James's license plate got me thinking. What can we say about our work that would fit comfortably on the fender of a car? Here are my suggestions for bumper stickers that just might rock the industry.
We could start by hijacking existing bumper sticker mottos:
Ask me about my latest bug.
Honk if you love to crash software.
My other car is a bug.
Have you hugged your software tester today?
But those seem too lame and tame. How about emphasizing the unique mental attitudes of testers?
Software Testers: Always looking for trouble.
Software Testing is Like Fishing, But You Get Paid.
Software Testers: "Depraved minds...Usefully employed." ~Rex Black
Software Testing: Where failure is always an option.
Or, we could emphasize the often-unnoted contributions testers make:
Software Testing: When Your System Actually Has to Work
Software Quality: Don't ship without it.
I don't make software; I make software better.
Improving the world one bug at a time.
We could even support both sides of the "making and breaking" question:
Software Testing: You make it, we break it.
Software Testers don't break software; it's broken when we get it.
Software Testers: We break it because we care.
Not bad for a start, but perhaps we'd like to get in a few digs at development while we are at it:
To err is human; to find the errors requires a tester.
If developers are so smart, why do testers have such job security?
My software can beat up your software.
A good tester has the heart of a developer...in a jar on the desk.
But maybe that is too hard on our poor developers, and we are all in this together. What I'd like to see is developers' cars sporting the following:
Test is my copilot.
If your software works, thank a tester.
Or, we could even support positions within our own testing community. I work with test automation and spec-based test generation most of the time, so how about these:
Old Model-Based Testers Never Die; They Just Transition to a Higher State.
Life is too short for manual testing.
Friends don't let friends do capture-replay.
Support spec-based testing: Be code-dependent no more!
People should think and machines should test.
Test never sleeps.
There can be lofty sentiments for those idealists among us:
Visualize Great Software
And some not-so-lofty sentiments for those whose ideals have taken a beating:
Trust, But Verify.
Truthfully, though, I am a tester because that is what I have always been, even when I was a kid. I have always asked awkward questions that I felt needed to be asked. I always looked for answers I could be satisfied with. So, the bumper sticker that sums it up for me would be:
Pertempto ergo sum – I test, therefore I am.
Jaunty slogans probably aren't going to make us any more exciting as a profession, but at least they are steps in the right direction. They help us focus on what we do and why we do it. I don't know that we testers will ever be as exciting as computational physicists are, but then who is?
Reference:
"Verification, Validation, and Predictive Capability in Computational Engineering and Physics" William L. Oberkampf, Timothy G. Trucano, and Charles Hirsch. Available at http://www.usacm.org/vnvcsm/PDF_Documents/Oberkampf-Trucano-Hirsch.pdf.
View James Bach's license plate at http://www.satisfice.com/images/tester.jpg
About the Author
Harry Robinson is test architect for Microsoft's Engineering Excellence Group, where he works with product teams across the company to identify and promote advanced test technologies. He writes and speaks frequently on software testing, and for the past six years he has been a driving force behind Microsoft's model-based testing initiative. You can reach him at model.based.testing@gmail.com.
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