Le Gasp! Our first blog - On beginnings and passion

When thinking of where, when or how to even start a blog, I ended up exactly where countless famous books have started. In the beginning...

I was tech support. I liked it too. I enjoyed working out what was going wrong somewhere and helping someone get it working again. It was great when it was great, and it was hell when it was bad. A few years ago I asked to move to QA. Now, being tech support I vaguely understood what QA (or Testers) did, and it seemed appealing. Just find the stuff I was finding anyway right? But before the customer? I know what you're all thinking now. WRONG. But actually, I was kind of right. When they let me move over to QA, no one really knew what to tell me. I was given bugs to check in Jira and I checked that those bugs had been fixed, then I handed the Jira back with a yay or nay. No one told me to do otherwise, and honestly, I'm not sure anyone else was doing anything different. Well, there were a few super experts who got asked their opinion on everything, but mostly everyone seemed to check bugs, and automation.

Oh man, automation was new and I was suppose to teach myself C# (I did) and learn automation (I did that too), but that's another story for another day.

Mostly my first months as a tester were spent watching youtube, and believe me, I wasn't happy about it. It kinda sucked. Occasionally my team would remember I was there and I'd get a bug to test, but honestly I wondered if I'd made a huge mistake. Maybe I should go back to Tech Support? At least I was useful over there. Was this all there was to testing?

It turned out the answer was two fold. For some people, that's really what testing is. You have super specific test cases and you just see if they're a pass or fail. For others though, testing was this massive thing that could make or break your product/software. There were testers out there who did BA, UX, Dev, automation. People who really care about the output of their teams and who through their passion, get others to care about those things too. I never would have turned into one of the second lot of testers if it hadn't been for a new wide-eyed team lead who started maybe 4 months after I moved to testing. She cared. She really cared, and because she did, I started to care too. Suddenly I'm starting to look into what exploratory testing really is (I was doing it well wrong), how testers can guide the team without doing every tiny bit of testing and checking that needs to be done. Did you know there's a whole world of tools and discussion out there about testing? 2 years ago me didn't, but boy did she learn.

It's interesting to think that without the addition of my new Team Lead, I might never have stayed or learned about what testing really is. I might not have tried my hand at public speaking at WeTest this year, and I might not be writing this blog.

All it takes is a spark to ignite passion in someone, and even though it took a bit more time and work over the next 2 years to get where I am now (with a fair few tantrums and almost giving it all up), I'm glad it worked out the way it did. Otherwise, I might never know otherwise.

Helena <3