Header Tabs

Monday 7 November 2016

Why you need to market testing and yourself.

I remember the very first time I found out that testers weren't always seen as the valuable people that I always thought them to be. As someone who started in support, testers were my buddies. They would help me find problems, and put them to developers who would fix them for us and our customers. I spent a lot of time talking and interacting with testers, which is probably a big part of why I ended up here.

But alas, the rose-coloured glasses had to be slapped off my face at some point. It was maybe four months into my new testing career that I read the fatal words. On Facebook no less, ouch. A developer friend of mine started what no doubt was an innocent and wide-eyed-fun thread about the worst things in development. "Javascript!" went one, poor Javascript. "The customers!" went another, har har, they're always getting in the way, those crazy customers.

Then it happened, "F&$*%ing testers!" went the next. My heart started beating faster and I just stared at my screen. "Why?" I thought. "What have I ever done to you?", my mind made it very personal, very quickly. It didn't matter to me that maybe this guy had just come across a tester who may have been a bit of a douche, he'd just put us all in the same sweary basket. There's no way this dev takes his tester or the work they do seriously. I wrote a detailed, long response reprimanding this developer, which I stared at for about 5 minutes, then deleted. I find that sort of thing cathartic, I don't actually need to post things to get them off my chest.

But this kind of anger is something that no doubt a lot of us have to deal with. The perception that testers are there to literally ruin your day. For those of us who don't experience out-right hostility, what we deal with is a little more insidious. We deal with apathy and a general lack of understanding of what we do. The two things kind of go hand in hand.

I work in a great team, full of great people, who care about the quality of their work. I asked them a little while ago, just at a stand up, what they thought I did. Everyone stared around a bit, looked a bit awkward, then one hazarded a guess of "You...test...things?." Huh. I guess she was sort of right, but I've always thought I was doing my job wrong if I was spending more than maybe 15% of my time physically testing something. What did they think I did with the rest of my time? Did they think I was just sitting there shopping online? Well, to be honest, yes, but I have 3 screens and I'm great at switching my focus between them.

After my little pop-quiz though, I started to ask around. I know my team is pretty up there when it comes to what I'm going to call "enlightened individuals". For some of the other testers, it was even worse. Not only did no one know what they did beyond the physical act of testing, but a lot told me that they weren't even expected to do anymore. Instead of Agile, they were working in mini-waterfall, and the cracks showed. More roll-backs than you'd think was alright and testers who felt dismissed, under-appreciated and just generally sad. Not only does this lead to poor software, it leads to retention problems. You can lose some great people because of a lack of care.

So something needed to change, we needed to start marketing ourselves. We need not just our teams to care about quality and testing, we needed our CEO, our managers, everyone, to get involved. And it's started with something that Kate Falanga of the previously ironically named Huge Inc (it's not ironic anymore, they really are huge), gave us a head start with when she took us through her "Teaching testing to non-testers" workshop.

Getting everyone involved in what testing really is means that they start to understand, and with understanding comes care and enthusiasm. Re-engage your testers by re-engaging everyone with testing. You need to market who we are and what we do, or else we remain that other thing that's always raining on everyone's parade.


P.S - Did anyone watch BlizzCon? Oh my nerd, the recreation of D1 in D3 may be my favourite thing this year. It may not be a Warcraft 4, but it'll tide me over ^_^


No comments:

Post a Comment