What you really need to know to become a Testing Expert

Hello Everybody.

Today I would like to show you what you need to become a Testing expert.

If you had noticed I deliberately left out the word Software. Why? Because becoming and expert in Testing Anything has the same root as becoming an expert to test software. And for that let me take you back to a Galaxy Far Far Away in Time AND Space.

The beginnings.

I went to school in Oroszlany, my home town in Hungary. My official Technical title would be Mechanical Testing Engineer. I had the luck that most things which were thought at that school and I liked were thought by people I liked too and were clever in their respective fields. Like Pneumatics, Metallurgy, Mechanics, Chemistry these were all really awesome fields. To this day I don’t know why I haven’t ended up in some lab testing the breaking point of metals and the capacity of various chemicals.

But ahh well.. I still remember some of the ISO standards we had to memorize. Like in Metallurgy the Charpy pendulum impact test which we loved so very much to perform. The ISO standard for that is ISO 148-1:2009. Now let me see if I still remember that correctly. Yes! I’ve still got it. So where am I going with this?

Moving on.

Back then we performed a lot of operations on various metals and a lot of chemical testings and the like. The most important part of every performed test was always to have insight. Insight in the structure of the metal. How it was made, how it was moulded and then shaped and heated and cooled and so on and so forth. We had to know EVERYTHING about the creation of this element that we had to test. Without that knowledge you could of corse still perform the test but you didn’t had any additional information why that test was useful or what it proved. Sure, you could have looked at the specification of the metal but that didn’t give you anything about the inner structure of it.

That was provided to you by the knowledge of the procedure that created it.

You get where I’m going with this.

Insight

So back to software testing. What is the single most important thing that gives you insight, that gives you the edge to be a professional? Knowing the development process. Knowing architecture. Knowing programming. Knowing the language and its capabilities and limitations.

Sure you can be a good manual Tester. Of course you can be an excellent Exploratory Tester. But look at the others. James Marcus Bach. Alan Richardson. Michael Bolton and I could go on. They all know programming. They all know it by heart and they could be exceptional programmers if they wanted to. They already know that in order to get very good at testing something you must have an insight on the subject matter. You can’t test it thoughtfully without knowing its limitations its rules that it obeys its exploits that you can use.

Last words.

So in order to excel at your craft of test you have to have insight of the subject of the test. You can still become good but you always have to aim high don’t you? A friend of mine reply to one of my tweets with a really good sentence:".and then you realize that being the best in one implies being excellent in the other.". Exactly. Because the two are interconnected. They aren’t actually two. It’s one. It’s called Engineering.

Have a nice day and as always,

Thanks for reading.

Gergely.