This guest blog post is part of an Atlassian blog series raising awareness about testing innovation within the QA community. You can find the other posts in this series under the QA Innovation tag. The post is Part 1 of a two-part blog series on changing tester skillsets written by Craig Smith, an Agile Coach in Suncorp’s Business Services division. Imagine this scenario. You are standing in an elevator with a senior manager and on the ride to the ground floor, after the usual pleasantries, the manager asks about what you are working on at the moment. Depending on your role, the conversation might go a little like this: Developer: We are implementing that new web site functionality using the flux capacitor add-in we developed this week, and we anticipate the increased speed will increase customer retention by 10%. Manager: Cool! If you are a Business Analyst, the conversation might go like: Business Analyst: We have been looking at the idea for adding that new product line to the website and think it should exceed our first quarter targets! Manager: Cool! And finally, the conversation with the tester might sound like: Tester: We discovered 6 new defects today! Manager: (coughs) OK? The “speed to cool” is a term that originated in marketing to describe the interest that somebody has in your elevator pitch by measuring how long it takes them to say the word “cool”. Developer and analyst roles are often well understood by management and linked directly to the delivery of business value, but testing is often just seen as a necessary evil. As a testing community, we need to change the perception so that we are seen as “cool”, particularly as more organisations are trying to find success with Agile methods that put a large emphasis on quality. What is Cool About Testing? Most testers who care and are passionate about their craft already know that testing is the coolest job on the planet. The challenge is to ensure that the coolness is infectious so that we can attract new recruits to the role. The problem the profession faces is that currently we are not attracting enough young people to the testing role. Partly this problem is due to the fact that most universities and colleges don’t offer specific classes (let alone an Information Technology major) in testing, which results in business and technology graduates being attracted to the key roles of developer, business analyst and project manager. As a result, often testers are recruited from key business users who understand the system inside and out or software developers that show a passion for quality. Interestingly, since 2002, the popularity of forensic science degrees have tripled due to the popularity of television series such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. If you think about it, testing is software CSI, going to the scene of the crime, investigating the scene thoroughly and collecting evidence. Software developers are innocent until proven guilty, and as testers we are the Gil Grissom’s and Horatio Caine’s of software development. How cool is that? One of [...]
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