One thing I’m known for amongst many of my oldest friends is being willing to repeatedly tackle a problem. I will bang my head against a wall until it caves or I do. I’m not one to feel particularly bad about failing at something, nor do I tend to spend a lot of time caught up in self-recrimination. I’ll take a moment to assess what happened and what I could try differently and then get right back to it. I’ve got my limits, of course. I won’t keep tackling a problem I know I can’t solve and I’ll eventually give up for at least a while to rest if I’m feeling particuarly worn out by my efforts, but my limits for this kind of repetition and effort are much more expansive than most people I run into. This is one of the qualities that has made me a good software tester. Unlike a lot of my peers who will write up what they saw and move on if they can’t reproduce the issue quickly, I will (when the situation calls for it) dig in and keep messing with things until I either figure it out or I feel like I’ve done my due diligence. This is an ever-moving goal, unfortunately, but it’s still something I and my coworkers have come to count on. If there’s ever a tricky little bug with a lot of finicky details and no clear cause, I will usually be sent in to figure it out because I will just keep trying stuff without letting it wear me down. It’s worked so well in the past that everyone on my team knows me for this quality at this point, for better or for worse. They can always count on me to do whatever needs doing in as exacting detail as it needs (if not maybe a little too exacting sometimes).
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“Process” Doesn’t Have To Be A Dirty Word
Once again, at potentially the worst possible time for my team, we are being forced to adopt a new company-wide process. My boss is encouraging everyone to participate early and get involved, that way we can provide feedback that will hopefully push this new process in a direction that will work better for everyone involved, but I could see the exhaustion and loss of morale on my coworkers’ faces as what was supposed to be a quick aside turned into an hour-long discussion. To be entirely fair to my coworkers, the only reason I wasn’t having a bad time is because it didn’t impact me and I’m already a heavy user of the tool being forced to fit everyone else. You see, the tool in question is a software development and bug tracking product with a well-built database and plenty of customizability, one that the software developers and testers have been using for over half a decade, to the degree that we barely think about it anymore (I’m not going to name names or get more specific than this for reasons of plausible deniability and keeping my writing away from my work life). What sucks for me specifically, though, is that there is rumor going around that all of the people who HAVE been using the tool in a way that works really well for us are going to be forced to use it this other way, that everyone else is using it, just so everyone uses the tool the same way.
Continue readingTalking To An Empty Room: Virtual Meetings with No Cameras
I had to do a presentation at work today. I had time to prepare for it, but I felt a decent amount of resentment that I’d been forced into needing to present at all. The testers at my employer meet once a month (virtually) to watch (or at least listen to) a presentation by representatives from one of the testing teams. The goal is for each team to take turns presenting some aspect of their work in order to foster inter-team communication and provide each other with information that could prove useful in our testing work. While this makes sense for some of the teams, it is pointless for others. It is especially pointless for my team. While a few teams in the Research and Development department work together or work on related products, our company’s diversification means that a lot of us work on entirely unrelated things. Literally no part of my testing work will ever be useful to anyone who isn’t on my team and we already share everything internally, so there’s no point to me going to the meeting. The whole meeting only exists because of a bit of political maneuvering as two people higher up the corporate food chain fought over control of the testers for reasons I can’t fathom. It’s not like either one of them has any actual authority over the rest of us. Neither of them was, is, or ever will be in my management structure. But I still have to go to these meetings and take multiple hours out of my day to prepare a presentation for them, for some reason.
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