Women in Software Testing

This is a bit strange, but I want to write something I find interesting. I have not work for many different companies, but each of my test team manager was a woman. And I've seen many women speakers who talked about software testing in seminars and conferences. I do not have scientific evidence about it, but I feel that women are pretty strong in software testing field.

Why do I feel that way?

I want to talk about gut feeling or six sense part of the software testing. This might has a lot to do with experience. Have you experience something like worries or uncomfortable feeling while you are reading a spec. Not that the spec is poorly written, but you get some feeling just by looking at the spec. Or while you are testing something, do you get some kind feeling that this is not going to work? This might be a little different from the smells of the code that software development engineers calls when they see others' code.

Here is my experience. Marketing team come up with really good plan for our users. We are going to send customized progress report based on user activities on our site. PM come up with nice spec about the benefits and plan for this. The very first question I got from our lady test engineer: "There are about ten millions of users and more than ten million activities. We need to join massive size of tables to generate info for customized email. What's our plan for that?"

Here is another experience. I asked my wife who is a senior civil engineer. I asked her, "How would you test soda vending machine? What are the things you want to make sure to sell soda vending machines?" Her first answer; I'll check to make sure the temperature soda machine keeps certain degree. I don't like warm soda.

People say men tend to be logical and women tends to be emotional. I think we need both in our software testing. Man-only testing team is not as good as men and women team. Maybe it is not about gender. I get different ideas from different guy test engineers. This is one of the reason why our team does test case reviews. Just like developers do code reviews. We like to hear other people's perspectives. And I remember reading interesting James Whittaker's blog post: test engineer types. Let me find that link. Here

I am admitting that I'm using pretty logical approach to test applications. Software testing is also a creative thinking process. Should I develop my creative emotional thinking part or just depend that part on our women test engineers?

Bye.