Do you like software testing? Why do you like software testing?
This is my first interview question. I've heard various answers on this question. Of course, the answer will not greatly affect hiring decision but I think it's been hard to come by candidates who really impressed me on this question.
You test engineers. Why do you like software testing?
It will be a same question as to ask to musician why he/she like music. Or ask teachers and professors why they like teaching.
One of the greatest value of America, at least I believe, is that the culture here encourages people do what they like to do. You've seen movies like one become successful by chasing their dreams. Sports player, musician, writer, chef, teacher, and etc.
Is there any kid who wants to be the best test engineer? Not even kid. Will there be any college student major in Computer Science wants to be the best software test engineer? Even myself did not know much about software testing. I started as junior developer and if I did not meet the software test architect who got me into software testing, I might not be in software testing field.
One of the famous test engineers, James Whitaker, (I should say used to be a test engineer), preaching about software testing as dying profession. He is proud of running his org without test engineers. (calling SDETs developers). He's got his own reasons and many of his point make sense.
Anyway, let me address my reason why I like testing.
I like software testing because it is NOT straightforward. It's not like you need to do 100 things for small applications and 10,000 things for bigger applications and done with it. And it's not like you're good if you have a certain number of unit tests, functional tests ,integration tests and system tests. It's not about the quantity; it is actually about the quality. There are so many things to consider when we're testing something. Different aspects of problems that the application solves, technology that is used, business expectations, user behavior, priorities, threats, performance, dead line date, project team, process, and etc. Finding best possible testing strategy and execution around this environment is great fun. And every feature, every story(in agile) provides different testing problems.
I like software testing because of its exploring nature. I like the thinking process of how it(new feature or project) might not work in the system and problem that comes as a consequence. I love to apply the Systems Thinking on this. Many people say going over test cases are boring. But coming up with test cases (written or not) or trying something with some suspicion about the application is great fun. "I try this because I've seen similar things before. I try this because from my understanding this new thing might cause problem on certain features that are already exist." Understanding the interactions in the system and explore the possibilities of unexpected interaction issue is really a beauty of testing. And this process start from spec reviews (sprint planning in agile) and I get to know more and more and exploring goes to many interesting directions.
I like software testing because I have many different options to execute tests and there are tons of tools out there to choose from. I would say this is more of test execution fun. This is not about writing automation code I would say. Coming up with best test execution strategy is great fun. What kind of tool is useful for data driven testing? How about model based testing? What's best test automation strategy for agile process? Experience in several different test framework and tools. Quick experiment on new tools. What if we just choose to go with manual for testing this feature? How can we represent our test results and communicate with the team? This requires endless learning. Learn to design good test framework, learn new languages and new tools, learn how to represent test results, learn how to optimize test execution time, learn, learn and learn.
How about you? Why do you like software testing?
