I will not do what you tell me

The line ‘I will not do what you tell me’ from the song Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine has been in my head. My initial thoughts were simply about rebelling and thinking differently as a software tester, however, the song has much deeper meaning behind it. As quoted in Wikipedia “the lyrics were inspired by the Police brutality suffered by Rodney King and the subsequent 1992 Los Angeles riots”.

The problem that I have noticed is that, at times, software testers do not dig into information and leave developers to take care of it. For an example, you can read my last blog post on salesforce governing limits. Everywhere you read about it, it’s aimed at developers. There are no articles breaking it down to create shared understanding. This starts to create barriers and gives the assumption that developers will take care of it.

This is deeply worrying, as problems that cause trouble can be in these areas. We start to lose our ability to be a second pair of eyes as we don’t have a shared understanding of what it all means. There may be other examples, such as the architecture or particular code changes that also create this problem.

I start to think, what is the cause of this? How do we think for ourselves and know when to dig in? This then evolved to some late night googling and researching on how we think for ourselves. One of the strong themes was how our brains are ultimately lazy. We take short cuts without thinking about it. We take information for what it is, rather than digging in. We have biases that influence how we think. We buckle under fear of being a beginner at something. This all in fact is normal and we all do it.

So, how do we overcome this? We learn about these things and start to use the power of reflection and feedback. To be a really great software tester I believe you need to become self critical and ask for more feedback. These two things are blog posts of their own.

Here are some other thoughts on how to think for ourselves as software testers.

1. We can understand our purpose and goals. So when things get tough we do not buckle under pressure, fear or guilt.
2. We can be informed. We dig into knowledge when we need to and break things down, so there is a shared understanding for all.
3. We can be flexible. We can change our mind based on new information.
4. We can keep an open mind.