Thinking and testing

I realized that my last few posts have not really been about testing, but have been more about values and other things that contribute to testing organizations. As you can probably tell, think a lot about testing at also think a lot about the factors that go into testing. I think that all testers need to be good thinkers, but I sometimes get concerned when testers emphasize thinking much more then they emphasize knowledge of the system or product under test.

What I teach debugging courses, one of the concepts I talk about is called "Think, but don't think". What I mean by this, is that while you need to think about a problem before diving right into it if you spend too much time thinking you're never going to try anything to see what happens. In a debugging situation, this may mean endless hypothesis over what the problem may or may not be, when in fact, simply stepping through the code may show the error immediately. In testing circles, I sometimes see endless discussion of concepts and methodologies where even after a long explanation, the point just isn't understood. And then these cases, I think the concept could be understood easily if the testers were to just take some time to practice the concept on their own and understand how it works, and what the limitations are.

I think all successful people have a passion for learning, and testers are no exception. I think testers, as well as all engineers, must have a passion for the technology they are working on. Good testers like to try new things; they install software just to see what what it will do, and often typically like to try new technologies. At this very moment, in fact, I'm experimenting with new technology to dictate this blog post. I took some time today to play with Vista speech recognition, and I am pleasantly surprised with how incredibly well it works. I do have to admit that I have a bit harder time thinking while I'm talking (especially when trying to enunciate little better than normal), but I think it's something I could get used to.

OK, nothing super substantial in this post, but I wanted to dump a random note off the top of my head and also try out speech recognition of the same time. I plan to try my next few posts like this, and all count on you to catch typos I missed as well as to comment on my quickly changing writing style.

- AP