The journal of becoming senior tester (11) - making big impact

Today, I like to talk about another topic of being a senior tester which is making big impact. One of the important way to measure the succeed of a person is knowing
how big the impact you are making to the team, to the project and to the customer.

   I have three areas which you can make big impact.

· Help other's grow.

  We need realize that no matter how smart you are, you can be not succeed with yourself only. The more you help others grow, the more likely you will be
succeed. As a senior tester, I always enjoy to see Junior tester grow their skill and their career, and I also will to help them grow by providing suggestions and mentoring them. From my heart, I believe that help others is the most important area we should build and applied every day. There are many ways you can help other grow, such as help them to doing project, answer questions in the forum, mentoring new members, teaching them how to coding and how to testing. Building such culture is super important for the org because people will feel warm from others, and encourage sharing and learning. In the end, we grow together as a team.

· Influence others

  Once you becomes more and more senior, you have built up a very deep knowledge about the techniques, and have more experience on doing projects. You get
more respect from others and become to the GOTO person for certain area. In other word, you have the ability of influence others. If we looked at the Architects, Techniques Follows and Distinct Engineers, their idea and mind can influence a lot of people and such ability is their unique asset.   Do you think we can influence others like the big guys? I think so. Everyone have certain area which you are the expert. You should use your expert to help people make decision and provide valuable suggestions. For example, for each project I was involved or I learned, I do have unique view of the project, I tried to understand why we should build such project, I think more about why not we use another way to build it, etc. I always share my thought to the people in the project and we make decision together. I wrote lot of blogs to share my thought, and hopefully influence more people.

· Do more cross team collaboration

There is one thing which I think our SQL Server team did not doing well is the cross team collaboration. In the past, we have different testing team for
different area, such as Engine, DP, Manageability. However, we don’t usually share best practice, testing tools or ideas together. We only work together once delivering a feature. In this sense, we did not doing cross team collaboration very well. The same is true for SQL server collaborate with other teams. We did not share too many testing tool to others, and we did not use other’s testing idea as well. As a senior tester, we should improve this area by engaging with more and more people. Learning from others and sharing with others can reduce the cost of testing a lot, and we can only grow if we start to learn from each other. So my finally suggestion is that reach out to more people and do more cress team collaboration.

  Take me as an example, in the recent years, I brought ATDD into our team, and introduced it to many other teams inside Microsoft, such as Bing, Lync team. I
also attend different kind of meetings and seminars to know how other team doing tests. Whenever I saw someone is doing project related to the area
I am familiar with, I also ask whether they need help.

Conclusion, when you are making big impact, you are also grow your experience and grow towards becoming a Senior tester.