I love errors. I love finding errors, I love reporting errors, and I find my reason for living justified every time one of my staff find some weird piece of latent bad code that only someone with an Evil Mind and the kind of cool, bad attitude that only a QA person would appreciate could locate.
It goes without saying that defect triage meetings are one of my Very Most Favorite Things. Forget the little kitties, pink ribbons, and red roses. Give me that tester that put 32K characters into a search input field that was supposed to allow only 10 and made the Oracle backend barf up.
And you know what kind of developer comment floats my boat? “Oh, c’mon, no one will ever do that!”. I think I’ve actually bitten through my bottom lip trying not to smile when someone says that. Some of the best moments in my career have occurred when not only does someone “do that” in production, but they do it on the first day, in the first hour of operation. The minute those words leave a developer’s mouth, the Three Weird Sisters of Fate step in and slap them upside the head.
Life is good.
I’ve tried to describe the kind of satisfaction associated with finding a bug, particularly a convoluted one, to other people in IT, but it’s difficult to describe to people that don’t do what we do for a living. Developers and PMs generally become offended if a tester leaps up while shouting “Who’s da MAN????” or does the Happy Bug Dance in the middle of a test session. What’s the Happy Bug Dance? Well, there’s a video out there somewhere with James Whittaker and crew getting down to “Piece of Crap”. They wouldn’t win any Master of Dance prizes, but you can’t watch that video if you’re a QA/QC person and not laugh out loud. It’s a “one mind moment” between testers.
When I’m interviewing testers and ask them what aspects of their jobs they enjoy most, I don’t really want a politically correct answer. Tell me you like to break things. Tell me you like to make developers cry for their mommas. Convince me you are one bad muhambajamba, that reading your defect reports will be akin to viewing a fine piece of art, and that you line dance regularly to “Can’t Touch This”.
Attitude is everything. My job is not to verify the system works the way it’s supposed to work. My job is to prove it doesn’t. Oh sure, I’ll end up verifying the system works as expected as a SIDE EFFECT, but that’s not really my goal. And that difference in perspective is what makes it possible for us to take code that’s been unit tested 47 times and break it in less than 5 minutes.
One of my folks found something so heinous today that I couldn’t have felt prouder if I had given birth. It was Vile. And MY GUYS FOUND IT.
Some days you just have to celebrate being who you are and doing what you do…
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