White Rabbits

Wait, isn't that what superstitious folk say on the first of each month? Does that translate well into a first blog post? So many questions!

Let's start as we mean to go on, with a (not so) interesting piece of trivia from our good friends at Wikipedia. While I'm at it I can test out these quote things:

The exact origin of the superstition is unknown, though it was recorded in Notes and Queries as being said by children in 1909

Bored of my waffle? Me too! So why am I starting a blog about testing? Who in their right mind blogs about testing? That thing that developers try to avoid!

Well me it seems!

I'm not going to lie; I fell into software testing and software quality as I'm sure many testers do. Nobody comes out of college or university with aspirations of being a tester do they? I failed to follow a lesson I learnt back at school.........

Don't do a good job at something you don't want to do!

On this occasion not following my own life lessons seems to have worked out reasonably well. I found a hidden gem, a topic with depth, variety, interesting challenges and most of all, something that perked the interest of my sad little mind, the chance to break things.

I'm certainly not professing that my opinions are correct or even valid for that matter. They are exactly what it says on the tin........ opinions!

I am also not professing to be an expert in testing. I have certainly got more experience in some areas more so than others however what I think I do have in my favour is quite a broad experience across testing, including varying degrees of exposure to automation, manual testing, waterfall, agile, performance and load, BDD along with a variety of tooling.

I also believe I have quite an open mind to new ideas. Whilst sometimes this can lead to chasing the next new shiny idea, it also allows me to challenge things (usually in the form of asking 'why' a lot). That can be in the form of challenging a traditional process or it could be challenging a new idea or concept.

I was also recently hit with a realisation...... not just that I had a big hole in my underpants. I realised that many other testers have fallen into testing (Ok maybe that isn't such a big realisation). However in many of these cases the testers are not working in open minded, forward thinking teams. They are not encouraged to look into the big wide world for new and improved ideas or ways of working. Sometimes this is down to workload, sometimes because of the attitude of the business and sometimes because of technical constraints, whether that be skills or product. There are however many people in the world of testing who just haven't stuck there head above the parapet and looked around at the rest of the industry. They don't challenge things, not because they don't want to, but because the thought has just never crossed their mind.

So in short, the reason I am really starting this blog is twofold. To act as a mind dump for the weird and wonderful stuff running around my head and to try and spark thinking and debate around testing, even if the debate happens to be how much rubbish I'm typing!

I feel the need to end this first post on a high, therefore please allow the below image to capture your imagination!