Think Like a Tester

Beginning with this week's post, my blog will be taking on a new focus!

I have renamed it from Fearless Automation to Think Like a Tester (for the moment, the URL will remain the same). There were three recent events that made me decide to shift my focus:

• I attended a large international computing conference where there was not a single workshop or presentation focused on software testing. 
• At this conference, I met computer science students who asked me if there were any college classes to learn to be a tester.
• I interviewed a QA engineer who was able to create a great automated testing solution for a website, but could not think of simple manual tests for the site. 

All of these things made me realize the following:

• There aren't enough people talking about testing software
• There aren't enough resources to learn about testing software
• The testing community has been focused for so long on how to test software that we haven't been thinking about what to test and why we are testing it 

Testing is truly a craft, and one that requires a different skill set from software development:

• Rather than thinking of ways to make software work, testers think of ways to make software break
• Rather than designing things to go right, testers think of all the ways that things can go wrong
• Rather than focusing deeply on one feature, testers focus on how all those features integrate
• Rather than solving a problem and moving on, testers come up with ways to continually verify that features are working 

In the weeks and months to come, I will be getting back to basics and discussing all areas of software testing- manual and automated- that require thinking like a tester. Hopefully both testing newbies and seasoned testers alike will find this knowledge helpful!