Testing is a Contradiction

You are a testing professional. People you seek to serve expect that you deliver detailed, new information.

Hey you! Test to find more bugs!

When you work, you easily lean towards the needs of your peers and bosses. You deliver detailed, new information in a world where we soon reach the amount of 44 trillion gigabytes.

Your Jira is already full of tickets that nobody has had time to fix. Details keep on pouring in from automatically generated hourly reports, dashboards and analytics from the production environment.

And what you deliver on top of the chaos-cake is more problems, tickets, bottlenecks and bugs. Who in their right mind would want more, when the plate already seems so full?

Testing is a contradiction.

The truth is that the people you seek to serve desire to feel in control and they want certainty and assurance. That’s why your line of duty is often called the Quality Assurance. People around you want peace of mind and clarity in a world full of information-static.

When was the last time that you delivered them that? When was the last time you reported on the big picture instead of the details? Sometimes less truly is more, just like Mark Twain once said.

I apologize for such a long letter – I didn’t have time to write a short one.

What if today, your wrote shorter? Could you compress the content of your session into 3 actionable items? What would be the three critical moves based on your results that would take your team furthest ahead?

Testing is a contradiction. Luckily you get to choose. Are you going to be the creator of chaos or clarity?

P.S. My new book is out now. Check it out on http://bit.ly/thetestingbook – I promise it’s going to be worth it!