I begun to learn about testing because I was blessed to work with some really good testers in my life. Because of that, I wanted to learn more, in order to make my interaction with them more fruitful. If I am a better developer it’s also because of them. I am glad that I have met them first, because afterwards, life showed me also the unprofessional testers. This made it possible for me to be able to compare, analyze, see…
Learning about testing helped me:
- see through the eyes of the tester;
- be aware of two worlds that interact with each other, but that shouldn’t be confused;
- have a better understanding of the professional behaviour that a programmer should have. A programer should test his/her work to the best of their abilities. This way, the tester will have more time to concentrate on rather delicate aspects;
- respect the tester and his/her job. Sometimes I feel the tester is used to filter the garbage thrown in by a developer doing a lousy job;
- learn about critical thinking;
- learn about tacit and explicit knowledge;
- learn how to approach in a better way the process of creating/building automation checks ( unit tests, integration tests);
- enter the world of builds and deploys, and aided me to work a lot with them;
- be careful at semantics;
- learn about heuristics, oracles;
- be aware of the work made by James Bach, Michael Bolton, Jerry Weinberg.