I am observing that every passionate learning tester have tried doing things that are not testing and try to bring in some learnings to testing from doing them, to test better. For instance, Michael Bolton has tried cooking and theater and has benefited by it in testing, you could read his interview in which he mentions that. Michael Hunter (a.k.a The Braidy Tester) has recently blogged about Drawing and how it has been helping him to test and think about testing. Jonathon Kohl's Exploratory Testing-Music of Investigation is no exception. Bach brothers ( James Bach and Jon Bach) are active in Chess.com and you could read how playing Chess helps to test better by reading Jon Bach's post.
CAST 08 has its theme "Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing". Interdisciplinary approaches drawn from diversified branches of learning or practice, such that insights can be drawn upon and synthesized to influence a particular craft.
Anuj Magazine, an experienced tester from India has been working for quite sometime on Graphology and Software Testing.
I wanted aid his research and agreed to share my handwriting because his research is to identify the traits in successful testers. You can read the analysis of my handwriting by clicking on this link. I hope you'd enjoy reading the analysis and might be of help to Anuj if he approaches you.
I am sure there a lot of untold stories of what else other than testing has helped them to test better. I hope a lot of other testers come out with those stories that might benefit the community.
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Pradeep Soundararajan - http://testertested.blogspot.com - +91-98451-76817 - pradeep.srajan@gmail.com
"The test doesn't find the bug. A human finds the bug, and the test plays a role in helping the human find it." --
5 comments:
My uncle (an english speaking Canadian) married a woman from Southern French. She was bilingual; he was not. After things started getting serious he learned to speak French. He once said that he didn't really know the language until he started thinking in French vs. thinking of what he wanted to say in English and to the mental translation.
This story applies to testing in that the top flight testers see tests and/or test inspiration everywhere. At the risk of both plugging my site and including myself in the 'top flight tester' category, I've illustrated this when build ing a shed, fixing a clothes dryer and walking to/from the train.
-adam
I have recently started learning guitar - a unique string musical instrument. I can learn lots of new things in this musical journey. Many of my questions like
"what is frequency C# chord? Who fixed that chord?" are hard for my teacher to explain.
As testers, we should be learning from the fields like music, art, science and others.
Good post ...
Shrini
Thanks Pradeep for making a mention of my work here.
I fully agree with your thoughts on bringing learnings from other professions and sciences to Software testing. With Software testing being a relatively new profession, there is always a lot of scope to learn from age old wisdom and knowledge that other areas of life bring in.
The examples you have cited in this post are wonderful to say the least. It requires more than quite a thought to learn from cooking, theater, Drawing, Music, Chess and successfully apply the learnings in our profession. One thing of note is that all these fields can be classified as Creative fields i.e. one has got to be creative to be a better cook, to act better, to be good at any art or drawing, to compose great music, win an intense chess game. I always beleive that creativity is the need of hour for Software testing and the successful corelation of Software testing with these creative professions is a great stuff happening.
It goes without saying that..
-Playing a violin doesn't turn you to Einstein.
-Discover yourself by yourself not through others.
I guess what am trying to say discovering patterns of behaviour in human nature is not necessarily a trend engraved in stones. There is always some way to evolve like nothing before!
Hi Pradeep,
just read Anuj's analysis of your handwriting and was left with a thought about the following sentence, "Fluidity of thoughts denotes the ability of a person to move from one thought to other or from one thought pattern to another with ease."
I wonder if you sometimes jump from a line of thought regarding the test you're doing at this moment to something that is related to it but draws your attenttion away from your work, i.e. distracts you.
The reason I'm asking is, that I've read "The Medici Effect" a few weeks ago which is all about finding intersections between subjects.
I myself find my thoughts wandering off sometimes (when I realize I'm not typing) because I think about how I would implement a solution in other environments (language, OS etc.).
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