Even though this industry is looked at by other folks as being infested by geeks and people who prefer to keep long hairs and not worry about being too tidy, who only drink black coffee, are at odds on social gathering and speak in C or Java rather then roman or french, the truth is that this industry indeed has lots of noble men.This is what you would be thinking, if you are a developer.
“………………..Wow. thats like real ego massage. A software tester claiming, or is proclaiming a better word, to be noble. What else could a man do ?. Especially when he is not writing code, or a better way to say would be ‘when he has not written a piece of code ever’………………..”
Well, then lets go back to line1. I am not saying that software testers are noble men, rather I am saying that he needs to be one (if he is not :), which in other way mean that he is already one :)). Leaving language rhetorics away, lets try to understand that why a software tester needs to be noble man, now I know that I am repeating myself and its getting boring by now so cut the crap and come to the point.
A noble man is someone who is able to distinguish between a sin and a sinner, a mistake and a mistake-maker, a fault and a fault-inducer and so on. A tester needs to understand that as well. When a tester finds a bug, he is not finding a bug in the person but in the system or in the object or in anything but not in that person. A person doesn’t need to be judged by the bugs he makes, after all some are working on maintaining an old and tested piece of code where as someone else is working on something really new. If a particular video while being played gives you this cracking and irritating audio then the bug could be with the video player, codec which is being used to encode/decode, whether the video is being streamed and in that case it would be bandwidth, whether the speakers are correct and so on. The list is long and probably your ears might have some role in the whole story as well. So distinguish the sin from the sinner.
A noble man needs to not carry any hatred. No offences, no hard feelings, no blame passing. I wont elaborate this further but to drive home the point, try to remember your feelings when your developer returned the bug with a nasty comment.
A noble man need to not attach himself too much with worldly pleasures (software). A software tester who get attached (starts to love too much) his product will have great difficulty finding faults. We all know it but still sort of start to like our product and then start defending it if someone points a bug. If an external party points a anamoly, we would all go into some protective shell and start reasoning. No. Admit. Dont love too much. Dont get attached too much. No strings.
A noble man cleanses the system. We all do, I mean we all software testers do.
A noble man doesn’t need to think of rewards. I guess I would rather stop here. There is this Gita thing, karmanya waadhikareste…
Write back if you can think of more things which makes a software tester a noble man.