Welcome to The Hate Mines
How to blissfully unearth the flaws in other people(‘s work).
My name is Cedric, and I am a Quality Assurance Engineer.
Frequently I’m asked to test something by a person who holds a very specific vision for how a QA Engineer actually goes about testing. The ask will be hyper-specific and will include detailed step by step instructions for exactly what I should test and the way I should test.
Now, there is nothing wrong with instructions, in fact, often they are very useful BUT rarely, if ever, should they be the sole guide for how a QA person fulfills their testing obligations.
In my experience, the bugs I encounter typically come from tests I run that extend past those initial instructions and this makes sense. After all, a person, at the very least has to manually walk through their own test steps in order to write them. A process which is “bug” revealing in itself.
Now, in a perfect world, I would write automation tests that cover the surrounding use cases to a highly detailed test request, but quite often there just isn’t enough consistency in the software I’m asked to test for automation to make sense. So for example, if you asked me to verify the content of your Top-Hat with an automated test, ok, no problem, but if you’re a Magician, you can go fuck yourself. Automation hates variety!
So, as a rule, I manually test everything. This does not mean a full regression test for everything I’m asked to QA but I will manually conduct a much more comprehensive set of tests than I am being asked to in an average ticket.
This can mean creating a lot of thankless additional work for yourself. Not to mention, doing things you are not specifically being asked to do can be a source of friction at any company where schedules are tight, engineer egos are fragile and budgets are paper thin.
The most reasonable question a person reading this would ask at this point is “WHY?”. “You are literally making life harder for yourself and for no specific personal upside or immediate financial gain. You could simply do the job you’ve been asked to do and call it a day. Why do the extra work?”
Nobody could fault you for this mode of thinking and I agree, my days would become much easier to be sure.
For me, this is the WHY.
I.
Am.
A.
Professional.
Hater!
Welcome to the Hate Mines.
Most of my days are spent in dark tunnels illuminated solely by the light of my miner’s hat. I’m often on my hands and knees, in painfully cramped dead-end spaces where for hours I’ll be breathing in dingy particulate-filled air, chipping away at the damp crumbling shale of the QA Hate Mines.
It’s hard dangerous work but I’ve yet to emerge from a mine empty-handed.
There is always a rough nugget of poorly written PHP code, some fools gold that briefly excites then immediately 404’s, or some dimly sparkled asset-ore that only when cleaned and polished reveals its true flawed nature. No product, website, software, hardware, feature, design, workflow, or app is birthed without flaw and in most cases a fatal flaw. My QA raison d’etre is in finding these flaws and so, I do the extra work.
The JOB
What this extra work looks like for me in my current role is a series of highly repetitive smoke-tests that I create and then run as a manual follow-up to all of my QA request tickets.
So for example, one of my current team projects requires me to validate and verify a high volume of image-asset, copy and design changes to dozens of high impact commercial web pages for a worldwide electronics brand. Changes where I often have to cull the copy from Word docs, URLs from Excel spreadsheets, creative-assets from Zip files all of which are stored in Jira tickets that are delivered to me with the urgency of State Department cables.
The Execution
I have 4 Mobile Test devices and my MacBook all pointed to my testing environment. I’ll have 2 Tablets, one in landscape the other in portrait orientation, and two handhelds devices in portrait orientation. My MacBook will have Chrome fired up with one tab opened and targeted to physical devices in Browserstack that I don’t have in my mobile device test lab.
So, when I’m asked to test “just” the new image assets for the hot new Smartphone being promoted this holiday season, my device-setup positions me to rapidly test image assets AND everything else on that webpage. It’s the setup and the pre-written smoke tests that enable the broader coverage not “additional time” or “more effort” and so, I DO THE EXTRA WORK.
I do the extra work because it is what the QA role calls for. I do the extra work to honor the legacy of others who did this work. But mostly, I do the extra work because of what it feels like when a flaw betrays itself.
For me, It feels like scratching off a winning lottery ticket. There is no other way to describe it. Finding the “fatal wrong” in the work of others fills me with a transcendent euphoria. My body starts to tremble, I hyperventilate, sweat beads form under my hairline and my heart rate increases to the speed and sound of an electric razor.
Now look, I’m not a sadist. I don’t celebrate a flaw despite how it feels to find one. Quite the opposite. I am perfectly willing to break an engineer's product in the pursuit of a safe product launch but I would never endeavor to break an engineer’s spirit.
Truly, the days that I’m most fulfilled at work always fall on the day after a successful launch because it’s on these days that nobody mentions QA at all. No need to. The product is safely in orbit, floating in the most peculiar of ways.
The silence surrounding QA on this day is the sound of QA done well.
