3 Step Success Formula : Transforming your Testing career
One of the most common self-limiting notion about testers is the belief that their role is strictly confined to executing predefined test cases or scripts. This narrow perception can hinder testers from fully leveraging their skills, knowledge, and realizing their full value and impact within the organization.
In this post, I talk about the 3-step success formula and it’s application for success in a testing career.
Author Robin Sharma, in his book “The 5 AM Club” speaks about a 3-step success formula, which in summary means:
“With daily awareness, you can make better daily choices, and with better daily choices, you will start seeing better results.”
Let us delve further into employing this formula to attain success in one’s career as a tester.
- Better Awareness:
It is imperative for testers to be aware of the business or the context in which application is used.
100% test coverage will yield no benefit unless the application meets the needs of real-life use cases, which usually extend beyond the standard paths traversed within the code.
Understanding the application design and how services interact with each other is an area that is not optional.
Finally, awareness of the support and reliability aspects of application is something that every test professional should strive to achieve.
2. Better Choices:
Awareness of all aspects outlined above will equip you to make better choices.
Impact analysis is an activity that testers need to do almost every day in their career. With better awareness of the business and context, testers can contribute to ensuring a great user experience.
Possessing a profound understanding of the underlying systems empowers testers to formulate more refined testing strategies, meticulous test plans, judicious tool selection, and have clarity on the most critical aspects of application under test.
An informed tester can challenge the reliability aspects of application, which may sometimes be overlooked, especially for new products and applications.
3. Better Results :
With better awareness and choices, better results will inevitably follow. In-depth knowledge of systems provides the individual testers an edge. Testers who partner closely with development, business, support teams, challenge status quo and look beyond the scope of a pre-defined test script play an important role in success of the project/organization and can prove themselves to be a valuable asset to the organization.
Now, if you are unsure about where to start building better awareness about your system/domain, talking to business analysts, developers, architects, other testers, and support teams would be a great place to start.
Would love to hear about any other mental models that helped you succeed!
