Yes, I am a Test Engineer — No, I can’t turn it off!

I have been a test engineer since 1998.

After nearly nearly two decades of manual and automated testing software using manual testing as well as automated testing skills. I cannot turn off my testing intuition.

In the last year, my husband has been taking introductory computer science courses in the pursuit of a career change. During his first semester, he took a C programming class. In the first few weeks, they worked on “Hello, World” programs. Simple, but instructive in regards to learning basic syntax and data structures.

One evening, he came downstairs with his laptop, beaming with pride, to show me his latest program. This program was a simple console application which took in several inputs and would provide outputs such as the user’s name, age and birth date. He said, “Would you like to see my program?”

“Sure,” I replied.

He handed over the laptop and on the screen was a console application with a prompt asking for my age. The cursor blinked at me, begging for input. Now I know it wanted a number, ages are always numbers, but the test engineer instincts rose up and I typed “a” and hit the enter key.

A C exception printed out and the console… crashed.

Crestfallen, my husband meekly said, “I wanted you to see the program not test it!”

I quipped, “Like I can turn this off!?!”

He took the laptop from me and slowly walked back upstairs, shoulders slumped, clearly defeated.

Some time later he came back down and confidently said, “OK, try it now.” I took the laptop from him and once again the console application was asking for my age. I typed in “a” and hit the enter key. The app responded with,

“Your age is a number not a character, please try again.”

I smiled, knowing he had figured out a way to check for the data type of the input value.

Once again, those instincts rose up and I typed in “*” and hit enter. The app responded with,

“Hey stupid, I want a number, please try again.”

I knew the app would only accept a number. I continued exploring and saw the app functioned the way my husband it wanted to. With a big grin, I replied, “Nice program. I can’t find any bugs in it. Good job!”

He’s continued exploring programming techniques to this day, and every once in a while, he brings me something to look at. So far, his code has passed my tests with flying colors.

I’ve shared this story with the software engineers at work. They laughed and replied, “If his code gets past you, we should hire him!”