When “Why?” is More Important than “What.”
It’s always been somewhat strange to me that, as a society, our interest in the world around us often peaks at “He/She/They/It did what?” We find out something that someone, or some team, or some company has done some “thing,” and we generally respond—either internally to ourselves, or out loud to those around us—with something along the following sentiments:
“Cool!”
or
“Weird!”
or
“Boo!”
This happens all the time on social media. A new outfit or hairstyle is displayed, a new song or video is released, or a single comment is uttered, and nobody can get their response of support or disapproval out to the world fast enough. Thousands of likes, hearts, stans, and threats of unfollows begin pouring in, without any deliberation whatsoever.
And it’s not that people aren’t spending enough time deliberating what they like or don’t like that confuses, or ultimately, disappoints me. It’s actually pretty helpful that our brains give us the ability to recognize what we like or don’t like so quickly. We don’t have to read a quote we believe is hateful, and re-read it 50 more times to come to the conclusion, “I don’t share this same point of view at all!” We often only need to hear a 10 second clip of a newly released song from an artist we’ve always loved to think to ourselves, “Off to Spotify! I want to hear more of this now!”
What I take offense to, and maybe it’s just me being a software tester at heart, is that very few people seem to be curious about not why they like or dislike something, but why the person who wore that dress, or released that song or made that watery peach cobbler with no crust did any of those things.
“This is the worst peach cobbler I’ve ever seen/had in my life. I wanna fight this lady,” — is, likely, a joke. Food shaming goes on on Twitter everyday, and depending on just how gross you think a dish is that someone has shared online, the comments those pictures immediately result in are often hilarious. But when I showed a friend the picture of that cobbler abomination, their immediate response was, “What’s the problem? It’s probably just someone who can’t have gluten and didn’t feel like dropping a huge chunk of their paycheck on an overpriced bag of gluten-free flour.”
That’s…a perfectly logical reason that cobbler looks as bad (to some!) as it does. I don’t know if it’s the actual reason, because I never thought to ask or investigate why. But I’m definitely never going to find out, if I don’t do what quality-minded, customer-centric people do every day.
In the case of really good software testers, they don’t just stop at “Cool! My tests passed!” or, “Boo! My tests failed.” They want to know why either of those things happened. They ask questions like:
Why did this work on the dev’s machine and not mine?
Why do I hate using this app, and how likely are our customers to feel the same way?
Why am I seeing that small flicker in the corner of the screen of this otherwise perfectly-functioning hotel kiosk? (Credit to James Bach)
The point is, just like someone’s choice of outfit, their political leaning, or their “weird” preference for unseasoned chicken, the bugs that software testers discover aren’t the problem. They’re only a problem, and, furthermore, they’re only even a problem to certain people! To others, they’re what, class? They’re a feature!
But you’ll never be able to make that determination unless you take a long and often arduous look at why those bugs or features were introduced in the first place, and why different personas view them the way that they do.
Good testers are always looking for those answers because that level of insight is critical for understanding how their organization can release more of what customers like, and less of what they don’t. And, ideally, they start to gain that insight long before their products reach their customers’ hands—hands that can’t wait to stop using those products, so they can be among the first to tell the world how they feel.
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I’m trying to practice what I preach by currently poring over the annual SmartBear Testing Community Survey to not only learn the current state of our industry, but WHY it’s in the state that it is. Hope to share some of those thoughts soon!
