Thanks for reading, glad you enjoyed it!

We may be deluding ourselves. Who is to say that we can’t be effective developers or testers until we START anthropomorphising our systems a bit? After all, they are designed (ultimately) to work with humans. Even an API has to produce data flows that will eventually feature in some machine/human interaction.

Analysis vs. evidence: I do not have a background in coding; so if I ever speculate on what is causing a bug, I am usually pretty circumspect on pointing the finger in case I’m laying a false trail for the developer to follow. I will say “This looks as if..”, “This looks similar to…”, or I will even phrase it as a question: “Is this related to…?” or “Is this because…?”. I don’t want a bug to go unfixed because a developer follows a false trail that I may have laid due to my lack of knowledge, but at the same time I want to be as helpful to the developer as possible.

“No user would ever do that”: Oh yes they would. And worse. No-one ever predicts exactly how users will mistreat your product. And they will often find ways of misusing or breaking the product that no-one has ever thought of. But we, as testers, should always try to anticipate ways users will interact with the application.

Thank you for your comment, Gem! I really appreciate it.

I love your suggestion of the different knowledge axes we teeter on as testers – I feel that way too. We need to know a lot of different things to test well; I’ve also found I can know juuust enough about something to start seeing bugs where there aren’t any.

This idea also makes me think of how I sometimes teeter between testing for different interests. For example, between testing on behalf of the designer’s and development’s specific vision of how something should work, and testing on behalf of my imagined user’s expectations and desires.

I think as testers we have different buckets of knowledge and so teeter on multiple axes? We balance things like client knowledge, domain and system knowledge, and context/project-dependant knowledge and have all that running through our heads when we test, which can be both useful when finding bugs, and a hindrance when it comes to the more chaotic nature of testing?

Thank you again for this post!

Patrick, thanks so much for your comment. I’m glad to hear it struck a chord!

Thanks, Colby. I don’t think I’ve cracked an ancient philosophy text since college, but your comment has certainly renewed my interest!

[furiously scribbling down concepts to look up later…]