That Fabulous First Day with Bug-Catchers
Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell!!
Somebody who just started a career as a digital marketing enthusiast, here is a story that I would like to share about my take at the situation of a person who had just stepped her feet inside the software testing industry; No! No! Not as a software tester but as a marketing personnel.
Being all the kinds of literary buff and a nerd who had a crush on Shakespeare’s works ever since first picked up Julius Caesar, trust me when I say I don’t tell my friends that I started working on 1st of May this year rather Prima Maii (my version of the “ides of March”). Travelling to my first day of work I was so excited and all emotionally beefed up about the n number of things I’d get to witness, the much talked about office culture and stuff like that. I had all these mental images about people dressed up in formals and with serious demeanor working relentlessly over their laptops. I was thinking about the interview I gave a week ago, about how I felt I would be a valuable addition and all sorts of theoretically practical aspects of me being somebody who would bring a new perspective to the intricately amazing aspects of this company, I was charged and pumped up. I know it all sounds dramatic but cummon! It was my first day as a professional and I believed I was going to bring some good change.
I finally reach the office building at ImpactQA, I had only been inside the CEO’s office before so I was excited to enter the employee premises and see my colleagues. For the first half of the day all the other formalities happened followed by my induction and then I was assigned a desk. I was still excited, I loved the ambience. Green is my happy color and I loved the soothing and subtle combination of green and white on the walls. Five minutes onto my seat and suddenly I hear the technical blabber about testings, code walkthroughs, tickets, inspection, bugs, cyclomatic complexity…what in the world did I even enter….what were all these jargons? Who are these people? What are they even doing? I mean of course I know what they are doing but hell! How am I supposed to understand their language? I felt like I was surrounded by more than one Sheldon Cooper and what if I am the ignorant Georgie Cooper who will never have a clue about what is this world all about? Believe me! I was overwhelmed and for a second there I wanted to jump out of that plush chair and barge out of that door I could see right across my desk.
I texted a confidante…” I might be going crazy. How am I supposed to do marketing? I don’t understand the technicalities!” With the next beep I read the text that I received, it was a quote from Jim Metcalf, “If you are a good marketing person, you have to be a little crazy” and just like that I felt determined. Determined to understand, to learn and to study how the software testers operate. I’ll tell you what they do in the most simplest of terms.
If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.
These testers, they do exactly the same torturing for hours, working on it over and again, testing and re testing to ensure that the desired output is there. What customers see, the effective results and the enjoyable UI; the credit goes to these geniuses who sit glued to their systems working at a stretch to execute the desired outcomes. These nerdy peeps fit right into the words of Federico Toledo, “As ironic as it seems, the challenge of a tester is to test as little as possible. Test less, but test smarter.” But don’t be mistaken, their work is cool. With constantly evolving software, the advancements and complexities, there are new challenges for them to work upon everyday, new bugs to eliminate, they are like good brandy becoming better and better with the number of software issues they handle and eliminate the nuisances that hinder with a good software experience.
As often as it is believed that the industry feels that software developers are the only real deal going around in the IT industry but I believe that the software testers get to play no less than God when it comes to deciding the future of a certain application or product. No doubt that there are a lot of big technical necessities that needs to be fulfilled while executing the job of a software tester but the successful end result prevents disappointed clients and irrelevant expenses that bring customer support. It’s harsh to undermine a work that tedious, to scrutinize and cross check the relevance of a product and to ensure earnest consumer satisfaction for sometimes our consumers can be little kids on a video game who just want to enjoy an amazing quality UI and the friendliness of the product. Software testers are the cornerstone of an IT establishment who are responsible for a quality outcome and the ones who ensure that the end users can keep peace of their minds while operating with the same.
Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort
So, all you software testing folks out there, be proud of the quality work you do and the excruciating level of efforts you go through to give way to successful projects and happy users. Cheers!
