Becoming an eXpert in Testing without wOrking hard and in 8 Simple Steps

The experts with whom you may interact in forums and on blogs, paint a picture of an expert that makes you believe you need hundreds of years of experience to actually become one. Trust me; they are trying to fool you to help them retain their own status as experts.

You see people like James Bach talking about skills like cognition, lateral thinking, confusion as a good thing, and other blah blah blah, making you think that a tester is a superman who needs to test software at the Andromeda Galaxy within microseconds before the galaxy is sucked by a black hole. Next on target is the other guy, what’s his name? Ah, Michael Bolton, who travels around the world teaching Rapid Testing pretending as though it needs some mental martial arts practice to become a Rapid Tester.

I have been their student and I can safely tell you that what they teach doesn’t make you an expert tester. In many worst cases I have witnessed, it has made their audience, student of testing craft forever. The world could have had many experts today but experts like those mentioned above have ensured that only they retain the status.

Who wants to be a student of the testing craft when there is an option to become an expert? I went to those guys wanting to be an expert and they converted me to a student of the craft. Guess they were afraid of my ability to overrule them as an established expert in this field. Luckily, the most important thing about their training was to use brains, question and test. Use lateral thinking skills and read books like Blink and study general systems thinking. I used the skills I gained from it and escaped from being a student. I am glad to announce to the world through this blog post that I am an established expert. It’s been years since I talked to them and I feel happy about it.

So, what’s my expertise?

I am an expert who introduced the Black Viper Testing Technique & Selphar Box of techniques for testers to this world. Needless to say that without the BVTT & Selphar Box of Techniques (short form: SelBox Testing) testers all across the globe would have not found many bugs.

My current area of research is Rhino Hunt Testing. When I shared the area of research on twitter, some experts got jealous of me and tried misguiding me asking if I was researching on One Horn Rhino or Two? Then another expert chipped in to misguide me further by asking if the One Horned Rhino was male or female?

For the context of this article, my new expertise is to help people become experts without having to work hard. Unlike James or Michael, you are in safe hands.

Pre-requisite

1. You must have worked as a tester for a couple of years with some big companies like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Infosys, Wipro, CTS (whatever)
2. You must have a blog
3. You must be on an interview panel for your organization or you interview testers
4. You could also be a testing coach or trainer.

Step 1:

Once you have that…

Think about an animal or a bird type which is not yet used in testing, be it White Mamba, Giraffe, Elephant, Blackbuck, Spoon bill, Parakeet, Dolphin…

If you want to be more imaginative, you may want to think of insects or reptile families like Spider, Tarantula, Gnat, House Fly, Mosquito – Dengue type, Mosquito – Chikun Gunya type…

Note: Monkey, Guerilla, Snake and Rhino are already in use and introduced by other experts. Don’t copy or if you want to, please owe them necessary credits.

Step 2

Once you fix upon an animal, bird or an insect in mind start to think about the connection between them and testing and form a new technique.

Suggestion / Tip based on experience: It is at this moment, you must start making notes. 

For example:

If you are going to think about spider, you can think of a technique where testers behave like a spider, first weaving the web (tests) and then waiting for the bugs to be caught on it, while staying at the centre. Once in a while when there are enough bugs to report, the tester moves from the centre and captures those bugs. If the web is destroyed, move on to make another web.

Note: Don’t use the above published example. Someone may google and find out that you are a fake expert.

Step 3

Write a lengthy explanation of your technique and use words and terms that confuses the reader.  For example use words like: Neil Bhors effect, indemnification against ramification, trapezium syndrome, Wurtz Fittigs reaction… that are not often used and even if Googled, people can’t understand what it means.

Experience based tip: If you are married, ask your spouse to read it, and if you hear, “Honey, this is awesome”, you are publishing ready.

Step 4

Publish it on your blog

Most important note: You shouldn’t do the marketing for your blog post.

Step 5

Ask all those testers whom you interview if they know the technique you published in your blog post and reject them if they didn’t. Do this over a period of six months to at least about 100 testers.

Now what those 100 testers will do is to first go Google your technique and try understanding your blog post. As you have obfuscated it, no one would get it, so they would ask experienced testers and experts in forums and groups that claim to discuss testing. The ego of experienced testers and so called experts wouldn’t let them say, “I don’t know this” but instead, they would offer their own explanations to it.

Step 6

Apply to testing jobs and attend interviews. If the interviewer is asking you to explain your own animal / insect / bird technique to you, tell to yourself, “Congratulations!”

Step 7

Quit your job and start writing to conference program chairs telling them you would be willing to do a half day or a full day tutorial on this famous technique. Say it was the “Snake in the Eagle’s shadow technique” you introduced, you could do a one day tutorial and charge as much as what ISTQB training costs.

Some conferences will give you a chance to keynote and from there you are a hero.

Step 8

Consider publishing a book with your technique. Hang out with other bloggers at conferences, buying them beer and tweet saying, “I am meeting @this_tester and he is so cool” or “This guy is one hell of a tester”. They would be so pleased that they would go back and write blog posts on your keynote and technique.

That’s all. No rocket science. By the way, this actually works. Have you been interviewed and been asked about the Monkey, Guerilla, Rhino, Snake, Yellow, Blue, White, Black?

Oops, I left my one horned male mutated rhinocerous testing technique research midway. I am speaking at CAST 2011 and hope to catch you all there. Apparently, James was the Conference chair and he didn’t give me the keynote.

About the author

Pradeep is an awarded thought leader, renowned author, invited writer and speaker around the world. Pradeep is the co-founding Director at Moolya Software Testing Private Limited which aims to be the most preferred testing vendor of the world. Pradeep’s consulting stories, test reports and experience reports have fascinated many people across the world. He has consulted for product startups, small to medium size software organizations, and multi billion dollar, euro and pound organizations, too. Pradeep's Tester Tested! blog is one of the widely influential and read blogs in the industry and his blog posts in Moolya’s blog is catching up to speed.