RoboCon 2024

Have you ever wondered how your career as a QA affects your life? We testers spend our time in detecting bugs, inconsistencies, and accessibility issues. We pay a lot of attention to details, try to think of scenarios not only on how to use the software, but how to abuse it too. We are the gate-keepers for a new feature to be released. Is the new feature secure enough? Does it meet the requirements? We constantly seek for flaws and try negative scenarios. And by doing so, we become better and better at this. We train our eyes and our minds to see the flaws. In fact, we become too good at this. Our brain is a muscle; depending on the training we provide, the better we become at this.

Have you ever considered how this training might affect the way we perceive the world in general outside the software?
All this negative thinking trains our brain to think negatively. And it does not stop when the clock ticks 5pm. This way of thinking, becomes the way we perceive the world around us. The way we interact with our colleagues, family or friends. The way we perceive challenges in life. Have you heard of the “Medical students' disease“? Is a condition frequently reported in medical students, who perceive themselves to be experiencing the symptoms of a disease that they are studying. The same happens to us, QA engineers, we constantly seek for flaws.
As Shawn Achor in the book “The Happiness advantage” said: “It’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.”

How about reversing all this negative thinking? How about instead of chasing bugs, we prevent bugs from happening by thinking more positively?

If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences a happiness advantage. Your intelligence, your creativity and your energy levels rise.
We can turn our issues into opportunities. When raising an issue or writing a review, we can provide constructive feedback. Instead of focusing on the result, we can focus on the process and how we can improve our Way-Of-Working. It does not matter how many tickets we raise. What does matter, are the discussions being raised by asking the right questions, firing up discussions, documenting, searching and providing actions.
Instead of testing the features being implemented by developers, think along with them while they develop; this way the product becomes more robust. We don’t need to measure success in numbers. Sometimes more is achieved by doing less. Give the space and the time to enable others to do more.

We not only see the flaws but also the successes. We work closely with the developers and we see first the beautiful implementation they delivered, the solution they found, the way they handled a problem. There are often times I am proud of the people I am working with. We should be more vocal and praise our colleagues for what they achieved.
Let's embrace the happiness advantage!