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Testing like you’re laughing

I was in a brainstorming meeting recently. The woman running the meeting started setting up an activity by dividing in the board into several sections. In one, she wrote “Lessons Learned” and in a second she wrote “Problem Areas”. The idea was that we’d each come up with a few ideas to put into each category and then discuss.

I immediately asked, “What if one of the lessons I learned is that we have a problem area?”

To her credit, she gave a perfectly thoughtful and reasonable answer about how to differentiate the two categories. The details don’t matter; what was important was that others in the room started joking that, as the “only QA” in the room, I immediately started testing her activity and trying to break it. This was all in good fun, and I joked along saying “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be hard on you right away.”

“You’re the QA,” she said, “It’s your job!”

This tickled an idea in the back of my mind but it didn’t come to me right away. Later that day, though, I realized what the answer to that should have been:

“As long as I’m QA-ing with you, not at you.”


Footnote: There’s nothing significant in the use of “QA” over “testing” here; I’m using “QA” only because that’s the lingo used where I am. It works just as well if you replace “QA” with “tester” and “QA-ing” with “testing”, whether or not you care about the difference.

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