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It’s a long-known truth – attention is all we have. Everything we do – or more specifically – everything we can do, is based on our attention span. Putting on socks in the morning, driving to work, sitting in front of the computer, and writing this blog required me my attention. Of course, some of these actions require more attention than others, but for a software testing professional, paying full attention is a requirement.
Because software testing is all about paying attention. It’s about paying attention to quality. It’s about paying attention to the requirements, the processes, and outputs. It’s about paying attention to the little things, things that might seem insignificant at first.
Maybe you are playing around with the application under test, and everything seems fine, but after doing a long series of actions, you see that one button has moved. It is an easy thing to miss but thanks to you paying attention, you notice the change and investigate what could have caused the button to move. After doing some research, you realize that there has been a new, invisible button element added next to the button that caused it to move to the right. This new invisible button should become active later, but it was already affecting the flex box design on the page layout. You make a bug ticket and thank your keen eyes for noticing the change.
Another thing about paying attention is, you can’t pay attention if you don’t know what you are looking for. And that requires repetitions. You couldn’t have noticed the moved button the first time, because you had never seen it before, and you have nothing to compare it to.
Software is not like real world construction, where construction equipment can be lying around on the job site and it is considered normal and expected. In software, everything you see, has been placed there with intention, meaning someone, some real developer put it there and usually for a good reason. So, if there ever is a change, it is not random; it is the result of someone pushing a new commit to the repository and building it.
This leads software testers to a common dilemma. What was the intention of the developer? Because, what are bugs? They are unintentional changes in the built application. So, let’s rework the sentence from the previous paragraph – developers place everything you see intentionally, most of the time. But every now and then, an unintentional change gets through, like an invisible button. That’s why the testers are there. And then the tester is left thinking to themselves, what was the developer’s intention with this change? Do they want the invisible button to be already visible or did they just want to move the button to the right or what? The best way to combat this is to have good communication between both parties about their intentions.
In conclusion, life is about paying attention but so is software testing. It is also about intentional and unintentional changes. So, you could say, that in software testing, we need to be paying full attention to every change, multiple times. If this is ever going to change, we would be the first to notice it.
