{"id":293,"date":"2011-04-05T10:19:35","date_gmt":"2011-04-05T17:19:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=293"},"modified":"2011-04-05T10:19:35","modified_gmt":"2011-04-05T17:19:35","slug":"my-job-as-a-tester","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/my-job-as-a-tester\/","title":{"rendered":"My job as a Tester"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Yes<\/a>I have somewhat of a non-traditional test role at Microsoft. I’m a tester (that\u2019s what my business card says), but I don’t own any specific components or features. I test, but mostly where I want to discover something for myself, experiment with an idea, or when I’m coaching others. The bulk of my time, in fact, is spent coaching and mentoring other testers on the team, as well as working with the test managers on the team and our test director to make sure we’re doing the "right thing" with both strategic and tactical decisions and goals.<\/p>\n

I should mention for those of you who don’t already know that I don’t manage anyone. One of the things I really like about Microsoft is that there’s a clear career path (including stock and pay scale) for non-managers and managers. On the Lync<\/a> team, for example, I report directly to the test director (the test managers are my peers), and the director and I happen to be the same "level". Several times in my career, I’ve worked for a few managers who were a lower level than me, and it hasn’t caused a problem. In my own eyes, as well as the managers I’ve worked for, I am a better asset to the team in a non-management role (not, I hope, because I’m a horrible manager, but because I can accomplish more and have a wider span of influence without the "burdens" of management). <\/p>\n

When I started on the team just a bit over a year ago, I asked my manager what he wanted me to do. He said, "Do whatever you want". My answer (possibly obvious if you know me) was, "Great – that’s exactly what I was planning to do." Doing "whatever I want" doesn’t mean I sit around all day – at least not to me. For me, it means that it’s my job to figure out what needs<\/em> to be done and find a way to get<\/em> it done. I try to recognize where gaps in knowledge or skill are anywhere<\/em> on the team and find ways to address the gaps. I’ve had success in my career having the right balance between breadth of knowledge, organizational influence, and tester intuition (or plain dumb luck) to find and address areas where a team needs to improve. The code review work I presented at PNSQC<\/a> last year (paper here<\/a>) is one example of this, but I\u2019ve also spearheaded efforts in exploratory testing, code coverage, test design, test automation and test strategy on the team. Mostly, I try to keep an eye on the big picture of what I think the future of our team needs to look like, then make sure we\u2019re making the right decisions and investments to move in the right direction. It\u2019s fun \u2013 and since the future changes frequently, so does the job.<\/p>\n

The coaching and mentoring parts of the role give me occasional opportunities to get my hands dirty testing, but I try to make sure I have other opportunities to keep my mind wrapped around the technical aspects of testing as well. I\u2019ve most recently been working on improving test code quality (through a combination of guidelines, code reviews, static analysis and (mostly) culture). It\u2019s a fun problem (for me) to solve because it involves both organizational and technical challenges, so it gives me an opportunity to make good things happen for the team while spending a bit of time grepping through code \u2013 fixing bugs and solving problems.<\/p>\n

Probably worth mentioning is that I chair two cross-company testing communities \u2013 one is a collection of other senior non-management testers (some, at least, with roles similar to mine), as well as a community of the top 3-4% of all testers at Microsoft. I am a huge believer in the power of community and networking and although the work I do to keep these communities going doesn\u2019t impact my day-job directly, I consider it a critical part of what I do.<\/p>\n

While my role is (I think) somewhat unique among industry testing roles, it\u2019s not completely uncommon at Microsoft. I\u2019m curious, however, if this sort of role exists elsewhere \u2013 or what you would call the role if it existed (other than  Tester \/ Thinker)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have somewhat of a non-traditional test role at Microsoft. I’m a tester (that\u2019s what my business card says), but I don’t own any specific components or features. I test, but mostly where I want to discover something for myself, experiment with an idea, or when I’m coaching others. The bulk of my time, in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}