Hell of a Tester

I made a bad mistake at work yesterday. I've been thinking a lot about mistakes recently (like here ) but this time instead of thinking how to make them, I started to think why mistakes are made at all. We testers concentrate a lot on finding bugs, which often are caused by mistakes of some sort, and I started to think that it might be pretty important to know why mistakes are done, on top of how mistakes are done and how to find them - hopefully this way also giving me more ways on the how section as well. So I started listing some reasons out, and as the first one came my favourite one, which is rush. In my testing career I've mainly been working for customers acquiring software, often doing "acceptance" testing and that way often starting testing on "complete" systems. And have seen some really crappy systems. I mean, so crappy that you immediately know that the people giving it know it damn well themselves. And in these cases, one of the obvious root...

I'm going to Turku. It's the third time inside a year I'm going there with testing in my mind. Year ago I went there to Turku ICT University to give a guest lecture on software testing, labeled My sorry life as a tester. It was remarkably fun, and so when Arttu and Aki (the guys making a huge favour to Finnish testing community by self-organizing a really awesome sounding testing course) asked me to do the same thing this year, I didn't have to think twice. 

(My first blog writing ever.) I've been thinking a long time that it's funny how many bugs I find by accident. Try to do something, make a mistake and boom - a bug is found.  Making the mistakes intentionally doesn't quite work - that's why they are called accidents I guess.. So I've thought of ways to make myself more prone to accidents, coming up with an apparent one; testing drunk. TUI (testing under the influence). So this I gotta try. More to come on that later.