Human Software Testing

The last few weeks of my life have been full of tests. Not medical or life changing ones. Software tests. If you aren’t aware by now, I’m a computer programmer by trade. Well I’m called a “Business Analyst/Developer” by my company, but that really just means I look at problems and solve them with code.

I’ve been working on a major project for quite a while now and we are at the point of running through testing scripts to see if there are any major issues with it. I’ve come to love and hate testing since I entered the full time world of software development. On the one hand, there is great satisfaction in running through all the tests to find that there are no errors and that something I created does exactly what it is meant to do. On the other hand, there are the times where I just feel like there is no end to the issues I am finding.

In a perfect world, every piece of software would run without fail from the moment it was written. There would never be any bugs or errors and the client would be happy with what I’ve produced. This perfect world doesn’t exist and quite often I will find things that I just wasn’t looking for when I was writing the code. Often it isn’t that the software doesn’t work right when I give it all the correct information but that the software takes incorrect information and doesn’t handle it gracefully, or even worse outputs some results which seem right but don’t make any sense.

I’ve come to appreciate just how much effort is required to test and review something and how hard it is to test something that I’ve made myself. I know what it should be doing and I know how things should be done. Often it is when people do things that I don’t expect that the big issues come up.

It’s a bit like life really. Sometimes it’s not until someone else comes along and points something out to me that I realise the error in my ways. It works perfectly for me from my point of view, but with the benefit of an outsider I can see things that need to be tweaked or thought through differently.

I know that in the last five years or so my viewpoint on the world and even myself has changed a great deal. This is because Natalie has been challenging me to open up my view of the world and to take a look at things a little differently. It’s like she is testing my internal software and saying “Hey, have you considered this?”

I know at first I struggled with it a lot. Sometimes I felt like she was breaking my brain. There were times that I just had to go off and process through the information she had given me and take time to absorb it.

It’s a bit like a programmer who has worked on a project for so long to be told of errors and they haven’t seen, and they just don’t want to see them. They get a bit cranky and upset and perhaps throw a tantrum. But if they are a decent programmer they eventually have to come back and analyse the information.

Sometimes the programmer will decide that there is no reason to change the software and that the result is as expected, or that the cost to change the program might be too much of a challenge. Sometimes though the programmer knows that they just have to suck it up and get in there and make the fixes that are needed. And it is the same with my internal software.

Sometimes it is just too hard to make the changes and I just let it go. It might be for a short time until it comes up again and I see it in a different light, or I have more time to deal with it. It might be something that gets mulled over for six months or more until I come up with a solution that fits the problem and fits me. But often I just realise that change is a must and get on with it.

It is amazing the things I have learnt about myself from what I do for a living. I’ve come to love my developer job, even though there have been challenges making the transition. And the things I learn about myself are just the icing on the cake.