99 Things You Can Do To Become A Better Software Tester

Back in August 2018 a question was asked on the Ministry of Testing website on 99 Things You Can Do To Become A Better Software Tester. I contributed to that as follows:

Never stop learning. At the end of every day I ask myself the question: “what have I learned today?”  
No matter how small, every day there is something you’ve come across that you didn’t know the day before. 
All these little (and big things for that matter) “learnings” will make you a better tester.

Definitely give that link above a read. There is a lot to be learned from that thread :-).

More on learning

Learning doesn’t have to be explicit and by doing the mental exercise of asking myself what I have learned today I “force” myself to also recognise the implicit learning.

By far I’m not an expert in this field and I speak solely from my own experience. However, I do read the occasional thing, and this article links very well with what I’m talking about here.

As well as reading, I’m an avid podcast and audiobook listener. In the latest episode of The Guilty Tester Podcast (at time of writing), Dave Duke (@theguiltytester) talks about his recent attendance of TestBash Manchester 2019. He had a stand at the UnExpo where he collected things what people felt guilty about in testing. It touched on learning and here is some of the advice from this podcast, but make sure to subscribe and listen to the whole episode as well:

Don’t feel guilty about how you want to learn.
Just learn something, even it might turn out to be the wrong thing. This is by far always better than learning nothing at all.

The challenge

I attended the same conference as Dave Duke. One of the presenters was @lisihocke. She sets herself a personal challenge every year and at the conference she talked about her challenge to become more code confident.

Tweet of lisihocke/1179783401139818498

Inspired by Lisi and her great talk I wanted to set my own challenge.

As said, asking myself the question (as per the title) has been mainly a mental exercise, and so far that has been perfectly fine. But now I want to get it out of my head.

As a challenge I will start to share the outcome of my daily mental exercise of asking what I have learned today with the whole wide world. Starting tomorrow (05–11–2019), I will post on Twitter a link to this Medium blog with what I have learned. Initially I will do this daily for a month and then take stock. I will see if I stick with the format, keep up with the frequency… or maybe stop altogether :-(.

Items to be expect can be of all sorts. Work related, testing, personal, hobby, culinary, politics, and who knows what. So as you can see, much more than testing alone.

For now I will use Medium as a blogging platform. I’ve got plans for something different, but that will be a whole different challenge. More on that in the future (thanks Lisi!).

Look out for the hashtag #WhatIHaveLearnedToday

This post is part of a series of articles about “What I Have Learned Today”; acknowledging every day the thing I have learned. Feel free to read the other posts. all opinions in this article are my own and not necessarily represent the views of my employer.