Some while ago I started to write a tester’s novell. Heavily inspired by Elisabeth Hendrickson‘s article in the January 2010 issue of the Software Test and Performance magazine. Personally, I wanted to try myself on a tale of a tester after having read her article, and got in touch with Elisabeth. We exchanged some thoughts, some words, and voila, there was it.
I hoped it was that easy. Basically, what I wanted to tell, is the story about a new tester in a larger corporation. Based on my personal experience four years ago, I realized there was little previous knowledge that I could have taken with me for the job. Between the job interview and starting as a tester my father had died suffering from cancer for a little more than a decade. One day after the job interview I brought him to hospital. During family affairs I got the job position offering call. Having got this hard set-back, anyways, I started to dig into the field and learned. First by getting experience from colleagues, later by reading the classics and reflecting constantly on the practices I followed.
After having read a blog entry from Anne-Marie Charrett and one from Rob Lambert earlier, I decided to tell a tale about a tester getting introduced into our work. Alongside I want to spread the word on what we’re acutally doing, though there may be just few outside the testing field who will actually care. Therefore, I realized I needed to write it as an authentic, still fictive story, just like “The Craftsman” from Robert C. Martin.
So, I realized that I might split my work up into pieces. I decided to come up with three pieces so far from the original article. There is more room for further articles in the same manner. I’m still working on the story-line, so I would be glad to get some feedback on future episodes from the readers, which I might incorporate. The Software Testing Club put the first episode of the Deliberate Tester up on their blog. You can read it here, it’s called Session based exploration.
