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50+ mistakes of my software testing career

We learn a lot from our mistakes compared to our success. Do we have a list of the mistakes we have made so far? Are you sure that you are not repeating the mistakes? Think about it...

Ajay Balamurugadas

How many mistakes have you made in your career? How many can you remember? Ajay Balamurugadas is trying to recollect most of his professional mistakes and hopes that someone else doesn't repeat the same mistakes. Are you curious to know more about the 12+ years journey? Read on...

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About

About

About the Book

An attempt to highlight the multiple mistakes I did as part of my software testing career so far. Twelve years is a reasonable sample size if you include the experiences of changing multiple jobs across domains, attending different workshops and conferences, co-founding a worldwide community for testers, attempting multiple initiatives and finally taking up this challenge of writing this book - Ajay Balamurugadas

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Author

About the Author

Ajay Balamurugadas

Ajay Balamurugadas, goes by the handle ‘ajay184f’ in the testing community and is continuously re-inventing his testing methodology. He co-founded Weekend Testing – a worldwide movement for skilled testing, authored multiple books available at bit.ly/booksaj and bit.ly/ajleanpub. His friends associate the terms – ‘Change Agent, Idea Man, Motivational’ to him. He tweets under @ajay184f and loves to have long conversations on software testing and life in general. He is currently working at GSPANN Technologies, Inc. as Senior Director – QE. When not testing, he spends time with his wife and two children.

Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

L1: Trust is a double-edged sword

L2: Wasted time on test data generation

L3: Did not set expectations

L4: Believed the developer - unmasked password

L5: Surprise alerts at last minute

L6: Who tested the main use case?

L7: Proxy setup - Are you sure?

L8: When the unimportant became important

  1. L9: Typecast as a UI tester

L10: When interests don’t match

  1. L11: Interests matched and still…

L12: What happened when I shot down an idea

  1. L13: Another perspective and I rebelled

L14: Intermittent issues and their investigation

L15: Email Etiquettes

L16: How well do we use the opportunities?

L17: Inconsistency heuristic at work

L18: Me and my overconfidence

  1. L19: Release without my approval?

L20: Heuristic vs Oracle

  1. L21: All it took was one remark

L22: Jack of multiple topics, master of none

  1. L23: Customer facing feature - did not test

L24: Everyone is on leave

L25: Silly mistakes - huge impact

  1. L26: Missed NLQ

L27: Stubborn towards automation and programming

  1. L28: Lied to do a course

L29: Dropped ownership mid way

L30: It came down to 5000 INR

L31: I am your mentor :)

  1. L32: Let us stop testing

L33: One man army

  1. L34: Touch me not - tell me not

L35: My way or the highway

L36: Health? After testing

  1. L37: Last minute pressure

L38: Missed backups

  1. L39: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

L40: Gained the nickname - Spy

  1. L41: Blind belief - no own research

L42: Under utilised the learning opportunities

  1. L43: Narrow vision - missed understanding the business

L44: Did not focus on money

  1. L45: When the cup overflowed

L46: Burned bridges

  1. L47: Organize your portfolio

L48: Was I passing my work?

  1. L49: Working to impress someone

L50: No career planning

  1. L51: Some more mistakes

Had a solution to a burning problem at the office. It was just in my mind. Someone else acted on it, implemented and got the name

Lost the source code/originals for the books/presentations I did. When I wanted to update the original, create the next version - all I had were the pdf instead of the .doc or .pptx

Every Zappers bug hunting contest - I would promise myself to complete reading the 400 common software errors by Dr. Cem Kaner. For a long time, I did not complete that.

This has the list of mistakes I had noted down in my draft book - "50+ mistakes testers should avoid"

How do I feel after these mistakes?

Appendix I - List of mistakes

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