Among the track sessions that I attended at EuroSTAR on Wednesday, the real stand-out session for me was Alex Rotaru’s talk about changing testers’ mindsets. Alex was telling an inspirational story about the creation of Altom and the part he played in founding a successful nationwide testing community in Romania.
Alex began his talk, “Changing Mindsets – Learn, Test, Lead [By Example]”, with some background about how he co-founded Altom, where he travels the world (often on a consultancy basis) to solve testing problems, which allows him to discover what testers and businesses each believe about testing.
I agreed with pretty much all of Alex’s profile of a “typical tester”. Testers have often fallen into the profession by chance; they will often hold a base testing qualification such as the ISTQB Foundation course; and they generally don’t have skills in coding, understanding software architecture, or even critical thinking. They’re also generally not heavy readers, struggling to name their favourite testing books or blogs. (Note that this is a very generalistic profile – the same profile wouldn’t be true of conference attendees, who are already showing a commitment to improving their craft.)
On the other side, the management-level view of testing tends to be very different! Common misconceptions which I’ve heard echoed elsewhere are: Anyone can test, Testers are just failed developers, Testers are cheaper than developers, Certified testers are better than uncertified testers, and 100% test automation is an achievable and worthwhile goal.
As a result, good engineers don’t want to become testers, and good testers are being demotivated and may leave if they feel that their work is being devalued.
Alex’s lightbulb moment came when he had to became a testing service provider, and it was in Altom’s best interest for him to be proficient at explaining and defining their testing services, how they deliver value to customers, and how their testers continue to learn and adapt to new industry developments. In particular, this reinforced the notion of continuous learning, which the best testers need to foster in order to advance their careers – or even just to stay on the same level!
This learning has to be at a manageable pace. Every individual learns at their own rhythm, and it’s important to let individuals find their own cadence, whilst avoiding being overly critical or judgemental. One of the ways that learning can be enacted at a gradual rate is by having an active community (both inside and outside the workplace) with which to interact, and this is something that Romania lacked for a long time.
So, in the second half of the presentation, Alex spoke about how, in 2011, he co-founded Tabara de testare, a new Romanian software testing community. At its first national meetup, there were 30 attendees, but within three years this had grown to over 1000 subscribed members in four chapters spread across the country (Bucharest, Cluj, Iași and Timișoara). The sustained growth is incredible, and is a testament to the organisers’ passion and commitment.
There was some reluctance within Romanian organisations about allowing their testers to attend meetups, for fear of them getting poached by other companies, and sponsorship (with its corresponding recruitment messages) is a challenge for meetups throughout Europe, as we discussed in the room. For instance, Alex was adamant that although food is a great social stimulant for conversation, TDT doesn’t like to have sponsors paying for that food – generally, attendees will go for food/drink after a meetup, but they will pay for it themselves, helping to remove that unease from test managers.
Dispersing the group across four sites also introduced its own challenges. (“We decentralised too soon,” Alex mused.) Each group had its own identity, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but they would also often push conflicting ideas. This problem was solved thanks to a “Weekend Retreat” for facilitators, where the leaders of each region refocused their efforts, and now there are recurring monthly online chats to keep the single-identity feel going.
Another challenge (which I’ve also experienced within testing groups in the UK, and in my work with Weekend Testing Europe) is sustaining attendee numbers, interest and involvement. Alexandru gave the example of the TDT EuroSTAR competition, a contest which only four of their 1000 members entered.
The session concluded with a key question: Why would others see my role as a profession if I don’t take my job as seriously as possible? This was a strong point to finish on, and resulted in a lot of post-session buzz in the corridors as the session attendees discussed how they might be able to implement similar changes in their own lives. Of all the sessions I’ve seen so far, I think Alexandru’s sent people away with the widest range of topics to think about.
