Inside you are two wolves
Let me jump on a trend for once, yeah? For some reason, I'm seeing the "two wolves" meme making a comeback over on Mastodon, which is admittedly pretty niche as far as social media platforms go. But it made me think!
It made me realise that software testers live with these two wolves inside them, and I think one of the painful realities of being in this profession is that you can never resolve these two wolves.
Working as a tester means living with permanent cognitive dissonance. Let me explain.
Developers are hired to build the product, but as a tester, you are hired to critique the product. To find problems.
However, when your main task is to find problems, that might not feel so nice. It can feel negative (some people at work call testers negative), like you are not truly working on the product because you are not building like a developer.
What if you also want to feel like you are part of building the product, like the developers? Well, you are! But not in the way that might feel like you are.
Testers find problems because we want to make the product better. We do this in a risk based manner, we don't go out and critique the product just for the heck of it. This is a very important part of creating good software!
Important business decisions can be made based on the problems that testing has uncovered, and this is an indispensable step in making good software.
But for some reason, many testers feel uncomfortable when they're "only" finding problems, and thus branch out into other tasks in software development, thereby muddying their value as a tester. Like peanut butter that you spread too thin over a large slice of bread.
For some reason, the industry encourages this behaviour. Being "only" a tester is widely looked down upon, like it's a second rate job that anyone can do. Testing is dead, testers aren't needed, bla bla bla. I've heard it all.
I've written about this before, but I've also gone through this cycle of self-doubt. And, I've come out of the other side, fully confident that I can be very valuable to any software project in the tester role.
Maaike Brinkhof
If you cannot feel okay with having "finding problems" as your main mission without feeling highly uncomfortable, you should really figure out if the testing profession is the right profession for you.
Or, try this: fully embrace the tester role and show people what we can do.
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