One Approach to Interviewing Testers: Episode One

Interviewing testers, or anybody really, is a challenging task and it can be expensive to get it wrong. On the other hand, being interviewed, and showing who you are and what you can do is not straight forward either. The interview is generally led by the recruiting company, what they think they are looking for and what questions they think will reveal any valuable insight regarding the candidate’s fit for this context. Pattern recognition tasks, logic puzzles, and other relatively narrow “tests” still seems fairly popular among those few who don’t just go down the “how would you automate filling in this form” route, and It’s all relatively contained so you can time box everything in 10-20 minute sections. Add to this the desire, usually on both parts, to keep things short and “efficient” and it’s easy to start sliding from what you think is “a well considered empirical evidence based decision making process” to something more related to “lottery”.

Continue reading “One Approach to Interviewing Testers: Episode One”

Who defines Testing?

I just read a post by Tony Bruce on making excuses for why a bug was not found until later testing cycles/UAT/Production. Good post, great read, as always. You can find it at dancedwiththetester.blogspot.co.uk

In the last part of the post Tony writes:

I am not a gate keeper, I am an information provider, I have limited time to provide what information I can. I will do my best, the people around me will do their best and sometimes we will not be able to investigate everything.

This reminded me of a matter that has been bugging me a bit for a while; I see a lot of people stating that “Testing is…” and then some definition or list of tasks as if this is the One and Only Truth.

Oh yeah? Is it really? According to whom? Who decides? Continue reading “Who defines Testing?”