"There's a hole in my soul"

Late last year our family went to see Bastille at the Cedar Park Event center.  As I started thinking about this post, I thought of their song "Flaws".  The title of this post is one of the lyrics.  I am finding recently that there is a hole in the soul of software testing.

I have conducted numerous job interviews for software testing candidates.  One of my common questions is "What testing books have you read?" or "What testing blogs do you follow?".  It pains me to say, but very few of the candidates have an answer.

"Are you familiar with Context-Driven School of software testing or Session Based Test Management?"  I am constantly surprised that the answer is NO.

"I see you have listed Selenium and Cucumber on your resume, please tell me about those tools."  And I get extremely vague answers, "my team uses those tools".

So the moral of this story is quite simple.  If you want to be a great Software Tester, Quality Engineer, QA Engineer, SDET, or  another career title in the field of software testing, you had better start paying attention to your craft.

There are tons of brilliant people out in the Software industry fighting to move testing forward through innovation and conversation.  Please join the conversation.

If you are going to put a term on your resume, you had better damn well know something about the term.

Please read a book or two on you craft.  There are plenty of great books available.

I participated in a discussion lead by Matt Heusser in Dallas a few years back at Software Professionals conference.  The debate was centered around, "Is Software Testing a Career".

"Hell yes!", Software testing is a career so help foster your career by participating in the industry.

Software testing rocks; however, "There's a hole in my soul, Can you fill it? Can you fill it?"