In this post I will be reflecting on the previous year and in typical 'retro' fashion I will explore what went well, what didn't go so well and will also address some actions I have decided to take going into the new year.
What went well?
Towards the end of 2021 I was promoted to a Senior position and immediately following my promotion I noticed that there are many skills I need to work on in order to do the best job I can in such a position. My time management skills for example had a big shake up as the work load increased. So any event/situation that sparks some reflection I do view as important.
Secondly, 2021 was a year in which I had conducted many interviews with various candidates and got to interact with many ideas. I have changed some of my stances of various activities in the workplace including some prominent testing practices. For example, I used to favour certain opinions such as 'no need for test cases' as a best practice. But I now think it depends on the context. If you are in a company which operates in an industry with many legal aspects and regulations, you might be required to sign those off before even testing - so in examples like this, having test cases is probably a better idea.
Another opinion I held which I challenged, was Testers decide when things are ready to ship. I used to think that though we do get involved from the very beginning, we as Testers are the ones who test the feature against the requirements and then decide whether it should be shipped/merged. However, upon reflection and a few discussions with other testers and colleagues, this should be something done by the person who owns the project, either Project Manager or Product Owner. My view became more apparent with tickets that work as they should when measuring against the acceptance criteria but certain pathways that were not covered, were not working. so in such cases we have tickets where the acceptance criteria is met and working fine, core flows are working fine but funky edge cases after some exploration are causing errors. In my opinion these tickets were not good to go, but our Product Owner disagreed, accepted the risk and asked us to create additional tickets to fix those other errors. At first it was quite a shock, but I now agree as Testers we do not hold such authority - which is actually a good thing in my opinion.
Lastly, I also realised the true importance of context both in testing and with anything in general, before populating opinions or drafting actions. To summarise, 2021 was a year of true reflection in regards to my career, what I am doing and where I want to go. Though these are questions I often ask myself I feel like last year things began to get a lot more clearer for me.
What didn't go well?
As you can probably tell by the nature of the content in the cards above, all of those cards could be down to one factor which is time management. I've didn't mind working from home when the pandemic first happened. It's definitely the more safer thing to do in my opinion but after having my second child it can get quite difficult just juggling everything in general. I'm still adapting. I noticed my passions and activities shifted and my life revolves around my kids now. Parents will probably relate to this more but it seems like my life has taken a big shift away from what I once felt were REALLY important. Now they are just about important. I think due to this shift I haven't put as much effort into self-learning, and when I have done I just get side tracked with more life stuff. I set myself quarterly objectives all last year but didn't achieve a single one and I didn't want to beat myself up about it either. I do however think that I really need to develop my task/time management as well as develop habits as opposed to doing things in the spur of the moment when some inspiration comes. All work in progress.
Actions
So far the only action I have come up with, which is realistic and achievable is to draft my blog posts before writing them up in the hope that this blog will at some point benefit as I really want to give back. I have taken on an 'apprentice' outside of work, who wants a change of career and I think rehashing a lot of the stuff they have to learn will serve as motivation for some new posts.
So I go into 2022 not on a high, but feeling pretty good about the year to come and I'm glad I was able to reflect on where I can make improvements moving forward.
I'd like to just use the rest of this post to thank the amazing testing community. Though I may not speak with you all regularly I get immense inspiration when I go through my LinkedIn and Twitter feeds.
Thank you all, and I wish you all the success in 2022 and the coming years!
James
