Being the only tester on the team has both pros and cons. A lot of times you feel frustrated and lonely. But there's a positive side to it too.

It took me few years to look from this perspective of being a solo tester on the team.

An opportunity to coach and mentor the team

When I'm the only tester on the team I try to make sure I don't become the bottleneck by holding all the testing knowledge and just me doing all the testing.

I help the team by coaching, guiding and mentoring so the whole team quality mindset by sharing the testing knowledge and advocating for quality. I get to build the process and testing practices.

I get to teach by mentoring the developers who are interested to learn different techniques(and ofcourse they would apply their own critical thinking style) around testing which helps me think about different styles of teaching.

Influencing the team

I constantly work on improving the overall quality of the product which means trying out different tools, approaches and sometimes different experimentation is needed.

I just cannot tell the team to do it, I need to influence the team to join the journey to follow different processes and experiments. And to do this I need to build trust, build allies and build the network.

Drive the team

Whole team owns the quality but there needs to be someone who drives the team. I just don't get to advocate for improvements on process and delivery but I get to drive the team to implement those.

What are the things that you like being a tester on the team? Share in the comments!