Let's take a look at what makes the worst testers SUCK!
How's that going to help Vern?! Well, if we understand what makes them so ineffective, we'll know what not to do! Plus, it might be fun!
Let's go!
TIP #1: Focus on the least important features 📉
Quantity beats quality (pun intended)!
The best testers find the most bugs. The fastest and most straightforward approach is to ignore those deeply buried, hard-to-discover emergent bugs and focus on the surface-level simple ones instead! Typically that means ignoring the features that make your company the most money (they're usually in pretty good shape) and focusing on things nobody cares about.
Remember, more is moar!
TIP #2: Ignore your peers 🙉
It's everyone for themselves!
There is little to no value in listening to your teammates:
The programmers? They're just trying to remove all the bugs you're rewarded for finding!
The PO? They're trying to prevent you from finding all those "shooting fish in a barrel" bugs!
The designers? They're just trying to make everything look pretty before you start working!
The other testers? They're just trying to beat you to find all those juicy bugs!
Be smart and keep yourself to yourself.
TIP #3: Don't look under the hood 🙈
Ignorance is bliss!
It's not implemented yet? It doesn't matter! Log that shit! It's logically not possible because of the architecture? Test that shit anyway! It's faster to test beneath the GUI? A likely story from your scammy dev teammates! Click, press and type away to your heart's content!
If it's not in the GUI, it's not important.
TIP #4: Document in triplicate ✍🏾
Some things are too important not to write down.
And I do mean write! No diagrams or visuals and talking is a no-no. Text only folks! If you don't, nobody will know:
How many step-by-step, field-by-field, action-by-action test cases you've thought of!
How many step-by-step, field-by-field, action-by-action test cases you've executed!
How many bugs you've logged!
Bonus points if you can do so in a tool that nobody else but the testers will ever visit because then you get to generate reports to send to everyone! WIN!
TIP #5: Be the quality police 👮🏻♂️
You! Shall not! PASS!
Remember, nobody cares as much about the quality of the product as you do. You will face a lot of pressure to release. Devs will claim the bugs you've logged are totally out of scope. The designers will complain that it wasn't supposed to work on BlackBerry or IE6. And the POs are the worst! Just because our least-used feature kind of works and has a workaround, it's unacceptable!
If you don't worry about the users, who will?!
What did I miss?
These are the most egregious ones I could think of, but can you come up with any more?
Let me know!