Are Good Test Engineers:Born or Developed?

connie

原文链接：http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/3092

Submitted by Ainars Galvans on Tue,20/12/2005

This time I want to share a little bit of my childhood with you. But be prepared to read how I make parallels from childhood experience with most of the recently popular themes for postings, such as methodologies or certification values.
I was so exited about this writing that I post it here yet hot – just finished writing and not even reviewed it myself: I apologies for style and language that may need so improvement.

Best tester sees testing as a role, not a skill. Most exciting role.
Although I value skills a lot just as new agile methodologies does, I still believe there are something very strange about professional tester. One who love this job. I’ve seen a lot of good test engineers that are doing their job well, but actually want to become a developer. Or person who was once a developer but converted to tester due to different reasons. I myself was a developer once, but I love to be tester now. How many of us find tester to be the most exciting profession?

I believe that there is something about character that makes him love this profession. It is not technical stuff. Even more this is not the testing itself that I like most. There is something wider.

When I ask my students to write a story about a person who is potentially a good tester they mostly recall persons who like to examine staff a lot, e.g. first toys and later stuff like phones, TV-Sets, etc. Or at least break them. I evaluate positive, but I know I am not such a person myself. Even more I believe this is characteristics of developer type person, not a tester – to want to understand how this is working technically. There is something else about testers.

Developer is not the career if you want to stand out of crowd

Perhaps this is a willingness to stand out of crowd that makes you love testing (or am I arrogant?). To stand out of crowd and be afraid of being misunderstood or even attacked. I saw James Back saying “Everybody against me. Par to me loves that. My favorite literary character is Cyrano De Bergerac…“
But I wanted to talk about myself. So I will start with the childhood when a lot of my classmates went to ice-hockey trainings but my mother insisted I do practice dancing. I like dancing all my life, still that was not the choice I preferred because any friend of my choose ice-hockey. Probably this is thanks to my mom that I’m a tester now as she helped me to understand that dancing is what I WANT, while ice-hockey is what the everyone wants. Later In the secondary school I started to participate math classes at the university and got a lot of prizes in Latvia and even International Mathematic Olympiads ’91 and ‘ 92 (not the first places of course, sill above average). That’s again was poorly recognized by my classmates who was playing and partying while I spent hours solving mathematical problems. Still the reward was also great, but let me skip the reward.
I will not skip to computer games that I was once addicted to and still love to play time-to-time. My favorite was strategic games like first WarCraft and Command&Conquer , later StarCraft, RedAlert, WarHammer4K, etc. The first games had no a big choice of what type of army to command, while Warcraft 3 and WarHammer have idea of 3-4 different races to choose. Guess what? I have always choose the one referred to as the weakest by my friends. Games are balanced enough nowadays, so it is always possible to with win any race if only your playing is excellent.

Games could teach much. And they are not evidence of childhood

I like to play chess. But I hate to play chess master (against computer), because my main strategy is to think the moves that enemy is less aware of, the move he would never imagine me to do. That strikes his morale and gives me the bonus not recognized by most of players. This does not work against computer who is aware of my any, even most dumb move. That how they play – just calculate any possible move.
I love bridge (this is a card game that 2 teams by 2 players plays each other). Computer don’t play this game too good yet.
Playing games does not mean I’m still a child. The games changes with a time. I don’t play with toys any more, don’t even play monopoly.

I don't see agile as something brand new either abstract (agile itself) or exact (XP). I see it as a vector of acceleration of an industry. I don't agree we should just remove to trash waterfall, specifications, architecture, CMM, IEEE and a lot of good stuff just because we are bored of it. Agile is a new toy for the industry that is still in age of a baby-child. The games we play are still the same or they become more complex? I would even say industry is learning the language to speak. More over it is learning how to make sentences out of words and find that context on the sentence change meaning of the word. That’s why context-driven ideas are so popular.

Don’t blindly believe in written (guidelines, standards).

There was times when Latvia was a part of Soviet Union. It was my childhood – I was in a school when perestroika and glasnost (reorganization and liberty) started thanks to Gorbachov who wanted to avoid economic and politic catastrophes due to stagnating situation the S.U. was into due to way communist party led the country. That was times of great changes. Teachers who yesterday told us Lenin is “semi-god”, world-communism is unavoidable, today say that Latvia should be independent, Stalin is probably not any better than Hitler, etc. Do they (teachers) suppose I’m going to listen to them when they tell me today just the opposite to what they told yesterday? That was the big lesson to me not to believe anything told or written, only experienced. One of my favorite TV channels are Discovery Civilization. I don’t blindly believe when they tell what they think the history was just because there was a single manuscript saying so, that is somehow translated by cryptographs… And still I like to see this all, just as I like to read fantasy books.
By the way they also told us yesterday that capitalism is bad for poor labors who are working overtime and are still hungry, well it turned out they was right about over-time, but talking about salary… that why U.S. and Europe outsource to Latvia and other former S.U. countries.


Knowledge VS experience. You can’t evaluate.
I now move forward to time what I was at University. While my family was unable to support me I was working in parallel to university – DB programming, in Paradox/PAL, few hours a day, few more using the computer to do university home-works. I remember I got the worst marks in course about databases and development life-cycles as I argued against waterfall (today I could proudly say I valued agile ideas already 10 years back). Those were two courses where I tried to use my experience as replacement for theory and failed. While other courses, such as applied cryptography I got 10, although I only know the name LDAP, but never configured any security provider. My best university experience was in the course where we learned Assembler language. There was a choice to either get the mark automatically calculated based on works at the class or get a written exam. Exam was two problems to be solved by writing code on the paper (not on the computer). I chose the exam and got 10 because I had real experience with assembler, but work at class was not directly related to writing the code (don’t remember what exactly it was).
I learned don’t value the marks that I got in university. And I could say today that I expand this to certifications: both personal (ISTQB, brainbench) and company (ISO, CMM). And still I value the persons who have got Bachelor degree just as I did for their “persistence” and purposefulness. If we add time sacrifice then this is all that is evaluated by certificates, not skills/ability and not even knowledge.

阿布虎

Thanks for sharing.

brilliantking

Are Good Test Engineers:Born or Developed?
好的测试工程师是天生的还是后天锻炼的？

This time I want to share a little bit of my childhood with you. But be prepared to read how I make parallels from childhood experience with most of the recently popular themes for postings, such as methodologies or certification values.
现在我想和大家分享我儿时的一点经历。但请注意我是怎样拿童年经历来比照最近帖的大多数比较流行的话题，比如测试思路又比如认证的价值。

I was so excited about this writing that I post it here yet hot – just finished writing and not even reviewed it myself: I apologies for style and language that may need so improvement.
由于对自己的这篇东西太有兴致了，我一写出来，还没亲自校一下稿就急匆匆地贴出来了。我为里面的一些有待修改的用词和语言问题向各位道歉。

Best tester sees testing as a role, not a skill. Most exciting role.
优秀的测试人员视测试工作为角色，而非技能。最刺激的角色。

Although I value skills a lot just as new agile methodologies does, I still believe there are something very strange about professional tester. One who love this job. I’ve seen a lot of good test engineers that are doing their job well, but actually want to become a developer. Or person who was once a developer but converted to tester due to different reasons. I myself was a developer once, but I love to be tester now. How many of us find tester to be the most exciting profession?
尽管我把技能看得和新提出的agile方法一样重要，但我仍然相信对于专业测试人员（热爱测试工作的人）来说，会遇到许多非常奇怪的事情。我看到许多能干的测试工程师能做好本职工作，但实际上想里想着能成为开发员。我也看到因为各种原因，以前做开发而现在搞测试的人。我本人以前也是一个开发人员，但我现在喜欢做一名测试人员。我们中有多少人觉得测试是最刺激的一项职业呢？

believe that there is something about character that makes him love this profession. It is not technical stuff. Even more this is not the testing itself that I like most. There is something wider.
相信每个人都有使自己喜欢上这个职业的性格因素。这不是技术上的原因，甚至可以说不是我最喜欢的测试工作本身。喜欢测试的原因要更宽一些。

When I ask my students to write a story about a person who is potentially a good tester they mostly recall persons who like to examine staff a lot, e.g. first toys and later stuff like phones, TV-Sets, etc. Or at least break them. I evaluate positive, but I know I am not such a person myself. Even more I believe this is characteristics of developer type person, not a tester – to want to understand how this is working technically. There is something else about testers.
我让学生们写一个人，他天生就是当测试员的料儿。学生们大多这样的人，他们喜欢摆弄东西，小时候是各种玩具，长大后是像电话，电视机等的大物件。或写的人至少喜欢拆东西。我积极评价他们写的东西，但我知道我不是他们所写的那样的人。我甚至觉得他们所写的不是测试人员的特征，而是开发人员的本性－－想弄懂某件东西的工作原理。测试人员具备的是其他方面的特征。

Developer is not the career if you want to stand out of crowd
如果你想出类拔萃，做开发不是你要的职业。

Perhaps this is a willingness to stand out of crowd that makes you love testing (or am I arrogant?). To stand out of crowd and be afraid of being misunderstood or even attacked. I saw James Back saying “Everybody against me. Par to me loves that. My favorite literary character is Cyrano De Bergerac…“
有可能正是一种想出类拔萃的愿望驱使你喜欢测试（或者是我臆断了？）想出类拔萃却又害怕被误解甚至被攻击。我见James Back如是说“每一个人都反对我。却都和我一样喜欢他。我最喜欢的文学人物是Cyrano De Bergerac（大鼻子情圣）”。

But I wanted to talk about myself. So I will start with the childhood when a lot of my classmates went to ice-hockey trainings but my mother insisted I do practice dancing. I like dancing all my life, still that was not the choice I preferred because any friend of my choose ice-hockey. Probably this is thanks to my mom that I’m a tester now as she helped me to understand that dancing is what I WANT, while ice-hockey is what the everyone wants. Later In the secondary school I started to participate math classes at the university and got a lot of prizes in Latvia and even International Mathematic Olympiads ’91 and ‘ 92 (not the first places of course, sill above average). That’s again was poorly recognized by my classmates who was playing and partying while I spent hours solving mathematical problems. Still the reward was also great, but let me skip the reward.
但是我想说说我自己。我想从我儿时说起，那时候我们班里的很多人去参加冰上曲棍球的培训，我的妈妈却坚持要求我练习跳舞。我这一辈子都喜欢跳舞，却不是我最喜欢的，因为我的朋友都选择去打冰上曲棍球了。也许我现在成为一名测试员要感谢我的妈妈，因为她帮助我认识到跳舞是我喜欢的，而冰上曲棍球是大家喜欢的。以后到了中学，我开始参加大学里的数学班，还获得了拉脱维亚国内数学竞赛的很多奖项，甚至还有’91 和 ‘ 92国际数学奥匹克的奖（当然都不是第一名，只是中等偏上）。这些成绩又被我的同学们不屑一顾。当我花时间做数学题的时候他们都在玩都在聚会。尽管这些成绩值得一提，但我还是打住吧。


I will not skip to computer games that I was once addicted to and still love to play time-to-time. My favorite was strategic games like first WarCraft and Command&Conquer , later StarCraft, RedAlert, WarHammer4K, etc. The first games had no a big choice of what type of army to command, while Warcraft 3 and WarHammer have idea of 3-4 different races to choose. Guess what? I have always choose the one referred to as the weakest by my friends. Games are balanced enough nowadays, so it is always possible to with win any race if only your playing is excellent.
我不得不说说电脑游戏。我曾经玩得上瘾了，现在还喜欢经常玩。我最喜欢玩即时战略游戏，像早期的战争机器，命令与征服，后来的星际，红警，战争之锤4K，等等。早期的游戏不提供大的自由来让你选择指挥什么类型的军队，尽管战争机器3和战争之锤有3至4种不同的种族供你选择。猜猜为什么？我总是根据我朋友最弱的地方选择种族。现在的游戏中各种族的力量很均衡，所以只有你玩的技术非常市高超，你才能总有可能胜过其他任何一族。

Games could teach much. And they are not evidence of childhood
游戏可以教我们很多东西，而且游戏不是仅仅童年时代才有的特征。

I like to play chess. But I hate to play chess master (against computer), because my main strategy is to think the moves that enemy is less aware of, the move he would never imagine me to do. That strikes his morale and gives me the bonus not recognized by most of players. This does not work against computer who is aware of my any, even most dumb move. That how they play – just calculate any possible move.
我喜欢下棋。不过我不喜欢跟大师下棋（跟电脑下），因为我下棋的策略是使用对手很少注意的招数。这样就可以挫败对手的士气，并给自己鼓劲。这是大多数棋手所不认同的策略。这种策略在和电脑下棋时就不奏效了。电脑可以算到我的任何一步移动，甚至是非常没用的移动。电脑下棋的策略就是计算任何一步移动。

I love bridge (this is a card game that 2 teams by 2 players plays each other). Computer don’t play this game too good yet.
我喜欢玩桥牌（一种纸牌游戏，玩家分两组，每组两人）。电脑玩这游戏玩得还不是太好。

Playing games does not mean I’m still a child. The games changes with a time. I don’t play with toys any more, don’t even play monopoly.
玩游戏并不是说我还是个小孩。玩的游戏会随着时间而变化。我现在不再玩玩具了，甚至不再单独玩游戏了。

I don't see agile as something brand new either abstract (agile itself) or exact (XP). I see it as a vector of acceleration of an industry. I don't agree we should just remove to trash waterfall, specifications, architecture, CMM, IEEE and a lot of good stuff just because we are bored of it. Agile is a new toy for the industry that is still in age of a baby-child. The games we play are still the same or they become more complex? I would even say industry is learning the language to speak. More over it is learning how to make sentences out of words and find that context on the sentence change meaning of the word. That’s why context-driven ideas are so popular.
无论是抽象而言（agile本身），还是具体而言（XP），我并不把agile当作一个新的产品。我把它看作是软件业的一种加速器。我并不认同仅仅是因为我们烦了就要除去瀑布模型，规格设计，系统构架，CMM，IEEE，还有一大堆的好东西。Agile对尚在襁褓中的软件业来说是一个新的玩具。我们所玩的游戏还是一个样的，或者变得更复杂了？我特别想说软件业这个婴儿正在学习说话。更进一步讲，这个婴儿正在学习怎样组词造句，并且发现句子所处的上下文环境会改变句中词的意思。这就是为什么现在环境驱动的思想这样的流行。

[ 本帖最后由 brilliantking 于 2006-4-24 17:55 编辑 ]

brilliantking

Don’t blindly believe in written (guidelines, standards).
不要盲目地相信纸上的东西（比如指南，比如标准）。

There was times when Latvia was a part of Soviet Union. It was my childhood – I was in a school when perestroika and glasnost (reorganization and liberty) started thanks to Gorbachov who wanted to avoid economic and politic catastrophes due to stagnating situation the S.U. was into due to way communist party led the country. That was times of great changes. Teachers who yesterday told us Lenin is “semi-god”, world-communism is unavoidable, today say that Latvia should be independent, Stalin is probably not any better than Hitler, etc. Do they (teachers) suppose I’m going to listen to them when they tell me today just the opposite to what they told yesterday? That was the big lesson to me not to believe anything told or written, only experienced. One of my favorite TV channels are Discovery Civilization. I don’t blindly believe when they tell what they think the history was just because there was a single manuscript saying so, that is somehow translated by cryptographs… And still I like to see this all, just as I like to read fantasy books.
拉脱维亚还是苏联一部份的时代正是我的孩童时代。我正在上学的时候，由于共产党的领导，苏联进入了发展停滞的时期，为了避免由此导致的经济和下政治危机，戈尔巴乔夫开始进行改革，公开权力（重组政权及自由化改革）。那是巨变频发的时代。老师们昨天还告诉我说列宁是半个神，世界共产主义是不可避免的，今天却说拉脱维亚应该独立，斯大林比希特勒好不到哪儿去，等等。当他们昨天今天说着截然相反的观点时，他们是否假设我要去听他们？这就是给我的一个大教训：不能相信任何听来的或纸上的东西，只能相信亲身体验的。一个我最喜欢的电视节目是文明发现。我不会盲目地相信节目里说的历史的样子，因为只有一本书是这样说的，而且还是用某种语记载过的。我仍然喜欢看这个节目，就像我喜欢看科幻图书一样。

By the way they also told us yesterday that capitalism is bad for poor labors who are working overtime and are still hungry, well it turned out they was right about over-time, but talking about salary… that why U.S. and Europe outsource to Latvia and other former S.U. countries.
同样，书上昨天还说资本主义对那些成天超时劳动仍然忍饥挨饿的工人来说是罪恶的而现在却说工作超时是对的，但是谈到薪水……这就是美国和欧洲为什么要向拉脱维亚还有其他前苏联国家输入劳动力吧。
Knowledge VS experience. You can’t evaluate.
知识对经验。难分优劣。

I now move forward to time what I was at University. While my family was unable to support me I was working in parallel to university – DB programming, in Paradox/PAL, few hours a day, few more using the computer to do university home-works. I remember I got the worst marks in course about databases and development life-cycles as I argued against waterfall (today I could proudly say I valued agile ideas already 10 years back). Those were two courses where I tried to use my experience as replacement for theory and failed. While other courses, such as applied cryptography I got 10, although I only know the name LDAP, but never configured any security provider. My best university experience was in the course where we learned Assembler language. There was a choice to either get the mark automatically calculated based on works at the class or get a written exam. Exam was two problems to be solved by writing code on the paper (not on the computer). I chose the exam and got 10 because I had real experience with assembler, but work at class was not directly related to writing the code (don’t remember what exactly it was).
我现在要谈谈我的大学时代。当我的家庭无力供我读书的时候，我就开始打工了。我在 Paradox/PAL做数据库编程工作。一天只几个小时，很少用电脑去做大学里的家庭作业。我记得我的数据库和生命周期开发的课程得了最差的分数，因为我不认同瀑布模型（今天我可以骄傲地说10年前我就对agile构想评价很高）。有两门课程，我在课里试图用我的经验来代替理论，结果失败了。而其他的课程，像应用密码学我得了满分10分，尽管我只知道LDAP的名字，但从未设置任何安全供应商。我在大学里最好的经验来源于汇编语言课程。这门课有两种方法得到成绩：一种是根据课上的作业自动核算出成绩，另一种是通过笔试取得成绩。笔试的内容是在纸上（不是在电脑里）写代码来解决两个问题。我选择了考试并且取得了10分。因为我有汇编编程的实战经验，而课堂作业却与写代码无关（我不记得课堂作业到底是什么了）。

I learned don’t value the marks that I got in university. And I could say today that I expand this to certifications: both personal (ISTQB, brainbench) and company (ISO, CMM). And still I value the persons who have got Bachelor degree just as I did for their “persistence” and purposefulness. If we add time sacrifice then this is all that is evaluated by certificates, not skills/ability and not even knowledge.
我学到不能评价在学校里得到的成绩。我想说今天我要把这个道理用到认证上，不管是个人的（ISTQB，brainbench），还是公司认证（ISO，CMM）。我依然赞赏那些像我所做的那样取得学士学位的人，为他们的“矢志不渝”，目标明确。如果加上时间方面的代价，那么这就是认证所应肯定的所有的东西，不是技能/能力，甚至也不是知识。

brilliantking

花了5个多小时，终于译完了。译得太匆忙了，里面肯定有很多不当的地方。请各位朋友批评指正啊！

skinapi

翻译的不错，加分鼓励,呵呵。

李逍遥

感谢!

zuojingqin

是的呀,谢谢了!@@@@

lix7411

ice-hockey 可直接译为“冰球”。

aliahua

感谢大家给我这样学习专业测试文献的机会！

kevintest

翻译的不错，谢谢分享

caiweiboyi

也翻译

Joan2005

有空看