Improvement through practice

In music, the better you are at the basics, the better you are on the bandstand. Even the pro musicians I know practice almost every day. I think testers (and developers) forget the value of practice too often.

In The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler suggests doing the exercises on CodeKata. I checked them out, and sure enough, the Kata are great, and I plan to start working through them. A few years ago, I solved a bunch of problems on project euler as an exercise to keep myself sharp.

As a tester, it’s sometimes hard not to practice. As I interact with software, I often ask myself “what if” …then I try it and see what happens. But this is only “sort of” testing – it’s my tester DNA seeping out into my every day life.

I’ve been thinking about other ways to practice testing. I’m a member of uTest, but I haven’t taken the time to test anything. I suppose I could volunteer to test a non-profit’s web site or find a product I like to seriously beta-test – or I suppose I could look into volunteering a few hours a week in a MS product group.

How else do you practice testing?

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2009
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  September 04, 2009
  The comment has been removed