I've spoken to a couple of friends recently about testers they know who continually express a desire to "learn automation" and continually fail to begin learning anything at all. A common behaviour is to find something that blocks the goal. For one friend, the testers wanted a course on automation and ring-fenced time each week to work on it. Without those, they said, it was obvious that no learning could happen. For the other friend, an interesting natural experiment had taken place. There had been a couple of weeks at his place where the wiki, task management system, and source control service had been unavailable. Staff who usually complained about not having time to study anything because they were too busy moving an endless stream of tickets across boards were told to spend that time on self-learning. Do you think they mostly did? No need to answer. I can empathise. From a standing start a distant goal can look very intimidating. Of course putting off starting does...
We are generally not the target users of the software products we work on. That's not to say we never use our applications or that we have no interest in those who do, but mostly we rely on feedback from elsewhere to tell us whether needs are being met. Sure, as testers we'll interact with the software and maybe even consider ourselves to be a proxy for users. Yes, we'll probably have people in product and business roles translating, or inventing, customer requirements for us. And, yes, perhaps we'll even dogfood the stuff we build sometimes, to some extent. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked developers whether they ran the software after their changes and been told that the tests pass. I've lost count of the number of colleagues I've had who work on a service and have little or no idea what clients it has and what kinds of tasks their users are trying to complete or why. I've lost count of the number of times I've been in argume...