A few weeks ago, in   A Good Tester is All Over the Place , Joep Schuurkes described a model of testing work based on three axes:      do testing yourself or support testing by others    be embedded in a team or be part of a separate team    do your job or improve the system   It resonated with me and the other testers I shared it with at work, and it resurfaced in my mind while I was reflecting on some of the   tasks I've picked up recently and what they have involved, at least in the way   I've chosen to address them. Here's three examples:   Documentation Generation    We have an internal tool that generates documentation in Confluence by extracting and combining images and text from a handful of sources.   Although useful, it ran very slowly or not at all so one of the developers performed major surgery on it.     Up to that point, I had never taken much interest in the tool and I could   have safely ignored this piece of work too because it would have been tested   by ...