Friday 20 July 2012

Win Win


The above tweet went out today, looking for "developers and designers"

Wot, no testers ?

Went to  the site, found a few errors ( one typo and a couple of IE8 problems ) and looked through it.
Seems they didn't just want "developers and designers", they also wanted project managers, system/network administrators, DBAs, and non-profit technical consultants and web strategists

Wot, no testers ?

Non-technical volunteers were also required "to run errands, help with setting up and cleaning up, and everything in between"

Wot, no testers ?

I've signed up

- it's for a good cause, it helps out non-profit organisations
- it will be a good experience of working to put something together quickly

and I can get a chance to show how a tester can be useful to a project.
So maybe next year the Tweet that goes out will be looking for testers as well as the usual suspects...

3 comments:

Rosie Sherry said...

Awesome. I love 'win wins' :)

Too many people/testers just complain about this stuff, great to see you get involved. As a community/testers we need to do more stuff like this - the more we get involved at events, projects, volunteering, etc then the more people will start to understand the value we give.

Anonymous said...

Well done for getting involved! and good luck for changing opinions! :)

I had a similar conversation with one of my collegues who was trying to get developers to sign up for "Dev4Good" - It's an event based in London where developers spend 24 hours creating software for various charities...

On questioning him about what testing gets done during the 24 hours and why they dont have testers come along, he replied: "Not sure how well it'd go down having a tester there. We only have 24 hours or so to design and code the thing..."...!

He did agree that it could be a good idea to have some testers there at the next one though to help test the ideas and requirements, and to help people with what to be thinking about/looking for from a quality perspective.

Rob said...

I did Cleveland GiveCamp this year and it worked out ok. One thing though was that I ended up doing some coding and Wordpress stuff because A. During the initial run up there isn't all that much to QA, so I helped create the templates, helped plan the design, and did some random php. B. Once the site was largely put together I was testing it like crazy right up to the last minute we had. The problem is the teams are small and pressed for time, so anything I found I had to fix myself. What should be said is that I went into the weekend with no web building experience. You learn new things fast when there's that kind of time crunch and you have gotten to know the charity runner and you want to help them so bad.

I guess what I'm saying is that you probably wouldn't be doing a "normal" QA position in that environment.