Last week, I tweeted a remark:
The irony was that after 1.5 years at my current company I did a teaching women Java thing, and that was something people were excited about to an extent that they wrote about it (interviewing me) for the company blog. Meanwhile, I do 30 talks on testing/agile, most international, a year and none of that has crossed the news bar.
I talked further to many colleagues in testing, and came to the conclusion that we are in an interesting situation where our profession is very valued within teams, where a lot of managers are "helping us grow" by pushing more automation even by force and anyone outside the teams have increasingly skewed perceptions of what we do, and why.
We are like air we breathe. Invisible. As soon as it is lost, we notice. And we lost some of our testing very recently so now we are noticing.
This all leads me to think of being the change I want to see. So instead of dwelling in my frustration of irony, I took the observation and promoted the other things I do. The amount of empathy and understanding sharing my frustration has been overwhelming. And the constructive actions of wanting to hear more, wanting to share more equally and learn about this stuff has been delightful.
We who see what testing is, appreciate it, need to talk about it more. We need to help others see and remember the invisible. Every single tester shares their part of promoting. Some of us get our voices heard just a little further, but our common voice is stronger than any individual's.
There is a lot of irony in being ignored in one's organization while doing keynotes around the world on #testing but ending up in public promos as soon as #programming is involved. Thinking while #testing is my superpower and you celebrate auxiliary skills.— Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp) April 5, 2018
The irony was that after 1.5 years at my current company I did a teaching women Java thing, and that was something people were excited about to an extent that they wrote about it (interviewing me) for the company blog. Meanwhile, I do 30 talks on testing/agile, most international, a year and none of that has crossed the news bar.
I talked further to many colleagues in testing, and came to the conclusion that we are in an interesting situation where our profession is very valued within teams, where a lot of managers are "helping us grow" by pushing more automation even by force and anyone outside the teams have increasingly skewed perceptions of what we do, and why.
We are like air we breathe. Invisible. As soon as it is lost, we notice. And we lost some of our testing very recently so now we are noticing.
This all leads me to think of being the change I want to see. So instead of dwelling in my frustration of irony, I took the observation and promoted the other things I do. The amount of empathy and understanding sharing my frustration has been overwhelming. And the constructive actions of wanting to hear more, wanting to share more equally and learn about this stuff has been delightful.
We who see what testing is, appreciate it, need to talk about it more. We need to help others see and remember the invisible. Every single tester shares their part of promoting. Some of us get our voices heard just a little further, but our common voice is stronger than any individual's.
