The guilt of the stopping plates

I believe that Testers can be involved in the development process in a miriad of ways. But does this cause me to feel guilty sometimes? Wait, this might not make any sense. Let me explain.

Testing for me can be a whole host of tasks. For instance I enjoy doing exploratory testing and I can sometimes find some pleasure in running prescribed regression tests. I love getting involved in the early discussions of a piece of work and I understand the importance of supporting a feature going live. Investigating issues in the software, whether that is preshipping or in live, can also be a great thrill.

I've worked on teams when I've been involved with looking at the monitoring and I understand the benefits of engaging with customer feedback. I've written integration automation tests at multiple different levels of the software stack and I can frequently be found advocating for good build pipelines.

Whilst I am talking about advocating for things, I believe that testability is everyones responsibility because it benefits everyone when it is done well. I've dabbled with contract tests and I think performance testing is important too. Which leads us on to security and privacy, which I wish I spent more time on.

Above I've listed at least 15 separate elements of testing, and I'm sure if I sat for long enough I could come up with 15 more. That is a dangerously large number of plates to keep spinning at once. Try visualising keeping that many plates spinning. See, it's foolish right?

But I think all those things above are really important, I think that if I didn't at least think about them I'd be a bad tester. In fact, it's disingenuous to speak about that as a hypothetical. It's not that I imagine I would consider myself a bad tester if I dropped any of the plates. I know for a fact that whenever I catch myself not having done one of them I do more hand wringing than is sensible. I blame myself and believe I'm terrible at my job if any of those plates stops spinning and hits the floor.
 

What I should do is consider that if I tried to just do those first 15 things every day that would allow for around 30minutes for each task. Clearly it's unreasonable to expect anyone to achieve that level of context switching. I wouldn't expect it of anyone else, but I always expect it of myself.

Maybe in this world where testing means a lot more than running manual test scripts we should sometimes remember that it can't always mean engaging in all of the practices all of the time. It would be more realistic to just keep some of the plates spinning and accept that the others aren't in play. Or delegate them, get a developer to spin some of them most of the time and you just check in every now and again. Or maybe just forgive yourself sometimes for only being human.

Even as I write this I know when that next performance bug or hole in coverage is noticed I'll forget this logical reasoning all over again. But maybe we should be okay with this because the joy of realising testing can add value in more ways has come with the burden of noticing when you're not playing your part in all of those ways.