Does a tester break the product?
Software craft

Does a tester break the product?

How does a name influence our attitude?
Bartosz Mikulski
Bartosz Mikulski – 2 min read

Recently, I came across this tweet:

Table of Contents

  1. Names

We may argue whether a tester breaks the products or proves that the product is already broken. I firmly believe that testers discover defects not cause them, so maybe we should no longer describe their job as “breaking the software.”

In IT, naming things was always hard, but it seems that recently we started to care more about the nomenclature. How many of you call yourself programmers? I agree with Kelly Vaughn, a programmer is someone who writes code. Period. That is the only requirement.

At work, we call ourselves engineers or developers. How does it change our perspective?

Are we here to write code? Not necessarily. We had been employed to solve a problem. Sure, quite often you need to write code to do it, but that is not the only part of the job.

In fact, it seems that the more experienced software engineer you are, the more problems you solve without writing code. The job changes from “writing code” to “talk with people and figure out what code you must write.”

Names

It may seem ridiculous that we spend so much time defining the vocabulary we use to describe our job. Is it ridiculous?

A few days ago, I listened to Jocko Willink podcast. In one store, he mentioned that some music clubs in the U.S. no longer call the person who is guarding the door a “bouncer.” They began to call them “hosts.” What changed? The bouncers… ekhm… hosts no longer think they should be aggressive and kick people out. Now, they are here to make the guests feel safe and comfortable.

"No name" street in Konin, Poland
"No name" street in Konin, Poland

Naming things is hard, but that should not be an excuse.

Older post

Dealing with dates and time in Pandas

How to use Pandas to parse dates or calculate time in a different timezone.

Newer post

Machine learning cheat sheets

A collection of machine learning cheat sheets I find useful and google repeatedly.

Related Posts

Software craft

Turning greenfield projects into brownfields projects

What happens when the team lacks software craft skills?
Published on: 19 Nov 2018

Software craft

Is programming art or science?

On a quest to find the right metaphor
Published on: 24 Oct 2018

Software craft

Programmers love new toys but hate new habits

We talk about toys. We love new buzzwords. We adore things that sound cool. Yes, we do.
Published on: 08 Oct 2018

Are you looking for an experienced AI consultant? Do you need assistance with your RAG or Agentic Workflow?
Schedule a call, send me a message on LinkedIn. Schedule a call or send me a message on LinkedIn

>