Exploratory Software Testing

Appendix A. Building a Successful Career in Testing

“If you have a job without any aggravations, you don’t have a job.”

—Malcolm Forbes

How Did You Get into Testing?

I made the transition from software developer to software tester in 1989, when I was a graduate student at the University of Tennessee. It was not a transition I made by choice. One fateful morning, my professor¹ confronted me about my missing too many development meetings. The meetings, I explained, were inconveniently convened on a Saturday morning, and as a new graduate student living away from home for the first time in my life, this particular time slot was problematic.² Interestingly enough, my punishment was not a pink slip, but a sentence to be the ...