TL;DR

This post is about the most critical ingredient to become passionate not only in software testing but in every job: passion. This post is based on a remarkable book written by Chad Fowler, The Passionate Programmer.

Passion (emotion) is a very strong feeling about a person or thing.

What does it mean to be passionate about software testing? I will tell you my story.

When I started with software testing, I did it all wrong. I perceived my work as a quality gatekeeping. And guess what, when you present yourself as a quality gatekeeper, all other team members would gladly pass that role to you. Along with all their assignments and work connected with “quality.” At that time, I could not see a forest from trees.

My colleague asked: As a software testing team leader, what software testing books do you recommend?

I was clueless, and one reason was my stand: Ah, those academics who write books about software testing. I know everything because I do it daily. And I was doing it, wrongly!

Google answered with James Bach’s lecture. Passion kicked in. More Google and I found book Lessons Learned in Software Testing.  Tweeter (at that time, it was useful for learning software testing) helped me to find international and local practitioners. I found about free BBST Course materials, and as being a “quality gatekeeper” at my project, I was rewarded with an early instance of the Rapid Software Testing course. It was part of the STP software testing conference, and at that conference, I met Jerry Weinberg! Michael Bolton held the course. Imagine three days, six hours per day of conversations with Michael! Just that worth every penny paid for the course.

Locally I connected with Zeljko Filipin and Davor Banovic and helped to organize ViaQa (today Testival) conference. At that instance, I met Bret Pettichord and had wonderful conversations about software testing. We started a local software testing meetup group, Zagreb Software Testing Club. Now we have 53 held meetups, under Testival name.

I am also passionate about learning programming. My latest effort is Elixir and Phoenix. It is evolving very fast, and when I finish one chapter of Elixir in Action book, there is a new Elixir release! I like programming, especially testing what I create. It is usual to say, do not test your code. I do not know who started this, but my goal is to make this a statement obsolete.

My blog posts are about what I learned in software testing. Writing about what you are learning is a recap of what you learned. It helps you to practice what you learned.

I went independent, and I own a small shop that offers software testing services. Being passionate about software testing helped me a lot to make this decision. Learning about business and economy was a precondition for this decision.

Other passions also challenge my thinking. Recent is solving the Rubik cube, practicing typing with ten fingers, solving puzzles.

This is my passionate software testing path. On that path other people’s writing, conversations, fears, failures, and successes were an important part. I like every bit of my software testing path.