Stepping back and seeing the big picture

After years of reading other people's blogs, subscribing and contributing to forums, procrastinating about whether I should inflict my opinionated views on others, and the encouragement of my peers, I have decided to take the leap of faith and join the blogging community.

So, for my first blog post - I thought I'd start with a positive story.

A little while back, I was working for a company in which we were developing a large enterprise system. After doing some very long hours (80 to 100 hour weeks), and sitting at my desk at 9pm most nights wondering why I chose this profession, the challenge seemed to have gone out of it, as the bugs were coming through thick and fast, I felt like I was drowning in the number of defects still open. Then on one particular day, close to our scheduled release to production date, I stuck my head up from under my desk at the most inopportune moment. I was spotted, and was quickly marched into the fortnightly Project Director's update meeting. While screaming my protests all the way down the hallway, being dragged by the ear by our project coordinator, I was then promptly sat down in the meeting - and told to stay.

Gritting my teeth, I sat through the usual spiel. Looking around the participants (had to keep myself entertained somehow!!), I noticed that there were more than just the project members in the meeting. I recognised some of the extra bodies as being business representatives, and thought it was a bit strange. Then I heard the words "and, now I'd like to pass you over to our Business Analyst, who will present a live demonstration of the application".....

OK - the only thing going through my head at this point was "Holy crap, I hope they don't see this bug, or that bug, or even that bug. Ah crap, there are just too many bugs - maybe I should just slink away now and pack up my desk"

So, here we were.... our wonderful BA (who I still adore to this day) started off by explaining to the project the current difficulties faced by the business in doing their day-to-day work with systems that were quite deficient, and only met the business' very basic needs. Then she opened up the application, and I saw my life for the past several months starting to unfold up on the "big screen". Oh application, how I've become to know you so intimately!

As she started to use the application, and work through some of the more common business processes, and explain the value that these features would give the users, I sat there in stunned silence. At the end of the presentation, there was loud applause from the business representatives, and I was just sitting there like a stunned mullet.

All of a sudden, I had seen the application through the eyes of an end-user, and not through the eyes of a tester. Damn, what a great system we had developed! At that point, everything was put into perspective - I had been given the opportunity to step back and see the big picture. All of a sudden, some of the issues that had been bogging me down seemed to have become less important. Yes, we still had some serious bugs in the system, but in the grand scheme of things, they were just slight hiccups on the road to delivering an important application to the business.

So, now, when I am feeling bogged down in the details, I take a step back and have a look at the big picture. This puts everything back into perspective for me. I think testers need to have a good balance of being detail oriented and also seeing the big picture.

I hope you find inspiration in my story - and can once in a while, take a step back and see the whole picture.