It’s Okay to Fail, Pick Up the Pieces and Move On — A blog about my FailQonf experience
Everyone fails. Why not smile about it? Sometimes you have to fail before you can succeed, right? This very unique idea of The Test Tribe Community’s latest software Testing conference FailQonf created a huge buzz on social media platforms.
Last weekend, I had this amazing opportunity to attend a Software Testing Conference with an exceptional theme “Celebrating Failures”. In this blog post, I would be sharing my experience at this wonderfully organized conference FailQonf.
My FailQonf experience and what it taught me
When I first heard about FailQonf, I was skeptical — “Who would like to hear about fail stories!!”. As and how I explored more about it and went through The Test Tribe’s posts about it, the vision about this conference got clearer and I began to understand the real value of these sessions and talks.
FailQonf had over 20+ speakers from different parts of the world. With talks and sessions from the most accomplished professionals, it had some good takeaways.
Top Lessons I learned through FailQonf Talks
I) Once upon a time … Three failure stories by Ajay Balamurugadas
I enjoyed this talk since Ajay shared his failure stories which most of us can relate to. His first failure story was on how he ran away from automation throughout his career, something which most of the testers experience. He also shared how he overcame this failure and gained enough knowledge to grow his professional path.
His second story was how he failed even though he tested a system and found 82 bugs in 8hours!! You might be thinking how this is a failure, the count is good enough. But 70 bugs were in a 3rd party application and were moved to deferred status.
The 3rd story was on how he failed to test the main use case in the feature and tested every other aspect of the feature. Throughout the entire session of 30mins, he covered 10 interesting stories around his journey in software testing.
My takeaways -
1) Do not run away from any technology without knowing what it is !!
2) Failure is highly contextual, what is a failure for me might not be for someone else
3) Failure is not a failure if you learn from it. If you learn from it, it becomes more of an experience and not a failure.
4) Never assume, have early checks with clear communication
II) Failures and Denials at Different stages — Revelations of a Quality Fanatic — Srinivas Kantipudi
This was a very insightful talk on what traits should be possessed at each level in your career. Srinivas covered the entire range right from fresher to a manager — what are the failures and denials and how to overcome them.
My Takeaways -
1) Move ahead from comfort zone to growth zone to have a better professional journey
2) Never lower your bar during the hiring/grooming of your team. Coaching takes time but it reaps long-term benefits.
My FailQonf Story
I kept wondering throughout the event, had I got an opportunity to speak about my failure story — What would it be!!
So here’s to celebrating my failures with 3 stories…
Failed in my 1st project —
The first failure that I would like to share was in my first independent assignment as a fresher. It was the first user story in my software testing career and I had to write test cases for a requirement that had an impact throughout the main modules of the product. Being a fresher, I wasn’t having complete knowledge of the product but navigated myself through the requirement document and managed to complete the test cases. These cases would then be executed by the developer working on the feature and then the build would be given to the Testing team for testing.
Back then, we followed the approach even if there was a single bug for which a test case was already written, we would reject the build. This mandated the developers to execute every test case in their dev environment before the QC team would start testing.
What happened was, there were bugs in the initial builds and we had already rejected the build twice. The developers were under a lot of pressure and a third-time rejection would mean the management would be notified about it and further actions would be taken on the team.
And here comes the failure, I tested all of the cases. Everything worked perfectly fine except that I found a bug! I found a bug for which I had missed writing a test case. It was missed in the initial 2 cycles of testing as well and also missed due to my limited product knowledge. Big-time failure!! This failure impacted the release timelines and the team had to provide an explanation to the management.
What I learned
1) Understand the impact area and feature completely before starting testing for any requirement.
2) Don’t be afraid to ask questions, however stupid the questions sound, but get them cleared instead of assuming things.
3) Processes have their pros and cons. Understand why there is a particular process in place and work towards enhancing it instead of blindly following the same.
Failed as a Freelancer
My 2nd failure was more of a freelancing work that I did during my career break. We were a team of 5 testers dedicatedly testing an application. The only catch here was the application is ready and already used by clients on production and we had no documentation as to what the application is or no one within the team who can explain what the application does. It was a pretty difficult task, considering customers were already reporting issues and we had no clue at all what it does.
Unfortunately, the organization had a very weird approach to testing. They measured based on metrics. Since there were no requirements provided, they asked us to navigate through the modules and write test cases for the same. It was measured based on 500 cases a day!! For me, this venture was quite funny because the only thing that was done was to add unnecessary cases to the suite instead of adding value.
I failed miserably on 2 things here. The first is to write 500 cases a day and secondly to explain to my QA manager that our focus should be on improving the quality instead of measuring the metrics
The irony was that others somehow wrote 500 cases. At this rate, our team was adding approximately 2000 useless(and redundant) cases each day based on the UI, whether a button/text/field is displayed or not.
This consistently made me a low performer and eventually, I decided to quit for good.
What I learned
1) If the interest of the organization doesn’t align with your interests or views, it is better to move on and find better opportunities for your career growth.
2) Have good listening skills. Listen to your team and take inputs from them on the betterment of the project.
3) Be a mentor to your team, someone who your team will look up to and get inspired.
Yet again I failed..and this was a huge failure!!
Yes, I failed to have a dedicated work-life balance and it impacted not only my professional career but also my health and personal life. 5+ years into a successful professional career and I decided to take a break. Career break -the most dreaded word or considered to be the worst decision by many people. Most of the people around me were supportive of my decision since health-wise things had gone haywire and this decision had to be taken. It was a challenging phase since I had no idea how I would bounce back and what my future looked like.
Getting back to the IT industry was a whole new ball game altogether due to unpredictable Covid times. I lost out on opportunities due to the career gap since many organizations don’t interview candidates with career gaps.
At times, it felt like wandering in a dark place but kept reminding myself that there is always light at the end of the tunnel.
What I learned
1) It’s okay to lose motivation, give up and give up again. The important thing is to learn from your experiences, learn from others who have been through similar situations, and keep moving forward… even when things get rough.
2) Reflect, Reflect and Reflect — Take time to reflect on rejections and take positive learnings from them. Meditate about what you would like to do forward.
3) Network with right-minded people — This is very very important. It is crucial to have the right mentors to guide you and give you that little push. To know what I mean is this: it’s not enough to just know someone. You have to have the right person, someone with whom you can share your vision, challenges, dreams, and failures. I am fortunate enough to have the most amazing mentor Mahesh Chikane. I was privileged enough to have him as my manager right from the initial phases of my career. This is something many of you will say but when you trust and listen to your mentor, things started to move easily in the right direction.
Be open to failure as failure is a stepping stone in reaching success. It’s there for a reason!
I must say after FailQonf, I have come back with some good inspiration, drive, and passion. I learned a lot about how to fail better. Instead of letting it completely disillusion me, I use it as a springboard for new ideas.
I would like to thank The Test Tribe community for organizing the event with so much enthusiasm. It was a great experience to network with a highly energetic audience, completely passionate about software testing.
Looking forward to many such events from The Test Tribe.