Natural born tester

My name is Marta, I’m a Senior QA Analyst with more than 10 years of experience and I became a single mom almost two years ago. My son’s name is Rúdi and he started his QA job as an “intern”, literally!

He is a natural born tester.

I’m like a software and Rúdi is my QA!

While he was “just a little bean” with no experience whatsoever, I felt that the first 3 months were like a software with small bugs that are not very severe but harasses the QA. I will never forget that morning sickness!

He was great in terms of “load testing”! I gained like 20 kg during pregnancy and I had a big big belly!
The big “release” happened, like I mentioned above, almost two years ago. The “change log” was risky to the “delivery managers” (aka obstetrician and midwife), or at least they thought that he was big, and I was not a recent “application”. After all, Rúdi was born with no issues and a new adventure started!
He started with no knowledge of the “features”, and me… Well, I didn’t know how to react to some situations. Nobody told me how to behave on each “request”. The first months were really hard!
He was, and he still is, very interested in “exploratory testing” like toys, books, and all other things, specifically those he shouldn’t have access to. Everything needs to be tasted, touched, thrown away and see if makes noises or breaks. I never taught him how to do this kind of stuff… There’s no “documentation”!

His “testing strategy” is continuously changing, and he uses the cause-effect approach. He learns a lot while doing this kind of things, he observes what will be my reaction and reproduces the issue to test me, specially when he knows that I don’t like what he is doing.Boundary and exhaustive testing are his favourites! The expected result would be for me having a nervous breakdown or crashing! I don’t know!

I was pretty sure that he was doing blackbox testing and this was just functional testing. I thought that he didn’t have access to my code, but then I remembered that he had access to it when he was an intern! Oh no!He is always finding new edge cases. The scenarios that people that developed me didn’t think about, he knows them all!

One of his favourite edge cases is something very similar to security tests. Every time he finds an open window he takes advantage of it and throws one or more objects through that open window. It’s like a “security breach” and that scenario was never predicted!

Now, I’m becoming faster and improved my “coverage”! As soon as I get home, the first thing I do is check if any window is open! Yey!

He is also good on “stress tests”. Sometimes I feel that he is pushing me to my limit. After some bad nights of sleeping, I become pretty vulnerable. Who doesn’t?

There are some “incidents” happening along the way, but my “availability” is still 100%! A mother needs to be operational all the time!

To close this, i’m very happy to say that I believe that his “acceptance criteria” are being achieved since I’m starting to get a lot of hugs!