Five Questions With Robert Straavaldson

Robert Straavaldson is the best tester I know. He is the famous Rob from my Hallmarks of a Great Tester speech. His developers on one project pooled their funds to have their dev manager to take Robert to lunch - for multiple weeks in a row! - so that he would stop logging bugs for an hour each day. On another project he was asked to stop referring to bugs as "cool", and to stop logging bugs during bug triage meetings. Robert even tested this interview - note that he boundary tested my "Five Questions" by answering six of them! Here is what Robert has to say:

DDJ: What was your first introduction to testing? What did that leave you thinking about the act and/or concept of testing?
RS: My first introduction to testing was in the late 1980’s with AutoLISP. I remember spending many hours writing scripts that I hoped would either fail miserably or crash the host application. Good times!

DDJ: What has most surprised you as you have learned about testing/in your experiences with testing?
RS: I think the most surprising change is how I look at things in my everyday life. I’ve gone from being mostly oblivious to my surroundings to noticing everything. I’ve also noticed that I’ve gone from being the person that expects everything to work and not really caring how it works to trying to figure out how it works and how I can make it to fail.

DDJ: What is the most interesting bug you have seen?
RS: There’s been so many over the last 7+ years and to keep it simple I’d have to say any bug that I was able to make my developer ask “Why would you do something like that?” after reading the bug report.

DDJ: How would you describe your testing philosophy?
RS: 1) Building a strong relationship with your developer and PM builds a better product.
2) Finding bugs is a good thing! Get excited about it!
3) Everything matters.
4) If you have to do anything more than once and it’s inexpensive – automate it.

DDJ: What do you think is the most important thing for a tester to know? To do? For developers to know and do about testing?
RS: I think this goes for both test/dev and it’s that testing isn’t something that you do at the end of the product cycle. Testing should always be done in measureable increments (by feature) over the life of the project.

DDJ: Is there anything else you would like to say?
RS: Since a very young age I’ve had the “I wonder what’ll happen if I do this?” trait. It turns out this is the type of thinking that all testers need. Being curious and devious at the same time is a good thing.

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink