Now before you go and actually spend 10,000 testing to answer that, let us first put the question into context.
There’s an idea floating around that in order to become an expert in a given field, one must spend roughly 10,000 hours honing those particular skills. Apparently, no one has taken credit for the 10k hour rule, but it’s believed to have been popularized by author Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. So if you spend 10,000 hours on something and don’t become an expert, blame him. Or at least get your money back.
Anyway, for some professions, the 10k rule would seem to make perfect sense. But we’re not talking about some professions here, we’re talking about testing. And in my view, there’s a lot more that goes into becoming a testing expert than just time. There’s passion, intelligence curiosity, work ethic and many other “nurture” traits that can never be substituted for time. Time certainly helps – don’t get me wrong – but it’s not everything.
To illustrate my point, take a look at this quote from a CNN.com article on the Secrets of Greatness:
For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice.
In other words, it’s not the amount of time you spend testing that will make you an expert, it’s how you spend that time. If you plan on spending 10,000 hours testing, make sure you spend it wisely! As James Bach once said in on our blog:
Pretty good testing is easy to do (that’s partly why some people like to say “testing is dead”– they think testing isn’t needed as a special focus because they note that anyone can find at least some bugs some of the time).
Excellent testing is quite *hard* to do.
Yet as I travel all over the world, teaching testing and consulting in testing organizations, I see the same pattern almost *everywhere*: testing groups who have but a vague, wispy idea what they are trying to do; experienced testers who barely read about and don’t systematically practice their craft beyond the minimum needed to keep their employers from firing them; testers whose practice is dominated by irrational and ignorant demands of their management, because those testers have done nothing to develop their own credibility; programmers who think their automated checks will save them from disaster in the field.
How does one learn to test? You can’t get an undergraduate degree in testing. I know of two people who have a PhD in testing, one of whom I admire (Meeta Prakash), the other one is, in my view, an active danger to himself and the craft. I personally know, by name, about 150 testers who are systematically and diligently improving their skills. There are probably another several hundred I’ve met over the years and lost touch with. About three thousand people regularly read my blog, so maybe there are a lot of lurkers. A relative handful of the people I know are part of a program of study/mentoring that is sanctioned by their employers…Most testers are doing it independently, however, or even in defiance of their employers.
So if you plan on making testing a career – that is, spending 10K+ hours – here are some practice tips courtesy of Fortune Magazine:
- Approach each critical task with an explicit goal of getting much better at it.
- As you do the task, focus on what’s happening and why you’re doing it the way you are.
- After the task, get feedback on your performance from multiple sources. Make changes in your behavior as necessary.
- Continually build mental models of your situation – your industry, your company, your career. Enlarge the models to encompass more factors.
- Do those steps regularly, not sporadically. Occasional practice does not work.
What makes someone an expert tester in your view? Be sure to share your thoughts in the comments section below.