Testing on the other side

How often do you see that others believe it is not their failure, it are the others? How often are you sure it is not because of you, it is because of them? How often do you see that you did everything to prevent failure and others are to blame? How often do we all blame the other side?

Perhaps not that often. Still if it is not happening at our place, then it must be triggered at the other side. If on the other side failures are triggered, created and on our side solved/prevented. Why are we spending time at our side to proof it works here?
Currently we seem to focus to measure that everything is OK on our side. We are not to blame when the failure hits the fan. So it must be elsewhere to be found. The other side!

If we are sure that it is OK on our side, and failure is on the other side, why aren't we adapting our strategy of testing and look on the other side? Sot the approach would be: create tests what we should do. This will proof we are right. Now reverse the test scripts and test other things as we reversed our thoughts to blame others, then they must be blamed by things we didn't found. That leaves us the parts we are not testing, the parts from the other side.

The thought is acting opposite. If right is OK, and wrong should be found, we believe everything is right on our side; then the other side is wrong. We should find the failures on the other side. Finding failures is NOT blaming. Finding failures is in this case helping out the others. This means working with them on the other side. This means joining for example development, become a team.

To be able to help we should force us to think differently. This also means that we should force us to change our minds to create space for other thoughts and ideas. Perhaps adding a new role to testing: “the devil’s advocate-tester”. He/she will try to force the team think in a different way; although controlled. This role might change every week just to force us think beyond boundaries.

This might result in an approach were space is created to think differently and to extend borders within a testing project.

So prepare to test also on the other side, just for fun!?