You have to PRETEND

We had our formal project presentation/kickoff to the external users yesterday. It was a first time experience for me as a QA. I had always been an internal user, doing only SAT (system acceptance testing) and with no formal interaction with users during UAT (user acceptance testing).

My work as a tester here is quite boring actually but I must say that the experience is worthwhile. Yesterday's experience is one of them I could say. The mini theater is awesome. My fellow QAs and I were wondering if its okay to watch a movie there (lol!) The mini theater (though, much simpler) is like one of those you see in a movie or in a prestigious school like Harvard. I think its really cool... Too bad, we were not able to get some free coffee hahaha!

The module assigned to me is the frontliner of the entire project. It is Dashboard. Hays, so basically I have to understand the entire process of the system end to end... So, I also have to understand the principles behind the other modules assigned to other testers. I was teased last Sunday by one of the developers that I am the QA of QAs... Weeehhh... Poor me :(

During the presentation, I feel like I am about to faint everytime dashboard is being accessed. I was so afraid that it might fail coz the test environment we are using is intermittent and there are so many changes in the code that are not yet tested...

Thankfully, no errors were encountered during the presentation. It is really quite an experience for QAs. Will make any QA sweat during a presentation coz when the module assigned to you failed, it will be quite embarrassing :(

Then during the wrap-up, the BA presiding the presentation made some comments about how the external users need to take External UAT seriously because they will be the one to support other users.

And one of his comments made us really laugh... He says that COSO users need to pretend to be admin, need to pretend to be an approver, etc... Then, when he seems to have lost for words already, he just said "Well, you have to pretend,"

Hahaha! He just mentioned one of the main qualities of a good QA!

QAs/testers really need to pretend to be someone else.

• Well, if you are testing an Accounting System, you need to be an accountant, that should be your POV.

• If you are testing a performance monitoring system, you need to be a network engineer.

• If you are testing a POS system, you need to be someone in sales.

• and the list goes on...

It was a nice presentation even if it means more work for us after :)