Charging the batteries

I know that I haven't been very active here lately and I apologize for that. This spring has been nothing but chaos at work and my motivation recently reached a new All Time Low. Fortunately for everyone involved I'm now on a much needed four week vacation, time that will be spent re-charging my batteries and hopefully my motivation as well.

This morning I read a tweet from James Bach, pointing me to a blogpost by Parimala Shankaraiah, the "Curious Tester". In this post she writes about interviewing/recruiting testers and that got me thinking about the time we recruited my colleague, a little more than a year ago.

For a long time, I had been the Lone Tester (Hi-yo Silver, away!) at the company, constantly swamped with work. As we were gearing up for a major, and I mean Major, platform update that summer we really needed to expand the test department. If not only for the increased scope of the update then because of the fact that I was going away on paternity leave. You may think that was extremely bad timing, but the fact is that the original release date for the update was before my planned leave (which I booked six months earlier). But the update was postponed, and rightfully so.

Around the same time as I booked my leave I also flagged to management that we were in desperate need of another tester. A wanted ad was posted and I went through a lot of applications, picking out quite a few interesting ones. But for some reason management didn't want to hire at that time after all, and it wasn't until a month before my leave that they realized they were about to become "testerless", right before the update! So a new wanted ad was posted and we had to rush through the whole recruiting process.

Again, I read a lot of applications, threw away quite a few right away due to the fact that they had misunderstood the actual job (and location for that matter). I can't blame anyone but our own HR department for that though, the ad was very vague. Since our product is a Virtual World, or a "game", many people thought we wanted beta-testers who could work from home. This was not the case, obviously.

We (the Development Manager and I) picked out a few interesting applicants and called them in for a quite informal interview. Several of them had some decent testing experience but "failed" (harsh word, but I'll use it in lack of a better one) in other areas, like not being interested in games etc. For me, the personal chemistry was a very important thing since I was supposed to work close together with this person every day.

To be honest, it didn't look good. But then a friend of mine gave me a tip about one of the applicants they had interviewed for a Customer Support position. While he wasn't chosen for that position, they felt that he had "something" and thought that he could be of interest. I said "OK, ask him to send in an application asap".

The application was on my desk when I came in to work the next day. This was a young guy with a lot of experience in MMORPG:s, playing and beta-testing. No other testing-experience, but man was this guy thirsty for knowledge! He wrote that when he got the call from my friend he didn't really know if he was interested at first but googled for "Software testing" to find out what it's all about. He then described how he lost himself in blog after blog and how he definitely wanted to be a part of this world. So we called him in for an interview...

You know how I mentioned personal chemistry earlier? Well, this was it. I quickly realized that this guy shared my values, ethics and sense of humor. He was also very well-versed in MMORPG:s and usability and had an honest interest for the work of a Software Tester. It was decided right after the interview that this young man, if he so desired, was to be my padawan...

He said yes, fortunately, and was literally thrown right into a pile of work. He's been doing an excellent job from day one and we work really well together. Hell, hadn't it been for him I'd most likely be burnt out today.