Writing down testing notes makes me a better tester

At Atlassian we don’t have testers. Each developer is a tester, we test each other tasks after they are implemented, that’s called DoTing (developer on tests).

I usually suck at this compared to other colleagues. A few of them have this attention to detail and perseverance that makes them great testers.

I’m fast paced, I get bored at repetitive tasks, I get distracted, and so on.

We have a QA guru on our team, but she’s in Sydney, 10 hours away. Her job is not to test our stuff but to teach us, point out things to keep in mind when testing and so on.

Some time ago she came up with an idea to keep Testing Notes for each issue within it. So when we implement the feature she usually fill in Testing Notes - how things should work, what to watch for, and so on. Sometimes we fill this info while testing, because not all goes this round trip.

I noticed that this helped me improve my testing skills. It makes me think about tests first and when I separate testing from preparing Testing Notes I get better at both.

I tried to follow sth like this before, on paper, by myself, but it didn’t last long. The addition of transparency (the whole teams see Testing Notes) made me commit to it which is great.