We as software testers could be renamed software observers without anyone’s job being impacted. The big difference between a new tester and one who has been doing it awhile is that the experienced tester knows what to observe. And which areas of the application require that observation. This observation skill is both the trained intuition discussed in Blink and what needs the 10000 hours of practice mentioned in Outliers (both by Malcolm Gladwell).

The earliest memory I have around observation[1] is when I read the book Fatherland back in late public school or early high school. In it a detective finds a body and determines it was dumped because it was missing its glasses by he bumps on the bridge of the nose.

The network television world seems to have jumped on this idea this year. In the fall it started running The Mentalist which appears to be a crime drama where the lead character observes stuff that everyone else misses. In this week’s ad he sees a corpse and immediately realizes that he was a jazz guitar player based upon the scars on his fingers. I have yet to actually see an episode, but I don’t have to in order to bring it up. 🙂 Premiering last night (at least in this market) is another show based on observation; Lie To Me. The premise of this one is the lead character is essentially a human lie detector through his skills of observation of non-verbal communications.

Observation is a double edged sword though. Once you start being an obsessive observer it is really hard to turn it off. Watching tv or a movie with me can be pretty painful if the producers have not paid attention to continuity between scenes or even within the same scene. I’ll notice it more often than not, and of course have to share it. Can you imagine watching a movie with The Mentalist?

One final note on observation today is that this would seem to be the argument for not fulling crazy long shifts while trying to test. I know that I don’t do my best observation exhausted (mentally and/or physically) as my brain often cannot pull the interesting or relevant bits of information out of what I am seeing.

Anyone can see, but it takes a professional to observe.

[1] Okay, now that I think about it was likely also the Encyclopedia Brown books in grade 2 or 3, but those were more puzzle books and I could never figure them out and doesn’t fit the narrative right so we’ll just gloss over this, k?