Here is an article I had open from New Scientist (which I suspect I found on Twitter, but not 100% sure) that I thought was interesting on the grounds of ‘If you understand humans better, you can test software designed for human consumption better’.

Humans prefer cockiness to expertise is a study by Don Moore where it was found that we [humans] prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. This is partly because there is evidence that precision and expertise do tend to go hand in hand.

Ummm, that is interesting, but how does it relate to testing? Well, finding a bug in your software is often the easy part. Getting it through triage and in front of a developer is often the challenging part. Or how about trying to make your case for holding up a release due to a particular bug; always a fun conversation as well. If you go in with lots of ummms and ahhhs is not going you are not going to convey confidence which not only intuitively is going to hurt your case but now will scientifically. I’ve seen this played out a number of times between a non-confident QA lead and a very confident dev lead. (To his credit, I learned a lot about being a team lead from him; do the opposite.)

I also need to work this into my paper on managing your career somehow.