I’ve recently finished James Bach’s book Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar. I liked it, but I don’t agree with all of it. As a tester, I feel that it inspires me and gives me new ideas in my way of thinking and how I perceive learning, especially self-education. I fully agree with James on that you should follow your passion. If you are able to assist those around you to that end, it will make you grow even more. In march James will be in Sweden and hold a series of courses, one of them is Self-Education for testers. It think it would be very fun and educational to attend, I will see if I can make time.

One thing that I consider after reading the book is how I can inspire my daughter to learn, test new things and to follow her passion. When she receives a new toy, I want her to explore how it works. For instance, she got a little toy puppy that execute somersaults. It had a lot of mechanic inside it and sounded like it was very fragile, if you actually played with it. The purpose of the toy was probably just to watch it. I dislike such toys. I asked my daughter how she thought it worked. She did a somewhat exploratory, destructive test by enabling the puppy to do the somersault, then directly afterwards hugged it tightly. There was a popping sound in the mechanic as the puppy tried to execute the somersault, while being held secure. After that test it was not possible for the puppy to somersault, rather it performed a half one and landed on its nose. I applauded my daughters destructive sense of testing of the toy. Translating that into testing terms, she prioritized which test to start with and considered what was the biggest chance a user would do then executed that. One test to render the system useless. Wonderful!

I think we have a lot to learn (or perhaps relearn) from our children.