The Benefits of Doing Things Outside Your Role

In my 14 years as a test engineer, I have done a lot of work that could be considered outside my role: project management, requirements engineering, software development, customer support and more. This has given me the opportunity to gain new perspectives and learn new things.

This text is about the principle that helps to open up such possibilities, and why I believe that these new perspectives and the new knowledge gained will make you a better tester.

I do what helps the team the most in the current situation - and that's not always testing.

This is one principle I use to guide my actions. It has helped me to support my testing, to learn new and a better understanding of things, and to get a new perspective.

Let’s take a closer look.

I have worked in teams without a dedicated role for requirements. These teams had to take responsibility for building software that solved real problems in order to be successful.

I often took over this part and made a structured list of all the use cases I could think of. The use cases gave us a basis for discussing the design of the solution. We could better understand what problems we were trying to solve and what we should build to solve them. It also helped us define a scope. And it served as a preparation for test ideas that could be used for automated tests and testing.

By using my existing testing skills, I was able to do something that had an early impact on the quality and helped not only my colleagues, but also myself.

I had the opportunity to slip into the software engineering role many times and for the most part it was a really valuable experience. I learnt what mistakes might happen, how complex certain components of our application actually are and what measurements development has in place to assess quality.

All that I found valuable for my testing and the way testing and development collaborate.

Doing things outside your role gives you a new perspective. You learn what it means to be in a particular role, what the responsibilities are and what it feels like to do certain tasks.

This new perspective can help you to get a better understanding for the whole development process, the challenges other roles face and how they collaborate. Then you can use this knowledge and the perspective and knowledge of your actual role to improve one or all of these things.

These improvements can have a positive impact on testing as well. It might help you or your colleagues to identify risks and problems earlier. Or to make a better test strategy for a new feature.

On one project, I learned about different tools that helped developers with their code quality and architecture. Years later, I was part of a team that was struggling with code quality. So I suggested that we look at the tools I had seen in the past. That way the code quality could be improved.

Doing the work of another role often requires learning new tools and approaches. This gives you an opportunity to think about whether and how you can incorporate these into your testing activities.

You might even learn something about yourself. For example, that this new role is something you want to focus your career on.

I hope I have been able to show you how many opportunities there are to do things outside of your actual role. Personally, I have had so many positive and enjoyable experiences as a result.

I am grateful to work in an industry with such opportunities. And I hope this approach will do the same for you.

Wherever you are, have a wonderful day.
Florian