Sad smoke alarm noises

At LLEWT book club yesterday, Sanne Visser said: "Nobody ever gave a smoke alarm an award" and I laughed so hard tears streamed down my face. I think it's recognisable for many testers. There are times when we are warning of what could happen if we don't address risk "x" or don't fix bug "y". Yet, if you're unlucky, you won't ever get credit for that. There's no a/b test to see what will happen if your advice gets ignored, but if your advice is followed and your concerns are addressed, it's just business as usual. Problem averted. Thank you for being the smoke alarm, but you won't get an award.

On the other hand, when (preventable) stuff goes wrong in production, the hero developer who creates the fix is lauded with praise.

Wrong behaviour can get rewarded, while good behaviour can be ignored easily.

There are more variants of this.

When preventable stuff goes wrong, terrible work places will even blame the tester. In that case: make sure your ass is covered with test reports, bug reports, so no one has the opportunity to claim they didn't know. And try to find a new job, yeah?

There's also the matter of being too much of a smoke alarm. I hadn't heard of this before, but in the book club we talked about the Cassandra effect.

Trusty Wikipedia says: "The Cassandra metaphor relates to a person whose valid warnings or concerns are disbelieved by others."

In the context of testing, this means your smoke alarm is set to too sensitive, and you bitch and complain about every little thing that goes wrong or can go wrong. Get some perspective, yeah? Not every typo is the end of the world. The button is 1px off center, but how is that a must-fix issue?

We testers need to pick our battles. In a just world, quality is perfect, and no typo exists, but sadly we have to deal with the muddy reality, and we need to look at the context and the risk.

Don't alienate the people around you by being overly critical, and dial down your smoke alarm for a bit.

In the end, being a tester is sometimes a very thankless job. You partly have to be okay with the fact that you won't get the credit when it's due and if you're unlucky you get blamed for stuff that was beyond your control.

sad smoke alarm noises