As my blog title says, I'm a programmer moving into testing and there are times when I get caught in the grey area.

This week I found what sounded like a very interesting and useful training course "Getting a Grip on Exploratory Testing " - sounded perfect as we've just started one project the Agile way and another one will also be starting up soon. Better get the testing up to speed, huh ?

I forwarded the details onto my boss and awaited the response.

No

He couldn't justify as it as I was still officially a programmer

( yes, there is an old program who's code is such a mess of spaghetti that I am the only one who can maintain it quickly and easily - the moral of this is that code reviews and standards should be put in place for all future projects )

The cynical side of me wonders if I was to request to go on a programming course if that would be turned down because I was about to become an official tester.

The pessimisstic side of me wonders if that shows the companies true commitment to quality.

Being a true professional ( cough, cough ) I of course got on with the programming work I had to do.

Half an hour later that was done so back to testing I went, to try out some Perl scripts I'd written over the weekend.

I was interrupted from this by a programmer wanting help testing out his spell checking program

Now why was he asking me, after all I'm not officially a tester.

Could it be that I've been getting everyone test-infected and they know that if they want testing done then I might be a good person to see ?

( what ? you think that testing resources are properly scheduled and there is a PLAN ???? )

I was happy to help out and it gave me the chance to try out the Ruby and Watir combination and what a great combination they make ! It also gave me the chance to explore and test out another program and any good tester should take that opportunity.

Then it was back to the program I was meant to be testing and 15 minutes later I'd got it to crash.

Not bad for an unofficial tester

And blogs are a great place to vent and let off steam !!