Inspected with Pride

July 19, 2011 — blog, testing

I checked out my new laptop bag last week and found an interesting card my bag.

This card raised a few questions…

First of all, who is inspector 46… are there 82 inspectors working at the laptop bag factory, does every inspector has his own card, did inspector 46 really inspect my bag? I did some Googling… but inspector 46 is not very known on the internet.. he or she has a facebook page.

Secondly, would (s)he sometimes inspect bags without pride…? Would (s)he still add this card or does (s)he also has other cards?

Thirdly, what did (s)he inspect? Did only inspect the outside, the inside, did (s)he perform a stress test on my bag?

And last, would this be something for testers and/or developers to add to their software…

Imagine, the first time you open an application, it displays the message “This application has been tested with pride by tester 23”, or when you open a menu item “This application has been tested and developed with pride by software development team Zulu”.

Why not? I believe most software development teams don’t get the credits they deserve. They only get complaints and issue/bug reports from customers. How often did you contact the help desk to give them compliment about with a new feature (and asked explicitly to also compliment the development team) or contacted the development team directly to give them some compliments? How often do you see a development team on stage to get the applause of customers?

It’s not in our nature to thank people. It’s easy to complain. We, Dutch people certainly, are the masters in complaining.

I would like to ask you: Next time you work with software that you really like or does exactly what you would like to do it (=Quality), send a mail or contact the development team and thank them explicitly!

Or we could end up with all kind of messages in the application where development teams state how pride they are!