Last week, I was driving around, and my 7 year old daughter was in the back seat with me.  We were chatting as we drove along (her mind tends to wander and bounce around) when she suddenly made some comment about something she had observed.  I was immediately struck with the depth of insight her comment carried with it, and thought to myself, “Oh, I must write a blog about that – that is so relevant to what we do!”

I can’t remember what she said.

So why am I writing the blog anyway?  Because there is still a lot of lessons to be learned here.

First, if you’ll just trust me for a moment in the fact that whatever it was she did say was in fact startlingly profound, is that fact that you never know when these things will happen…when an observation, out of context, will cause an earth moving jolt of realization about how the universe hooked something else together, and suddenly you have a seemingly unrelated insight that is huge.  So since you never know when these things are coming, you have to be on the lookout for them at all times…and that is no small task.

Second, and a corollary to the first, they will often happen at a most inopportune time.  You will think to yourself, “Oh, this is so profound, I will certainly remember it, so there is no reason to stop the very important thing I am doing right now and deal with it.”  I could have jotted down whatever it was my daughter had said…but somehow, continuing to drive the car through downtown traffic seemed more important at the moment.

Third, no matter how good you are, it always helps if someone has your back.  I consider myself a fairly observant guy…I am a software tester, trained to spot all those little idiosyncrasies that the developers miss.  I take pride in being good at what I do, and work diligently to train my mind to pay attention to little details, incongruities, broken assumptions and premises, and all manner of minutiae that drive my friends insane.  And yet, I missed whatever it was she saw.

Fourth, there is no time machine.  It really bothers me at a personal level that my little girl said something that I considered very intelligent and important, and now, I cannot remember what it was.  I would give almost anything to be able to dial the clock back, sit in the seat again, and try to pay enough attention this time to not forget, to somehow find a way to engrave it in my memory so strongly that it could not escape…but that simply will never happen.  It is gone, and gone forever.

Now I rarely use the blog to blatantly hawk our own products, but all of these reasons are exactly why TestExplorer was created in the first place.  Because as software testers, especially as manual, exploratory, sapient testers, we deal with these issues constantly.  In the middle of something that is crucial and has a deadline of last week we will suddenly see something unrelated and think we will get back to it later and when the dust finally settles all we remember is that there was something we wanted to get back to later.  TestExplorer logs these things for us, retains the context, lets us go back in time and review them when it is convenient for us, and with more than enough detail to thoroughly investigate them.  So if, as you read this, little voices in your head were yelling “Yes! Yes!  That is me exactly!”, then I would encourage you to take a look at TestExplorer, and see if you think it can help you in this regard.  And if it can’t, I would encourage you to tell me why, so I can change that.

Beyond that, on the heels of Fathers Day, I would encourage those parents out there to take heart…your not the only one who forgot one of those little gems that pop out every now and then.  Enjoy them in the moment is all I can say.