How to stay motivated when you don’t like the products you’re testing?

Question

I work in a very great team which are aware of testing and everyone is great to work with. But I have a problem though. I don't have the interest in the domain I am working. At the beginning, I had to learn everything from the technical environment and all the products and functionalities, and as I was new to the team and the role, it was challenging. But now, after 2 years, I get bored to talk about it. I have difficulties to show interests in what we do and to be more implicated.I started to ask myself if it was that I didn't enjoy to test anymore.

Answer 1

I hear you! I've been in your shoes and it feels all too familiar. I remember that whenever I've told someone what I am working on, I just could not express and show any fake excitement at all and just tried to not talk about the products I was working on at all by quickly changing the subject.

Not being aligned with and interested in the products you are testing, or company's business itself is actually a problem but it is not the end of the world as well.

• try moving your focus to other things: focus on technology, try out different and new testing techniques, types of testing, improve and expand your area of expertise. Just to pick one idea from many: approaching the testing from the idea of Personas may really shine new light on the very same products under test
• if it is at all possible, talk to your boss and clearly state that you are not as excited and motivated about the products as before. It is really okay to get bored working on the same thing for a long time
• take a vacation/break from work altogether
• compare yourself version "today" and version "a year ago" or "half a year ago" - what have you learned and achieved during this time at your work? If you cannot recall anything you are proud of or something notable - that's a bad sign and you need changes
• if nothing works and nothing changes, get yourself out of the comfort zone and change your job - it is quite an exciting time to be in the industry - it is trending - there are a lot of exciting opportunities out there and we have a chance to work on really interesting products and ideas - we have a chance to work on something we are really excited about - not something we have to work on

Answer 2

You are already motivating yourself by talking about your experiences here.

1. SQA is like a, how should I put it, emmm, testers Anonymous meeting. We share our experiences together, whether it is a frustration or a success or a technique. You can also talk with your peers at work over a cup of tea.
2. Organize an afternoon tea session with developers, testers and managers. Back in my old days, one place I worked for had this culture of Friday afternoon tea, where people shared a few jokes and talked about how they planned to spend their weekend.
3. You can try increasing the awareness towards testers within your company by organizing presentations, show casing what testers have been doing lately, what you have achieved; is there an important bug we have managed to catch lately? Tell others about testers.
4. Attend local testers meetups; there are normally a few testers meet ups here and there, simply drop in and meet new people and exchange your ideas.
5. If you have developed resentfulness towards a certain product, ask for a secondment in a different apartment, working on something else. Refresh your mind and come back to work.

Answer 3

I'm in the same shoes right now with my current project. The people in QA team are great, but apparently not the QA team itself. Separately, everyone is a very fun, positive and good person, but when it comes to work side, most of them become unrecognizable. And that's the main reason why I'm constantly losing all the interest in the project. Test cases are written incorrectly, automation code quality is very poor, the total absence of any sort of responsibility feeling within the team. Well, my solutions to the problem might not sound fair, but so far I found them as an escape from this boring atmosphere:

1. Try to learn new technologies. This can be in development, QA, DevOps, machine learning sides. I sometimes watch Pluralsight / Lynda courses right at the work desk. Even my manager sees it sometimes, and not making conclusions why I got bored :))

2. Talk to manager/director to see if any new projects are coming up in a very close future. Propose yourself as leading QA for it. The new challenge might wake your interest in the field.

3. Constantly keep connections with respectful in the field recruiters. They might call any next day for a great opportunity in a good company. No, I'm not saying switch the job, but being familiar with what's going on on the market and how much companies are willing to pay will keep you informed all the time.

Answer 4

Not sure what is your area and why you find it so boring.

In my long IT career I worked in many different problem areas, as different as accounting, under-performing mortgage servicing, bioinformatics, and much more. Every time, learning more about the problem area helped me to see why the problems are solved, and increase my satisfaction in solving them.

When I took classes in biology, I was able to understand better underlying problem, and ask biologists question which uncovered fundamental misunderstanding in our model (which would make our results worthless). Mortgage servicing itself is ridiculously complex, in some states laws are different in every county, and parametrizing it correctly (and make sure it works) is real puzzle. Maybe what helps is that I always loved complicated logical/math puzzles, and my current job is just a way to get paid for solving puzzles for other people :-)

Usually person is frustrated when person cannot control environment. So if you take a position that complication in your work, and required changes, are just random malicious requests to make your life miserable - it is frustrating of course. But if you make effort to understand why users are requesting all those seemingly random changes, what is the source of the complexity: you will see that the complexity has a reason, and solving it is less frustrating and more satisfying.

I sincerely doubt that after just 2 years you got into the very bottom of the current problem and it's complexity - and if you did, you should see way where it could be solved better, or where your users have needs not covered by the current system.

My project manager has saying, that there are only two issues that matter: communication and leadership. Communicate with your customers/users, and show leadership to solve the problems they have.

Answer 5

I guess you lost your mojo because you feel that you cannot change anything in the product/company. if you keep finding bugs, but a company keeps ignoring them. Good news: it is 21 century, it is OK to change jobs every 2-3 years.

As long as you are not sure - I suggest you to run small experiments. start using another testing method, try a new communication way, learn a new tool or language, ignite weekly informal meetings around development etc.