I got this out of a Jon Carroll column. It really hit home. After all, in testing I'm an autodidact, too. Sure, I went to college, and sure I got a degree, but nothing there taught me testing. I've been to some conferences, and taken a few classes, and I read a fair amount, but for the most part, what I learned I've learned on my own.
I'm missing something.
But you know what? Even if I had gone to school for testing, and been trained in testing by someone who knew a lot about the field, I would still be missing something.
I would be missing all the times I'd read an article on some testing technique and said to myself, "hey, that would be really cool if I used it for this totally different thing". (For example, I read an article about a guy who was using the VMWare CLI to start and stop machines for installer testing, and I said, "hey, I could use that to dynamically configure machines in a Selenium Grid").
I would be missing all the times I'd screwed up a test and discovered that actually I'd been testing something completely different - and that was useful information.
I'd be missing all the times I stumbled across a tool I'd never heard of and made it do something with help from Google and from friends.
So yeah, I'm an autodidact. I'm learn a heck of a lot from myself and from all the information I seek out by myself. I suspect most of us do, and I think a lot of us doe a pretty darn good job with it.
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