Anon, thanks for this comment. I’m having trouble answering it–not because I don’t have an answer, but because I have so many. It’s worth a blog post of its own. Stay tuned.

What’s interesting is I often use the word “play” to quickly communicate what I’m doing…I think it both communicates what we’re doing, and that we like our job.

Fair enough, but I’d be careful to consider the audience. As Mary Reilly suggests, play often isn’t taken seriously, even though it ought to be.

I have a three-year-old daughter, and watching her play is watching her learning. Testing is learning, too.

For project managers who like test plans and lots of documentation, exploratory testing would seem to be a poor fit without some education. And even then it would be a tough road.

One thing I see lacking in the testing field is that there is a lot of talk about great methods, but most of the time it assumes an environment where there is strong support for the testing function. How do you test in an environment where the rest of the engineering functions are hostile to your methods?

Luckily, I’m not in such a situation now, but I left my last job because of a profound, and previously hidden, difference in testing philosophy between myself as the test lead and the project manager. The project manager felt that if bugs got through it was the testers fault, never mind the developer who wrote the bug in the first place. In his case he took the lack of traditional test documentation as a sign of a poor testing process. Unfortunate.