Disclaimer: These are my experiences and may not be shared by individuals or industry “experts”…now that I’ve said it out loud, let me rant 
Dictionary defines word Creativity as (as per Dictionary app running on OS X 10.6)
Creativity [noun]: The use of the imagination or original ideas, esp. in the production of an artistic work
Wikipedia says
Creativity – A mental process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the existing ideas or concepts,fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight.
Ok ok ok, this is not a rant about definitions…so, what does this have to do with Software Testing?
Well, I believe it relates to software testing in a fundamental way, specially in the context of Indian software testers I happen to encounter via interviews, work, personal interaction, reading their thoughts on the internet.
How so?
Most testers are “trained” either via institutes or on-the-job training which mainly involves the process of forcing out ones innate ability to be curious (and explore) and indoctrinate the culture of reading reams and reams of testing literature. This process makes us believe that the literature provides answer to all problems to our testing challenges (even though the documentation was written years ago and the challenges are ever changing) and we should adhere to it for success or perish to mediocrity (as a tester) if we fail. It all sounds so familiar to me when compared to how grown up’s taught youngsters about “age old rituals” and things like “make sure you put right foot out of the house first on your examination days to get good marks”. The indoctrination is pretty smooth and consistent which forces testers to let go of their most basic quality of being creative when trying to solve a problem which eventually gets lost as months/years progress in your work life.
No, that’s not true – we need documentation/literature to learn about previous successes and mistakes.
That’s true but it doesn’t mean that we hold such things to a higher standard and do all our current problem solving using it as reference. People are creative/inquisitive by nature and if they are taught to hone that skill, I believe they become better at problem solving than making them read hundreds of pages on Processes. The key in my mind is to have an environment where mistakes are considered failures/bad. If a test team is fearful of being wrong, they’d not be creative.
This doesn’t mean that making mistakes can be termed as “being creative” but, if one is not prepared to be wrong (and acknowledge/take responsibility when wrong), you won’t come up with creative/original ideas. I constantly come into situations where I’ve seen testers being afraid of being wrong when trying/doing something new which concerns me because that feeling (of being afraid) seeps very quickly into a tester’s normal way of life which in turn stops/stagnates his potential.
Ok so if you are a Guru, what in your opinion is the solution
Well, I told you that this is a rant (read my disclaimer) and though I do not consider myself a Guru of some kind but I do believe that there are some fundamental areas of ones life that need to be radically improved if the new generation of software testers are to be better / more constructive and more contributive towards a successful product. I believe that testers need to take up the baton of not being afraid to try new things or ideas (remember kids? if they didn’t know, they’d have a go with no fear of failure). This is not a silver bullet but it certainly is something that helps one to come out of one’s comfort zone and improve – and that’s (improving) the real silver bullet
I believe that all testers can be good at what they are doing because we are an intelligent species, we think diverse, we think dynamically, we experience the world around us in so many different ways (senses) like visually, sound, abstract and above all all of us are unique, we bring different things to the table. Then why should we stop doing this and chain ourselves to few set of ideas that were created years ago (in a different context) and in most cases hurting the evolution of new ideas.
This blog is merely a brain-dump of something I’ve thought often, specially when I read about someone breaking the shackles of tradition and try out something different or use her own thoughts/ideas to explore. If you have any comments/experiences, I’d like to hear them.
PS: special thanks to Parimala Shankaraiah whose coaxing (and my promise to her) helped me in getting this post out sooner than it would have otherwise.