Here I go...
Time to put things to the test (pun intended)
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand,” Confucius once said. After one and a half years of school, it was time to put things into practice. Learning by doing.
I had the privilege of doing my internship at Qlik in Lund, a company that develops software for collecting, organizing, and drawing insights from data. Finally, I was going to see how things are done in the “real world”.
I soon discovered two things:
Things are exactly like I’ve been taught.
Things are nothing like I’ve been taught.
How can those coexist?
Well both can be true at the same time. The basic meaning of testing was the same — the thinking behind it and the way we talked about it. The ways of working, however, were different. But then again, in school we were always told that there are as many ways of testing as there are companies — or maybe even testers.
I noticed that what I enjoyed the most was trying to think like the end user — what they need, what might confuse them, and what could improve their experience. After all, if it’s not working in a way that feels intuitive for them, what’s the point?
But I was afraid to step into actual coding. Writing automated tests felt like a huge step and something I wouldn’t manage. I did some, but in hindsight I wish I had had more courage. After all, I was there to learn.
Talking about learning, I also struggled with finding the balance between trying to figure things out on my own and not waiting too long before asking for help. I often found myself trying to solve things independently, but also learning when it was better to just reach out.
Looking back, I realized I had actually picked up quite a lot of test theory during my studies — more than I gave myself credit for at the time. It didn’t feel complete yet, but it was there in the background, helping me make sense of things.
Pretty quickly, I started to feel like I had made the right choice. There was something about testing that just made sense to me, and Qlik was a perfect place to discover that.
After the internship, I stayed at Qlik and worked over the summer. A few months of actually working with testing. I loved it — now I just had to find a more long-term job.
In this point in time i still didn't know how hard it would be
