What do you hate about testing?

Tester interview questions usually focused on positive results, like most obvious test interview question is what do you like about testing, but should it be the case. I believe asking reverse interview question would open the real mind of candidate for Test Engineer position and would perfectly describe the software development organization where Test Engineer works now.

The most hated term among all testers is “UI Automation” and the misunderstanding from management around “UI automation”, thinking it is the silver bullet to all software development problems. As result the company spends money on unproductive test automation software.

Next most hated issue would be the developers. Some developers know how to test, when to test and what to test, another just throw the code over the fence with issue so bad that a basic sanity test could have caught as blocking issue.

The testers do not like managers, because every time the customer raises a defect in shipped product the management would question the testing team why this defect was missed during the testing cycle and who missed the issue instead of doing the root cause analysis for the defect. Some managers continuously call Test Engineer as Quality Assurance Engineer while Quality Assurance is a process not a title and request the software application to be QA’s when the meant tested.

Of course test engineers hate themselves. There are testers who get comfortable with what they already know and stop pushing themselves to learn more, other testers doing the same manual tasks again and again, while basic automation should be applied and used.