The Curse of Knowledge suggests that when we know something we assume everyone knows it. Here I am talking about that in a 5 minute video.
My very first job out of University was with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). I learnt all about programming (in COBOL, how antique) and testing then. Many years have passed since then, and the idea of a testing environment has just been a part of my world.
Recently I’ve been working on change management in releasing software / SAP upgrades / apps for a few years now. I’m still surprised that people we ask to be UAT / User Acceptance Testers have no idea what a test environment is. I’m also surprised that the people working in IT don’t recognise their curse of knowledge on this subject. Rarely do we explain it, because we just assume that everyone knows.
Here’s an explanation I wrote recently to explain “the obvious” to the uninitiated.
The Test Environment – go Crazy, you can’t break it (and if you do, that’s a good thing!)
Test environments are not “real world”.
They are a copy of the real world (production) environment, often a few months old. Nothing you do in a test environment impacts the real environment.
You cannot break a test environment, and if you do break it, that’s good news. Because you’re in a testing environment we can put it back together and work out how to stop that happening in the real world.
The great thing (and the discouraging thing sometimes) is that because you are testing things you will probably find that some things don’t work.
Be happy if it doesn’t work! That’s what testing is for – to find problems and fix them.
You’re in a restricted and selected cohort of people who are testing this, so that the wider user community can benefit from a working system.
Every time you find a “fail” on a test, rejoice. One more inconvenience you and our colleagues won’t have to suffer when the system goes live (They say “break it, or live with it”)! So thank you for taking your time to test, we all know you have important things to do, and this isn’t at all a normal part of your job.
As a side note: if you enter something (a purchase order, a supplier, an expense, a customer) in the test system it does not exist in the real world. Conversely, if you added something in the real (production) environment yesterday or a week ago, it will not be in the test environment.
If you’re ever confused about what’s happening in the test environment do put your hand up so we can help you.
