It’s September 9, and we are once again celebrating International Testers’ Day here at Nortal. It has become a tradition, and it seems we mark-off the years by this day.
Nortal’s QAs are a close-knit tribe. We work with passion and support and inspire each other. We know how much impact we have on the projects, and we are committed to making them a success. That is why we also appreciate the chance to celebrate every once in a while, be it Testers’ Day, boardgame nights, or merely having lunch together.
This year has brought significant changes to our work culture. We were used to working mainly from the office and among our colleagues, where we can collaborate easily. This has now changed to a home office culture where you can’t just shout out the question and get an answer (I doubt your cat or your child can help you with QA topics). Nevertheless, I think we have managed to work things out and are now used to the new normal, where you gather information by “shouting” in a Teams chat instead.
As our internal training and other learning possibilities and conferences have moved into virtual space, we can participate in a much more comprehensive range of events. There’s a stronger emphasis on online learning platforms. And this new situation has motivated me to take more online courses as well — not only to advance my IT profession, but also to widen my knowledge in psychology, cooking, cat videos and countless useless facts. I also strongly advise you to use free time not to be used for commuting to learn new skills. Or on the other hand, you can just sleep more to be fully energized to tackle the everyday testing challenges!
To get you all in a celebrating mood, I have gathered some reminders of the fun we have had since the last Testers’ Day.
Disclaimer: the comments may not be historically accurate!
Last year’s Testers’ Day we had visitors from outer space to bring us the ultimate wisdom to recognize obvious bugs!
Also, we tried out what it’s like to be a tax-payer in Botswana. I became a billionaire for a day!
We dressed up for personas testing. By the way, it’s quite hard to use a computer as a ghost!
We enjoyed a Black Box Tasting event at Christmas. Now we are qualified to offer our services as food tasters.
We virtually visited restaurants, shops and events in Germany to get a glimpse of their social life.
We had different challenges to spice up the everyday work routine, either by doodling our testing problems; sharing good tools, blogs and podcasts or measuring the distance from our computers to the coffee machine.
And hopefully everybody had a relaxing summer to recharge their batteries.
Happy new learning year — be safe and have fun!
