Interview with Maaike Brinkhof

Maaike Brinkhof

Twitter: @maaikees

Interview

Where are you in your testing journey?

At the moment I’m an iOS developer working on my own app as an indie developer and I’m not working as a tester. That isn’t to say that I’m no longer a tester since all these skills serve me extremely well as a developer. Programming has always fascinated me, but I was never any good at it as a tester so I’ve decided to take the time to invest in myself and learn it properly.

The best bug you have ever found?

That time when I wanted to try out a poo emoji in a mobile app and followed its journey to the database and back and it broke almost any system it went through. The biggest failure was at the database that couldn’t handle unicode, but every system in between (API’s, the website, the mobile app GUI) also showed very weird things instead of the poo emoji. The “solution” for this bug was to prevent the use of emoji’s in the app, which saddened me more than I care to admit.

Advice you would give to Testers?

Please reconsider your stance on quality. Do you really believe testing is correlated to better quality? Is it really a guarantee? I think QA is a terrible name for testers. Quality is something that can’t be ensured or assured, the judgement of quality is for the user to make. I don’t think we testers should be as arrogant to make claims about how good the quality of a product is. In stead, we should aim to make working software, that is a more achievable goal. Leave the quality judgement to someone else.

What does winning mean to you?

If you mean winning in general: not much. I don’t care about winning or losing or competition. But if you mean winning this title, I’m mostly appreciative of the fact that some other person cared enough about me to nominate me. Patrick nominated me and I really want to hug him for that, he’s so kind. You, Ben, are also amazing for this initiative and seeing it through!