Test Engineering Is a Mindset, Not Just a Job

At this year’s Testing Peers 2025 conference, Katja Obrink delivered a talk that stuck with me long after the applause faded. She didn’t present slides packed with metrics or showcase the latest toolchain—she spoke about something more fundamental: mindset.

Her message was clear and powerful. The essence of a great test engineer isn’t in the tools they use or the test cases they write—it’s in how they think. The tester mindset, she argued, is rooted in curiosity, resilience, and a deep, sometimes stubborn, desire for quality. And most importantly, it's not something you can just teach.

I found myself nodding along with every word. Because I’ve seen it too. There’s something different about the way good testers look at software. Where others see features, we see risk. Where others feel relief when the code “kind of works,” we feel unease. We dig. We ask. We notice the things others don’t.

Katja’s talk reminded me of a moment from one of the most intense projects I’ve worked on.

We were working on a business-critical application. On paper, everything looked like it was coming together. Stories were being closed, builds were green, and timelines were being met. But I had this gnawing feeling that something wasn’t right. The product worked—but only if you used it in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time, and didn’t touch the edges.

You know that feeling? When your gut tells you the release is technically shippable but fundamentally broken?

I raised my concerns a few times, but they were met with nods and polite deferrals. “We’ll fix that later.” “Let’s not block the release.” “It’s probably an edge case.” After a while, I started doubting myself. Maybe I was being too critical. Maybe it really was “good enough.”

But in the final retrospective before release, I couldn't stay silent. I took a deep breath and said something that surprised even me: “I want to be proud of what we release. And right now, I’m ashamed. This should never see the light of day. We might be better off starting over.”

The room went quiet. Not defensive, not angry—just quiet. It was one of those moments where everything hangs in the air, and you know you’ve just changed the conversation.

It wasn’t easy to say. And I knew it could have gone the other way. But something shifted in that moment. The team started to reflect more critically on the state of the product. We stopped looking at story points and started looking at actual user experience. Bugs that had been brushed aside were suddenly unacceptable. We raised the bar, together.

Over the next two months, we worked harder and smarter. We prioritized, we rewrote, we retested. We stopped obsessing over the original scope and started focusing on what actually mattered. And when we finally released, it was a completely different product—stable, intuitive, and genuinely useful. That application is still in use today, and still delivering value. It’s something I’m proud of.

That experience reinforced something I’ve come to believe deeply: A tester’s job isn’t to make peace with mediocre software—it’s to challenge it.

Good testers don’t just follow steps or check boxes. They see the gaps, the rough edges, the future problems. They know when to speak up, even if it means being “the difficult one in the room.” That kind of mindset isn’t about being negative—it’s about caring so much that you refuse to let things slide.

We need more of that mindset in our teams. Not just in people with the title “tester,” but in developers, designers, product owners—everyone. We all benefit when someone has the courage to say, “This isn’t good enough,” and the persistence to help make it better.

Katja was right. You can’t teach this mindset like a framework or a technique. But you can nurture it. You can create environments where speaking up is safe, where quality is valued over velocity, and where curiosity is rewarded rather than rushed.

Because in the end, quality isn’t just about the software we ship—it’s about the pride we take in our craft. And that’s a mindset worth fighting for.