A true Story: Explained My Work i.e. Software Testing to my Father
When I started my career as a Software Test Engineer with a reputed company my father asked me what you do sitting all day looking at the computer screen. I said that I make sure that things (software) work the way it is expected to. And believe me it was difficult for me to explain my job because my father is businessman and IT is not something went down well with him earlier. Although he made a handsome profit after investing in some IT companies right in middle of Dot com crash...it did take some time before he en cash it.
Few years later, one morning I asked my father, “If you invest Rs. 500,000 in share market, in Share of one single company, do you see any risk (of making losses) there and if yes how do you minimize the losses?”
He promptly said, “I am not a fool to invest Rs 500,000 in a single company without considering Risks, the risk of losing hard earned money. Once I invest, it means that I have taken a Long position on some equity with a view that I will sell these shares after sometime when prices of this equity go up and thereby I’ll make profit. But as I cannot afford to lose all my money so what I do, I buy Put Option (buyer of Put Option gets a right to Sell underlying asset at pre-agreed terms and conditions to seller of the option.) to hedge my risk for a minimal premium (amount)”.
I said, “Papa now I’ll explain what I do. Software is developed with an intention to reduce manual intervention in things which we do in our day to day life and software does all this at a very fast speed. As a trader, earlier you were buying / selling shares by making a phone call to your agent and he used to do all the trading on your behalf, now sitting at home you can see price movement and buy/sell accordingly by using a Computer with Internet connection and having some Demat / trading account. Now if something goes wrong with your trading application (suppose it starts buying against your sell order) you might lose a lot of money.” He agreed to my delight as it made some sense to him.
Then I said, “As a software tester my job is to identify such problems which we call Defects and get it fixed by developers and again test before it is shipped to its users. A trader hedges the risk by Buying a Put option against the Long position s/he has taken on some equity. Though, not all traders do it and the reasons can be many. For example; Not a big amount of money is at risk and s/he is willing to take that risk of losing money ad don’t want to pay extra cost s/he will incur on buying a Put option for a premium. In market, if price of Share does not go down and market is offering more than what seller of Put Option is then trader will not sell his securities to that fellow and will let option seller keep his Premium (which s/he initially paid as an Option buyer) and sell the securities in the market for a higher profit.
Now implement this is Software industry. Company invests a good amount of money on developing the application and if they do not go for testing Risk of something going wrong increases so in order to hedge this risk the application owners ask for testing also.
By drawing this analogy I could successfully explain my work to my father and he agreed that I am doing something good.
