Unit Testing Your Life
Welcome to another episode of trying to figure out what I am doing in the tech space – I can’t wait to make a podcast of these blogs.
I have had the chance to work with amazing womxn in the tech space and in my recent role – I have met an incredible Head of Quality Assurance (QA) in my division. You would be surprised how very few womxn managers/heads there are but I was not. As a womxn of color – I feel like navigating the tech space is easier (using this term loosely) when I have someone like me in a higher position giving me advice/mentorship. I look to people like Shabhana Thaver or Rakhi Naodar who are champions for womxn in tech and they are killing it.
I tend to ramble a lot and in a recent ramble with our head of QA – I spoke about feeling lost and as the quality assurance person she is, she hinted that it may be time to individually scrutinize my operating system (OS) aka my life. She said there may be a number of issues leading to this feeling but the main ones should be listed like how you would unit test your OS.
The purpose of unit testing is to validate that each portion/unit of the software code performs as expected. Unit testing is done during the development (coding) of an application by developer (in this case, me). Unit tests separate a section of code and confirm that they work the way they should. In my case, it involved understanding what are my triggers for feeling lost and testing when it occurs. This allows you to know what is the cause and it is easier to fix once you know what is causing your code not to work the way it is meant to.
A unit test usually consists of many things and one of them is test cases. Each case needs to be tested separately in an isolated environment to make sure it does not depend on something else in the code. The developer needs to test this and make a test for every line. This seems tedious but is crucial because you can’t solve the bigger problem without solving the smaller ones. I was feeling lost because of multiple things – family, stress, anxiety etc but I would not see those individual items if I only looked at just being lost. I had to dig deeper and understand the smaller portions that contributed to this. These small portions are important because they serve as defects/bugs.
Unit tests help to catch defects/bugs early which saves costs because there is little that may be affected. Unfortunately, this is similar to life. If you catch bad habits, tendencies or decisions early then it is easier to fix them than later on. Unit tests help with reusing code because the portion (function, procedure, class etc) already works. This is similar to positive habits – you tend to do them over and over again and they help your overall life in general. It leads to discipline, having a routine and many positive things (as the Tik Tokers would tell you).
Unit testing requires you to understand the code in high level and low level which is similar to understanding where you want to go and the habits/routines you are building/doing to get there. During our chat, she emphasized that you need to look at what is making you feel this way and breaking it down. This allows you to analyze and fix what may be broken. Some things take huge fixes or small ones but do not underestimate the importance of fixing the small ones because they are tested to determine whether they are fit for use. In your case – it would be determining whether or not they fit for the life you want.