The little flutter of excitement I get if I find something interesting while playing. If I’m not in a timeboxed exploratory session, I go where the rabbit hole takes me, collecting as much info as possible along the way. The little joys I get in following a “huh?” to conclusion.
I really love getting into the ‘zone’ with deep work and really thinking during exploratory.
It’s a big game in my head where I try to optimize the expanse of what needs to be tested with my own efficiency in covering it all. That’s the good stuff for me.
When someone I respect tells me “good catch”.
And plenty more!
What could you add? What brings you joy when you test?
I get a special joy when I’ve had my suspicions about some anomalous behaviour that I think I’ve seen, or said to myself “Hang on - did I just see it do…?”, and being able to replicate the behaviour is neither straightforward nor obvious.
I get a major sense of achievement when I am finally able to replicate the behaviour (and even more when the dev says, “Yes, that’s a bug” as opposed to “It will do that when you do X, but no-one will ever do X anyway.”) (Of course, we know that someone, somewhere will do X at some point and it will seriously impact their experience of the product, but some devs won’t believe it until they get the ticket from tech support. Testers are allowed to say “I told you so” under those circumstances. )
Right now the things that bring me joy are:
• When I have to try hard to find any bugs
• Exploring the product and learning valuable info about it
• Discussing potential improvements to the product