Hear to discover the Unseen

Yes, you read it right. I’m talking about “Hearing, and not listening”. While the world is focusing on listening as a skill, I want to draw attention to hear. The basic ability of ours. While listening requires focused attention, anything you overhear can be beneficial too!

Being a tester, the information I have is never enough. I always end up seeking new details.

While I was attentive in meetings, my basic hearing ability has been of a lot of use post meetings.

Hearing just happens. Mostly, when you multitask.

You hear (where you are not directly involved) the announcements, sounds, gossip, arguments, discussions, news, and chats. You automatically recall them while you are performing related activities.

I hear when - E.g.

Devs discuss the issue fix while grabbing a coffee - this later gives ideas on how else I could test.
There are discussions about choosing a specific 3rd party library - I get an idea of what all other libraries may or may not offer, and how to test the feature in a different context.
We have water cooler chats- I get an indication of how one of the apps messed up.
UI/UX team talk about why a specific colour - I now understand the accessibility and dark theme usage.
The backend team highlights an issue - I recall I had come across something similar in the app, and I now make sure that I visit that warning/error again. How someone could not use the app specifically on 29th Feb!

These are the scenarios where you do not have to pay attention. Even hearing a few words can trigger your thinking process, which may or may not lead you to listen.

The important things to bear in mind when you hear words:

You don’t judge
You should not be biased
You just take it as a raw material
You don’t get affected or overwhelmed
You do not have to prepare a response to what you hear

Hearing helps you uncover a lot of unnoticed aspects of software or a domain. This helps you explore the area further and eventually recommend robust automation after your exploratory findings.