Dear project team,

This year I will…

• target my testing to find you the right information sooner and trust your decision to ship early.
• not test everything just because it is possible to test.  Instead, I’ll spend my energy where I think my services are most valuable to you.  I’ll tell you what I decide not to test and why.  If you disagree, I will change my plan and test it.
• consider the idea to stop executing tests that I’m 99.99% sure will pass.
• not stress out about test deadlines.  When I run out of time I will share that with you; in the past you have either jumped in to help or given me more time.  It typically is not as terrible as I anticipate.  Nevertheless, I promise not to be a slacker because it doesn’t feel nearly as good as being an over-achiever.
• swallow my pride and ask you questions sooner, rather than hoping I understand later (even though I enjoy self-education via independent exploring and experimenting).
• pay more attention to the business needs behind the things I test, as they will help me focus my test coverage.
• look for ways to increase my value to you, like giving impromptu test reports, offering to log your bugs, and testing breadth before depth to at least catch the obvious ones early.
• learn something about Selenium because everyone keeps talking about it and I feel dumb not knowing much about it.  And who knows, someday I may have an opportunity to test a website for a change.
• congratulate you on good work and take more interest in your achievements as BAs, Programmers, and CMs.
• read that Data Warehouse Toolkit book by Kimball that you keep referring to.  I’m sure much of it will be boring but I think it will help me respect your development efforts and determine new test ideas.  It should also increase my Data Warehouse vocabulary.
• squeeze time out of each day for learning something new about testing because fresh ideas make my job more interesting and make me a better tester.  I will share these test ideas with you for the fun of it.  Who knows, it may lead to something we can use here on a project.
• stay late to meet deadlines or accommodate production releases…sometimes.  Not often, hopefully.  But I will do my time like others on our team and I will thank you when you work late.  My personal time is important to me, therefore, it must also be important to you.
• pay attention to my little tester light bulb that occasionally goes off with new thoughts.  I will attempt to blog about these thoughts on my personal blog during non-work time.

How about you?  Any Tester New Year’s Resolutions?