Snoop on the Competition: Learning from Other People's Mistakes
The cheapest bugs to fix are the ones someone else already tripped over. Are you watching closely enough?
One day, three fishermen sat by the river.
The first cast his net and said, "I only watch my own line. I don't care what anyone else catches. If I focus hard enough, I'll surely bring in the biggest fish."
The second laughed. He looked over at the fisherman downstream, saw him struggling to pull in his line, and said, "That rock always breaks the nets. He's about to lose his catch. I'll cast my net upstream instead."
The third fisherman quietly walked along the shore, studying where the reeds broke, where the currents swirled, and where fish had slipped from others' nets. Then he cast exactly once - and came back with a basket full of fish.
The Point of the Story
In software, too many teams behave like the first fisherman: focused only on their nets, their modules, their scope of control. They're diligent but blind to the lessons unfolding downstream.
But the cheapest problems to fix are the ones someone else already discovered.
Your competitors have already stumbled on rocks in the river - bugs, failures, outages. If you're paying attention, you don't need to stumble on the same ones.
How to "Snoop" the Right Way
- Regulatory Reports: In regulated industries, detailed problem reports are public archives. They're goldmines of "what can go wrong."
- Social Media & News: Customers are quick to share their frustrations online. Even a Twitter rant can point you to a hidden testing scenario.
- Support Forums: Many companies run customer Q&A boards and even semi-public bug trackers. Every unanswered complaint is a test idea waiting for you.
- Fake Post-Mortems: Take a competitor's public failure, pretend it happened to you, and run a retrospective. What would have let that slip through?
Closing Thought
You don't always need to cast your nets in deeper waters. Sometimes, you just need to watch where others' nets have torn. By snooping smartly, you protect your product from repeating history - and your users from catching the same old rocks.
Because in testing as in fishing: the wisest catch isn't the one you fight hardest for. It's the one you didn't lose in the first place.