Starting to test in a new environment is like stepping into a house where every door opens to a room you’ve never seen before. The floorplan is unfamiliar. The furniture doesn’t match what you’re used to. Some doors lead to wide, bright spaces. Others open into cluttered closets where things have been stashed for years.
That’s how it feels when you inherit a new data model, user flows, and all the little idiosyncrasies of an unfamiliar system.
I felt this when I began at my current company. The product worked differently than anything I had tested before. The way data moved through the system, the permissions and flows users relied on, even the vocabulary teams used—all of it required patience to understand. It’s tempting in those early weeks to feel like you should already be contributing at full speed. But I’ve learned that testing is not about rushing; it’s about orienting yourself so your contributions actually add clarity and trust.
What Makes This Hard
Different Data Model You can’t assume fields, relationships, or hierarchies will line up with what you’ve seen elsewhere. Even basic entities like “client,” “task,” or “invoice” can mean something very specific to the business. Unique User Flows The same outcome (say, creating a billing record) may involve different steps, dependencies, or permissions than you’ve seen in other systems. Organizational Idiosyncrasies Every company has its quirks—naming conventions, old feature flags that never got retired, or workflows that exist only because of one big client. These things don’t show up in the onboarding docs but they matter a lot in day-to-day testing.
Practical Advice for Getting Up to Speed
Here’s what has helped me move at a reasonable pace while still beginning to contribute:
Start With the Core Workflows Find the 3–5 most critical flows for the business. At my current company, this meant things like creating proposals, invoicing, and document signing. Learn those first. If you know what the lifeblood of the system is, you can already add value by spotting risks there. Use the Product Like a User Don’t just test features in isolation. Walk through them as if you are the customer. What do you notice? Where does it feel clunky or surprising? These observations become test charters in themselves. Pair With Someone Who Knows the System Early on, shadowing a developer or a customer success teammate can reveal hidden flows that no doc will tell you. At my current company, these conversations helped me discover what really scared people about production bugs. Write Down What You Learn Even if your notes feel messy, they’re gold. They give you something to return to when you forget, and they can become the foundation for onboarding the next person. Let AI Help I’ve found AI surprisingly effective for parsing database schemas, generating starter tests, or drafting docs from exploratory sessions. It doesn’t replace learning, but it speeds up the climb.
Encouragement for the Long View
In pastoral ministry, I learned that walking into a new congregation is not about proving yourself in the first week. It’s about listening, learning the story, and gradually earning trust. Testing in a new environment is the same. The story is in the data model, the user flows, and the quirks of the product.
Give yourself time. Learn to walk before you run. And remember: the goal is not just to find bugs—it is to build confidence in the system, for yourself and for your team.
—
Beau Brown
Testing in the real world: messy, human, worth it.
Testing Tester 
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