Steps to become a better software tester - can do these over a period of time - Part 9

In the previous post (How to become a better software tester), I have been writing a series on how a tester can improve his / her abilities. Making oneself a better tester means that you get a much enhanced reputation, your career prospects improve, you get promoted faster, and the better developers seek you out to get their features tested. In this post, I will write some more tips that will help the tester improve their abilities:
- You need to be positive in your approach. The developers will not like this, but if you start with the approach that you will find bugs in your testing, it is more likely that you will find yourself in the best frame in which to find bugs. When a person is in this mode, they are likely to question things and question the feature, and start finding the weak points in the feature that are likely to lead to determining the bugs in the feature.
- Another way in which you can find bugs is by collaborating more with your other testers. One of the weakest points of features is where one feature interacts with another feature - this can be through passing of data from one feature to another, or API's that relate one feature to another, and so on. Testing assignments are normally from one feature to another, so the interaction of one feature with another does not typically get the attention it deserves. If you work closely with the testers who work on the features with which your features integrate, it is likely that you will find more bugs, and this will help in shaking out all the bugs in your feature. This does not happen without spending more effort, whether in working with the other testers, or focusing on the additional testing, but the returns will be worth it.
- Be the person who knows the feature well, even if this means that you are the person who spends the most time reading the designs, reading the specifications, and so on. This makes you the expert on the feature, including when important demos need to be given (which is good for your career), and is also important since you get the feature knowledge necessary for doing some great testing.