Still, when your job is based around finding what's wrong with something before it gets into the gentle hands of your customers (who are usually even more able to find problems than the best testers, because... well, we do what we think a sensible person would do. We usually don't get a chance to do monkey testing and randomly click stuff because we're flat out trying to make sure that would should work, does), you're going to have a mindset that's focused on finding flaws. Possibly you'll even get nitpicky. Or - horrors! - negative.
When you look at testing in the broadest sense we've got several basic responsibilities when it comes to new software. We're effectively responsible for making sure that
- it does what it's supposed to do
- it doesn't do anything it shouldn't do
- it doesn't break anything that used to work
- if it does barf, it does so as gracefully as possible
- and it doesn't gobble all the available CPU, take forever to do a simple lookup, or any of the thousands of usually undocumented extras that are taken for granted.
- Oh, and it looks good and doesn't confuse anyone.
Also in my experience, when a customer hits on the one scenario in several million that blows the software up, they blame the testers for not finding it. They don't know - or care - that we're supporting hundreds of other customers who all have completely different configurations and would never hit that problem. They just want their scenario to work.
This might not go down well with managerial types, but I don't consider it to be negative when it's true. Even my typically blunt form of honest isn't something I'd call negative - because I'm not claiming things are worse than they are.
Of course, to those who like to live their professional lives in cocoons of happy-happy sales talk, it's going to sound negative.
(True story - the worst year my employer ever had, every month without fail the sales manager kept on with the "but next month will be great and it will all turn around". Needless to say, it didn't - but whatever the heck drug the sales dudes are on, I wouldn't mind a stash for release days. It must be potent stuff).