Am I the Software Testing World Champion?

I have seen many software testing myths becoming dead at many practical points and so does the claims of software testing giants who unbelievably have surpassed a huge amount of time in a domain and claiming to be the subject matter expert of that domain but the question arises.. Are they the one and only...? Many software testing practitioners argue that at some point of time in your career, you have to stop and then work on the young generation, which is great by the way as I am not pin pointing the negative aspect in it, but still why I have to think it in that way when I actually reach at that point?? Does any body have an answer..?

Again this is one of the hottest topic that always turns out to be bone of contention in between practitioners as this topic divides them in two group, one in favor and the other one in against. Now lets elaborate both perspectives in simpler way by taking an example of one group in favor, lets suppose I am in banking industry for 5+ years and the company has decided to place me in lead position making me the head of QA for x.y.z team. Now being a lead my task would definitely be but not confined to building a team, educating the team and then harnessing the skills of the team. That's awesome and its been going great since 2 or 2.5 years, recently a new technology got adopted which I am not familiar with and then suddenly I will realize that I was not prepared for it. Makes sense? And the interesting part is that a junior QA has recently worked on that technology and that makes him quite skillful in comparison to my self. But since I am the subject matter expert so it won't hurt my ego as I would be utilizing that resource for my self learning and carrying out the required tasks for the product. No ego, no worries :)

Whew! that was a good part, now here comes the point when a group of practitioners is against the point of stopping yourself in learning phase and educating the young generation with your experience. Now I am not totally against this perspective because as a lead you have big responsibilities rather than putting yourself in the curve in a same way as a junior resource would be doing so. Now there comes many testing scenarios which you can't cover because you have to drill down that technology or language at a good extent and it will take you more than 2 months to have a good hands on experience on that technology or language, while on the other hand, the junior resource has already learned that technology or language and has been fluent in writing test cases. Now as a QA lead, you cannot guide him/her with your expertise on the technology or language rather than you can nourish him/her with respect to the common test scenarios that you had experience during your tenure as non-lead resource.

The result? Who won? Well there is no doubt on the fact that you should keep on learning and implementing it in your on going projects to get more clarity on testing optimization and a better way of implementation and execution of what you've learned so far and keeping your lead role or subject matter role aligned and flourish with advent of new technology or language.