Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering

Stop the blame, keep the learning - Natalia Romanska

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Why your biggest professional mistakes might be your most valuable teachers

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"I can make mistakes. I will be doing mistakes in the future. That's not something that we can just skip and forget." - Natalia Romanska

In this episode, I talk with Natalia Romanska about why our biggest professional disasters often teach us more than our polished success stories. She shares how a 70,000 złoty accounting mistake early in her career forced her to develop the self-awareness that now guides her QA work—and why that painful learning stuck harder than any training ever could. We dig into the uncomfortable truth that testers rarely talk about: the gap between knowing we should learn from failures and actually sitting down to extract those lessons. Natalia offers concrete practices for turning blame into growth, from the "magic five whys" to building feedback loops that don't just stroke our egos.

Once an accountant, Natalia Romanska is now a QA. She is a fan of a holistic approach to Quality Assurance - the one that begins with neatly designed processes and thoughtful planning. She truly enjoys having things balanced, both in private and professional life. After hours, you’ll find her rewatching Friends, exploring new destinations, and always on the hunt for the next great scent

Highlights:

  • Analyzing a failure without emotions involved is a precondition for extracting useful lessons: grief and reaction belong first, analysis comes after the feelings settle.
  • Every failure is a different case with different contributing factors, so no universal pattern applies and each incident requires its own root-cause analysis, not a recycled fix.
  • Comparing your current self to your past self tracks real growth more accurately than comparing yourself to others, whose visible success represents only a fraction of their actual experience.
  • Self-awareness requires active input from outside, including regular feedback from managers and peers, because personal bias blocks honest self-assessment even after years of experience.
  • Avoiding an activity entirely after a painful failure, as Natalia Romanska did with public speaking after nearly fainting on stage, is itself a signal that the failure has not yet been fully processed.

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      Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality EngineeringBy Richard Seidl | Software Development & Testing Expert