When I introduce myself as a tester either to a known person or to an unknown, many people asked me why not a developer? Or so many said oh testing in a sarcastic way which used to make me feel that it is not at all a Job :(
Also, they will refer some X person passed out in XXXX year from other streams (ex: Pharmacy, Agriculture etc.) who could not get into their field due to several reasons. Recently they completed learning some YY testing tool and want to join Quality Assurance team. J
I will just say them that testing is just not learning a tool and entering into the field. It is an art and person should be passionate enough to do that work.
A few myths behind their question/feelings can be any of these
1. Tester does not require skills to get into software field
2. Tester’s job is not an innovative work
3. Testers will not get an opportunity to code.
etc.
But I strongly oppose all of these.
Testers Job is very very innovative. The more we think the more complicated scenarios we can get to test.
I personally feel that only skills that a best QA engineer should have are innovative thinking and coding skills.
In Olden days, even in Companies, there were occurrences where QA is given least significance.
Earlier it was so because Developer used to write the specification and QA job is to derive test cases out of the specification and do Manual Testing. Automate only if they can.
Though the Product or service is developed by Developers, it does not mean that only developers are required to take care of everything. I can strongly say that Developers may not be able to test as an end user due to their development perception.They can think of the scenarios on how to test the written code but they may not think many cases which cover the whole product.
But after the Agile adoption,
- QA is now getting an opportunity to participate from feature planning itself which helps in thinking the scenarios based on customer perspective.
- Apart from normal functional testing, QA is now responsible for doing Non-Functional testing like Security, Performance, Resiliency Testing etc.
- QA is targeting to automate the feature completely to reduce repeated manual testing.
So now the software testing job is the very responsible and critical job.
As mentioned earlier, tester’s job is not just executing manual scenarios but has lot many things to perform. I have listed a few responsibilities of a tester below.
- Should think like a customer and write cases (Very Innovative and critical task)
- Developing Automation for the test scenarios (Need coding skills)
- Maintaining the automation framework
- Enhancing existing automation framework
- Triaging the automation results
- Write New test cases for new features and maintain existing Test cases.
- Regular Regression Testing
- Perform Integration Testing
- Continuous Integration to find the issues when the product runs continuously.
- Should be capable enough in debugging the customer issues.
- Develop Test Strategy
- Develop Quality Profile
- Perform Non-Functional testing (like Security, Performance, load, Resiliency, i18N etc.)
I do most of these things and I am really proud to say I AM SOFTWARE QA Engineer rather than just a Software Engineer. :)
