How To Be A Better Software Tester
Software Testing is a rapidly expanding field with many specialized careers available. These job openings often provide a nice salary and appear in a variety of organizations, from government agencies to product companies and global corporations. Software testing as a career allows IT professionals to use their creativity and problem-solving skills to help businesses offer fully functioning programs and services to employees and customers. Still many people and organizations have a tough time finding the right software tester and it is because of the lack of the "secret skills" apart from analyzing requirements, test planning, setting up a test environment, executing cases, and reporting bugs. A Software tester’s role is not just bound by the above skills, it includes way more than that.
Software Testers should be flexible with various testing strategies, (for example, automation versus manual testing), the latest testing tools, and essentially a passing knowledge of the choices. For instance, manual-testing abilities alone won't cut it. Somebody who has become capable in five more established testing tools presumably can gain proficiency with the following five - - including some that are still under development or in the Beta phase.
Every software tester must be aware of different testing techniques and the use of tools. Regardless of the domain and application type, the knowledge of different testing types like black-box testing, penetration testing, security testing, system testing, unit testing, automation testing, API testing, etc. makes a software tester versatile. Moreover, with the number of tools that have been available in the marketing such as bug tracking tools, test management tools, GUI testing tools, automation tools, etc. It becomes mandatory for software testers to be aware of these tools and techniques to serve different requirements and complexities of the project.
A software tester should know, how to conceive real-time business situations through mind mapping, abstracting the idea inferred from the specifications. Ongoing business situations ought to solidify in testers’ minds, and they ought to contemplate what test cases are, rather than what they should be. A software tester should be able to anticipate complex problems, in addition to articulating and visualizing them. The software tester should be able to perform a complete system simulation rapidly and accurately in the present software development environments.
When we talk about programming, it isn’t that software testers need to work as a developer, but it is important to understand the inside out of the application so that it becomes easy to understand the functioning and create tests accordingly. Programming knowledge helps to identify possible issues in the application code which further reduces the chances of bugs and application incapabilities. A Software tester should learn at least two programming languages since there are brighter chances for testers to understand the workarounds of the application for ensuring a better application quality lifecycle. This covers?Automation Testing?as well.
Unlike traditional setup, modern-day testing projects demand testers to be ready for providing customer support and to think from their perspectives. Being a software tester does not mean that you should always remain back office as software testers contribute equally to the success or failure of the project and hence they should always be available to respond to and support customer requirements.
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As a software tester, it is very important to understand individual components of the system and how they interact with each other under given circumstances. The presence of multiple stakeholders in modern businesses makes it challenging to understand the complete functioning of these systems. Software testers can holistically test the application if they can detach themselves from the system and get an outsider’s perspective. This view of the components will give them a better understanding of the component and any errors in its internal working as well. This is known as the Glocal approach, monitoring global interaction as well as local working.
As a tester, you need to understand what should be tested and what should be given less priority, what should be automated and what should be tested manually, which task should be taken up first and what can be done at the last moment. Once you are a master of defining priorities, software testing would be fun. A software tester unknowingly becomes a good time manager as the first thing he needs to understand is a priority. These regular prioritization challenges distinguish a smart software tester from the rest of the crowd.
Every software tester should possess good communication skills. By good communication, I mean that they should be a good writer, speaker, listener, and reader to communicate effectively with stakeholders such as update the status of the project to the clients, inform about requirements to the team, communicate issues to the developers, translate requirement documents to test cases and prepare reports for management. Apart from this, good communication helps in demonstrating a high degree of comprehension which further helps in conveying insights and giving feedback to both technical and non-technical people logically and rationally.?This practice of reporting leads to better coordination of the overall test project and also gives transparency to the top management in terms of test cases executed, bugs encountered, release timelines, etc. which eventually helps in taking the right decisions.
It is intellectual curiosity that motivates and prompts a software tester to identify interesting questions about the software being tested. A tester should understand that being an intellectual and being intellectually curious is not the same. A tester should arguably be the latter one; intellectually curious – which is all about asking questions and not about having answers. Software testers should love asking questions and should not consider it a blow to their ego when they are wrong about something.?To remain competitive, testers should also learn to be rational, analytical, and logical since these skills when applied while testing helps them identify errors, understand the complexities, assess the unfamiliar behavior of the application, and test them accordingly. Having good analytical and reasoning skills helps in assessing relevant information, raising clear questions, and identifying strengths and weaknesses without being biased, which helps with the right course of action and solution.
Organizations and business environments change rapidly, which means the approaches and processes that work well today will be outdated tomorrow. Therefore, it is imperative that a tester notice, adapt, and learn from change. That doesn’t mean that testers should undergo training or certification continually. Rather, they should be open to learning from everything in life. If a tester gains basic knowledge, then the rest can be achieved through self-directed learning. In short, learning should be a lifelong habit.
CONCLUSION
No matter what is your educational background or years of experience, we as software testers should continuously endeavor to learn and improve our software testing skills and knowledge. A software tester will always have individualistic qualities and will vary from person to person. Each tester has a unique perspective which helps them to identify critical problems quickly. Be it self-learning or taking part in a training program, a software tester should always be eager to learn more methods and processes to improve their performance in testing and keep implementing the new skills and learning to keep him/herself ahead of the competition in the job market.
I hope this list gives you an idea as to which skills you need to work on to be a better software tester. To learn more about software testing and how to start your career as a QA professional please refer to my free course.