Testing as Career Challenge

I started my career as a developer and in a situation made me to gnash the teeth when many times my team said “Is this feature developed by you had a Defect, That’s the biggest problem with you developers” that made me to think why can’t I turn myself as Software Design Engineer as test who can program and test thoroughly the software that made my slow transition to a software testing role was complete and I never looked back.

After I moved as a tester and lead I got to move more of a rewarding journey. The nature of testing work was bit a new initially and later after a month it was much appealing and enjoying.

A software testing role requires more ingenuity as the work asks to solve a series of puzzles. QA offers more opportunities to add value to software and to get the proverbial dopamine injection that comes with solving problems. Also, as I tell people and to all my friends, testing is a job where you get paid to tell people they are wrong (:- and they thank you for it. Companies pay testers to find problems, and this requires ones a willingness to act contrary to the developer mindset.

Testers work on UI issues, if I can’t figure out a feature to accomplish or the UI to accomplish a given task with the software, I can report that issue, when that happens the User-Experience experts come to address the issue. After they figure out how to make it work the feature or UI they thank Tester (me), I got paid for what I got confused as a customer will that happen anywhere else? New UI’s intimidate many technical staff members, who often put extra effort in to try to understand them -- and to get inside the developers' heads. Many users won't put in that much effort when they interact with the software. The tester's job is not to try as hard as possible; instead, it is to match the actions of a user. And if I can't figure it out, someone needs to address that problem. Also, in testing, organizations reward me for contrarian or maverick opinions -- or even for being a bit of a jerk. A development manager might insist that a new feature must absolutely ship this morning. That can intimidate IT staff, but not a good tester, who might respond with more skepticism than acceptance. Testers who think in this contrarian way can more efficiently go about their work than team members who blindly accept a deadline at the expense of quality.

The Deep fact of testing is Testers have the least incentive to lie. When working to a deadline, project managers typically believe they will hit that deadline, even in spite of strong evidence to the contrary. When I was Project manager I often heard remarks like, “never let reality get in the way of your project plan or sprint plan, always there is scope creep and added features to the scope the deadline never changes – we need to figure it out. It's easy to lie when confronted by a deadline. When that date comes, the team must finish all sprints, which means they might rush to the finish line. Programmers can slap together a UI that has no real functionality, then call any problem -- no matter how massive -- a bug found in test. QA is where the rubber really hits the road. When a tester says, "It is not done, we can't log in," the product manager & scrum master must take notice.

With the move to Agile, DevOps and continuous delivery, teams are making smaller changes, making the delivery cycle more predictable. The incentive to deceive others -- and yourself -- about a project's readiness for market still exists, but it is significantly lower than it once was, especially in testing. Finally, the software testing role can be intellectually satisfying and put you in contact with brilliant minds. Testers are a vital part of the overall company story.