Software Testing. A brief introduction.
I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid there would be bad repercussions for breaking things. I would be yelled at by both of my parents and then I would have to clean up the mess that I’ve made as a result of breaking whatever object was unlucky enough to be in my way and smashed into pieces when the laws of gravity came into play.
If you remember having a similar childhood, you might want to become a software tester. It allows you to break the status quo, to think outside of the box, and stick it to The Man (“See Dad? I CAN make a living out of destroying something others have created”).
What is Software Testing and what does a tester do?
But what is Software Testing, you might ask? Author Bill Laboon defines it as being “a way of providing an estimate of software quality to stakeholders” in his book A Friendly Introduction to Software Testing. The website guru99.com describes it as being “a method to check whether the actual software product matches expected requirements and to ensure that software product is defect-free”. Sounds simple enough, right? And while the process of testing software is simple in the beginning, as you progress throughout your career as a tester you will wear many hats. That includes, but is not limited to, checking the app for defects, writing test cases and test plans, logging bugs into an issue tracker such as Jira, prioritizing testing activities, being the middle person between Design and Development teams, be the user’s advocate, talking to stakeholders, pestering the developers with that one bug that has been sitting in the backlog for over a month, etc.
The barrier to getting started as a software tester is fairly low in the majority of cases (most companies don’t ask for a massive technological background on your part), however, you will need to know the basics of using a computer, basic knowledge of HTML/CSS/Javascript/Database and have good people skills. From what I’ve experienced, a passionate person who is eager to learn and can communicate well with his colleagues should have no problem starting their career as a QA Analyst/Engineer.
Common misconceptions about Software Testing
In the 3+ years that I’ve worked as a QA Engineer, I’ve heard many myths being thrown around about this field. Here are some of them:
- It’s boring
- People in the field are looked down upon
- It doesn’t pay well at all
- You have no room to grow
- It’s repetitive.
Let’s address the elephant in the room. At any company that is worth its salt, testers will be paid on par with the developers (technical knowledge will be taken into account, of course) and have the same benefits (health care, free gym, free snacks, etc). As far as “being looked down upon”, maybe I’ve been lucky enough to never have it happen to me or it is just downright an urban legend. No one on the team has treated me or any of my testing colleagues with disrespect or used a condescending tone, ever. So you can put those worries to rest. Next, let’s talk about the “boring and repetitive” misconceptions. Sure, if you’re a manual tester and never learn how to do automation or the importance of checking the results of your action in the DevTools console, it can get pretty boring. As with any job, if you don’t try to learn new things and better yourself, things can get pretty boring and pretty repetitive pretty quickly.
All in all, as someone who wanted to become a programmer since high school, I have to admit that Software Testing is more of a fit for me than coding is. Instead of sitting all day and writing code, I get to interact with people from all departments, gain different perspectives of the Software Life Cycle, help stakeholders achieve their goals, and still have to get technical enough times to scratch that itch.
What are your thoughts on Software Testing? If you are a QA Engineer, what would you have liked to know at the beginning of your career?
