Getting into Software Testing

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elrasho

elrasho

elrasho

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Hi I've been doing IT Support for five years and now think it's time for me to find a different aspect in IT to work for.

As a hobby I like messing around making web sites so thought I might go into that. Having asked around and seen what's out there my conclusion is the competition is too fierce. So after reading some posts in this forum and others I thought I'd look into Software Testing.

My question is how do I actually get onto the Software Testing ladder? I could do the foundation ISEB course but will that land me a job in testing with 5 years of tech support experience? I've supported everything for PCs running windows/mac/linux to web hosting servers (oh and ADSL aswell).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, I need a change from IT Support big time. I'm not using my brain anymore, its just so boring now.
 
Definitely do the ISEB foundation course and exam, from what I've seen it's almost a pre-requisite for a job unfortunately. It's actually a really good course though, and you will probably have to work quite hard to pass the exam too.
 
If you're bored, I'd consider going towards Development rather than testing. Testing, for the most part, can be very monotonous. When you become a bit more senior it can become interesting, but as a Junior Tester you'll discover a new definition of boring. Disclaimer: I'm a developer.
 
Definitely do the exam, it's good in theory but pretty useless in the real world but for some reason companies do value you having this.

It's a breeze to be honest. Got 38/40 with little to no study, the trick is just to know the different terms since the multiple choice exam more or less just tests that you know what the terms mean IMO

I would advise you to do development if you can though. Was in Software testing for 5+ years and the first few years you are most likely to just be executing tests and not designing them and this can be very tedious work indeed. (In some companies you would have to run the exact same tests every week for like a year)
 
elrasho said:
Hi I've been doing IT Support for five years and now think it's time for me to find a different aspect in IT to work for.

As a hobby I like messing around making web sites so thought I might go into that. Having asked around and seen what's out there my conclusion is the competition is too fierce. So after reading some posts in this forum and others I thought I'd look into Software Testing.

My question is how do I actually get onto the Software Testing ladder? I could do the foundation ISEB course but will that land me a job in testing with 5 years of tech support experience? I've supported everything for PCs running windows/mac/linux to web hosting servers (oh and ADSL aswell).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, I need a change from IT Support big time. I'm not using my brain anymore, its just so boring now.
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As people are pointing out, Software Testing is as mundane as IT support.

Software (or even Web) development does indeed provide much more variety and a challenge (normally).

I would just point out in a friendly way, that
I could do the foundation ISEB course but will that land me a job in testing with 5 years of tech support experience?
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The IT experience is not very relevant in terms of software development (including testing), it is nice to see technical experience in people, so it certainly won't harm, but I'd say emphasis on your web development hobby shows much more relevancy. I interview for software roles at our company, and I ask for examples of relevant software they've written, and if someone brought in an example of a website they'd created, and could talk me through it's design and even the underlying html/code, I'd find that ten times more relevant..

The things we normally look for in our juniors would be a reasonable understanding of basic software design, some basic to moderate level of programming language fluency, and something to demonstrate they can analyse and understand software (i.e. some aptitude)..

I can tell you that some places have a large emphasis on programming language knowledge, and usually give a more clinical technical test on nuances of one or more languages, which I don't agree is very valid, but it's often a hoop to jump through.
 
Software Testing is a legacy role that is dying a slow death anyway. Automated testing that is developed by the programmers themselves is replacing it.
 
NathanE said:
Software Testing is a legacy role that is dying a slow death anyway. Automated testing that is developed by the programmers themselves is replacing it.
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With the assistance of a tester. :) We have 2 full time testers, and they pair with the programmers to assist in writing of tests, including Acceptance tests all the way down to unit tests. Testers are great at pretending to be a user, a developer will tend to just test for passes where as a tester is testing for failures.

I agree that the traditional "Sit there and follow a test plan" days are soon over, but the role of a tester is stronger than ever before. :)
 
Hmm , its alright , I did it for about 4 years full time

It was ok , I do some testing now and again in the role Iam in now
don't think I would like to do it full time again tho (can get boring)
 
Tikkabhuna said:
And they're outsourcing it to other countries as well.
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But the other countries aren't necessarily any good at it. I'm looking at you, Mission testing...

Can be very frustrating, sometimes rewarding, but so can development. I do/have done both.
 
Development as in C#, ASP.net ?

My only experience is using html, php and using Dreamweaver. I'm willing to learn more but need some guidence into which language would get me the better jobs, as in where is the demand?
 
elrasho said:
Development as in C#, ASP.net ?

My only experience is using html, php and using Dreamweaver. I'm willing to learn more but need some guidence into which language would get me the better jobs, as in where is the demand?
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It depends on what you want to do and what you would find interesting. For web design I don't think you can go wrong with brushing up on CSS, XHTML and some PHP (I think these are the most common languages to learn)

I believe people on this thread were just pointing out that testing can be boring and that if you have other interests then you can pursue them instead.
 
Being a QA geezer and how boring it is depends on the company you work for. I respect my QA guys opinion and run ideas past them so that they feel they have more of a role in the product design.

Its not always just about following scripts.

NathanE said:
Software Testing is a legacy role that is dying a slow death anyway. Automated testing that is developed by the programmers themselves is replacing it.
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Balls... testing that is constructed by developers tends to miss a ton of stuff!
 
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I test an enterprise storage visualization system, it's technically a software product, but runs on very specific hardware and has to tolerate all that can happen to that hardware. This is one situation where automation will not replace the testers. For as long as I've been doing it, we run automated tests overnight and manual scenario tests in the day. We write the automated tests so a background in programming is pretty much essential, I don't know of anyone that has come from support into test, but only testers can become level 3 support. There's about as many testers as developers in the department, but we test very heavily.

In summary, get the programming up to scratch and start testing in an area showing good growth. It's an enjoyable job I find, very varying challenges, almost like puzzles sometimes, keeps things fresh.
 
For those of you that were in software testing but since moved on, what role did you move to? Did you move across to a more technicial role, eg. programming, or perhaps move up to a more managerial role, or move away to the requirements/design side of things? Or did you change to a wildly differnt role, perhaps not even in IT?

I've just started my first job out of uni as a software tester. Been here a year and enjoying it so far. Could easily see how it could get boring but it's quite interesting with my current company. Testing for someone like the MoD I could imagine being extremely repetitive and tedious due to the strict regulations, but testing for someone a little more 'low key' could allow more flexibilty.
 
I would love to get into web design but don't you think there aren't enough jobs for th number of web developers/designers? Competition is fierce and the only way I could get a job would be to be the best of the best, thing with that is there are many people who have been doing it longer than me and they will most likly get the job over me.
 
NathanE said:
Software Testing is a legacy role that is dying a slow death anyway. Automated testing that is developed by the programmers themselves is replacing it.
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Not in my experience.

As a developer the only tests I really write are automated unit tests, and some integration tests that run when code is checked in. The Functional Testers still have a huge part to play in ensuring systems work as intended.
 
jamief said:
Not in my experience.

As a developer the only tests I really write are automated unit tests, and some integration tests that run when code is checked in. The Functional Testers still have a huge part to play in ensuring systems work as intended.
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Agree with this.

Over the 10 years i've spent as a tester, i would certainly agree that there is more of a push for test driven development in the last few years. And i think that's a really positive thing - to me I always seem to receive code of a higher quality from dev teams that adopt that approach.

But TDD is not a magical solution to quality issues. If anything it can tend to give a false sense of security - ie all these unit tests pass therefore the software is 'good'. I still see a strong demand for independent QA teams performing functional/integration/regression testing as a matter of course on any projects i've worked on, regardless of the overall project methodology being used.
 
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