Career Advice - quality assurance and automated testing

Shicky · 14 Oct 2013 at 08:58

Hello all,

the below is a post I made on hacker news which unfortunately didn't get much attention so I'm still looking for answers. Its been a few weeks since then so at work I'm actually performing as a manual tester already and it seems to be going okay so far, I don't feel I need much advice in this regard as it mostly appears natural, apart from developing to writing good test plans maybe which I haven't done yet. Hopefully you guys have some good ideas for me in terms of what to do to get better outside of work.

So for background I'm a CS grad who doesn't seem to have a great ability to develop, at least not yet. I went into finance and worked for two years in support/development and got on very well, unfortunately my application got quite popular and therefore the team was heavily regulated, this meant I went to strictly support and low level so I wasn't happy with the lack of complexity.

As a result I decided to try a different industry and have went back to technology and got a job as a QA engineer. I am fully aware I cannot rely solely on my employer to provide the skills necessary to become a good QA Engineer.

Therefore I wish to firstly cement soft skills as a good QA tester which I believe I already have. i.e. an eye for detail, enjoy a good puzzle. What technical skills do people feel are required to be a good 'manual' tester?

Lastly the main reason I took this jump was to get into automated testing as I believe it will allow a jump in complexity and perhaps a side move to development when I'm good enough. Where do I start in becoming good at automated testing?

The standard advice for a dev is to start developing personal projects? What about a tester? Is it the same so then you can test your project thoroughly? I've often seen it said you should be testing OTHER peoples code mainly. So how can I get this exposure? I've looked around for some open source projects but a testing element only seems mentioned relating to your own code.

Just for additional info, I've been researching a bit myself and have come across a few products like selenium to play with and reading the google testing blog. On top of this I've started two udacity classes, one for software testing and one for debugging. Any further suggestions? Any decent books to help me feel a little less lost in my current situation?

Thanks for any advice you can provide

Smit · 14 Oct 2013 at 13:01

Well it appears that QA isn't your intended goal so you should be working on developing whatever interests you. Working as a manual tester here would actually help you quite a bit here in that assuming you are working in a good team then you will see the kind of things which manual testers look for and find so that when it comes to developing your own things then you also know the kind of situations to watch for.

You could always just work on some open source projects and find defects in them and submit bug reports in whatever tracker they are using.

There are some websites out there where you can do some tests for various projects. uTest and BugFinders are two of such sites although there are probably more out there. Again this will show you the kind of issues which regularly crop up.

Shicky · 14 Oct 2013 at 23:10

Hi Smit, thanks for your reply. I'm a bit confused why you say QA isn't my intended goal? If it's the development comment, that is merely keeping my options open, as mentioned I'm not good enough for that and want to learn a new skill. I'm actually hoping I really enjoy testing and progress along that route.

I've had a look for open source projects I can test on but seems I don't know where to find them. Thank you very much for those two sites, had never heard of them and they seemed packed full of resources

MrClark · 16 Oct 2013 at 16:56

Hi Shicky,
I'm a contract test manager (and have been for 3 years) and worked as a contract performance and automation tester 7 years prior to that.

What makes a good tester? Well, to start with, someone who can program and is technical. You get too many numpties who don't understand development and programming and as such make poor testers (and hence, testers as a whole get a bad rap from developers).

My advice would be to steer well clear of manual testing however, too many low skilled people doing it and true manual testing will usually end up off shore because, frankly, it's not that difficult.

If you want to get into automated testing Selenium (http://www.seleniumhq.org/) is a great tool to start with. You can also download applications that can run on your PC/laptop for you to play with, there is also loads of resources available for you.

If you have any specific questions feel free to shoot me a PM/reply here.

Shicky · 22 Oct 2013 at 23:21

Hey MrClark,

thank you very much for the reply, you're exactly the kind of person I was hoping to hear from on here. With regard to automation, it is definitely the direction I'm looking to head, manual testing just doesn't have the complexity I'm looking for but I feel I should do a few weeks of manual to try and adjust my thinking to ensure I'm thinking from a testing angle. Luckily I don't feel I have an issue here, the only problem seems to be time restraints so I can't do much exploratory testing or test all the scenarios I want for a given test case.

Selenium is something I've already been looking at with evil tester and hope to get more of a look soon.

My main problem seems to be that I can do basically anything, my company have very little in terms of existing testing and therefore I have no mentor/guidance. It's part of the reason I'm doing this to try and find a mentor and get pointed in the right direction

I'll definitely send you a PM soon, hope you don't mind

Smit · 23 Oct 2013 at 11:10

One warning, it depends on how your company it setup and based on there being very little in terms of existing testing it probably doesn't apply here but I have seen and worked with numerous companies whereby the Automation team only automate test cases already written by the manual team (this seems to be an issue with larger companies rather than smaller ones though).

MrClark · 25 Oct 2013 at 15:52

Shicky said:
Hey MrClark,

thank you very much for the reply, you're exactly the kind of person I was hoping to hear from on here. With regard to automation, it is definitely the direction I'm looking to head, manual testing just doesn't have the complexity I'm looking for but I feel I should do a few weeks of manual to try and adjust my thinking to ensure I'm thinking from a testing angle. Luckily I don't feel I have an issue here, the only problem seems to be time restraints so I can't do much exploratory testing or test all the scenarios I want for a given test case.

Selenium is something I've already been looking at with evil tester and hope to get more of a look soon.

My main problem seems to be that I can do basically anything, my company have very little in terms of existing testing and therefore I have no mentor/guidance. It's part of the reason I'm doing this to try and find a mentor and get pointed in the right direction

I'll definitely send you a PM soon, hope you don't mind

Yea feel free to shoot me a message.

Have you thought about joining a different company?

There is a big testing consultancy with offices in Ireland who I do a lot of work for, happy to share there details via PM.

If you are interested in that route it helps to have a degree to get your foot in the door but if you can demonstrate practical know how (esp something like Selenium) it's not always required.