Software Testing As A Career

I wouldn't say that it is difficult to get in to (assuming it is manual testing that you would start off in), there's usually quite a few jobs going around although the pay at the lower end isn't great.

Having a read of the ISTQB Foundation Level documents should give you at least some grasp of what you need to learn. If you obtain the certification then it should be easier to get a job.


If it's more the automated side you wish to get in to then you would need some programming skills. To start off you could always use the click and record programs (e.g. Selenium IDE, QTP..) but some programming skills would be beneficial. QTP I believe still uses VBScript whereas something like Selenium can be done in Java, C# and Python (I think there was support for VBScript although it was unofficial).
 
Prepare to be bored unless you REALLY like following test scripts. You can get quite well paid for QA but in mind the above.

If serious, a better place to be it's the person doing the more interesting role of writing tests scripts etc. You will need the testing experience under your belt though.
 
It depends on the company, I work with a lot of people who are basically mindless drones, pushing buttons and reading emails. A testing role should involve development, writing tests and creating tools, at least, that is what I do.

You wont get £300 with no experience, but if you immediately specialise, you will get more, mobile, databases, cloud etc. Once you get into it, with some good knowledge in your brain, you can start to command that sort of money.
 
I do it for a living, and hope this helps. It's pretty fun at the company I'm at, we do a lot of chatting about stuff and developing tools to help us test and writing automated tests, but at least half my week is spent either writing test cases in a spreadsheet, or carrying out test cases.

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We are required by our customer to do that sort of thing (and more) manually for every field on the website we've built for them. It takes 2 of us testing for 2 days flat out to get through everything manually (which we do before every release).

I've tried to write that in a way that doesn't put my own opinion on it. If you think that would sound OK/fun/challenging or you could at least find some fun in it, then you should consider it as a career. Luckily I actually enjoy all that. We must spend 5/6 days planning the next full test or evolving the plan to include things we learnt from the last full test, then 2 days carrying it out. It's pretty satisfying to see how quickly you can fill the spreadsheets up whilst still testing everything properly.

"Mindless drones" is something I've heard a lot, but it simply isn't (or shouldn't be) true. Every action you have on the application should be thought about, documented and test cases written for it. No stone should be left unturned. You can act like a mindless drone just clicking without thinking, but then you're not really testing, you're just checking things (in my humble opinion).



I will say this though - it is NOT well paid enough, and won't be for some time. I came out of uni and started in my job and I'm on a fairly average wage for my role, not underpaid at all, but my developer mates I went to uni with are all on 10-30% more than me.
 
Tweaker said:
It depends on the company, I work with a lot of people who are basically mindless drones, pushing buttons and reading emails. A testing role should involve development, writing tests and creating tools, at least, that is what I do.

You wont get £300 with no experience, but if you immediately specialise, you will get more, mobile, databases, cloud etc. Once you get into it, with some good knowledge in your brain, you can start to command that sort of money.
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May I ask where you work? I've just gotten into testing from dev/support, only been in 3months but enjoying it so far. When you say writing tests in this context I presume you mean automated tests? Any tips for getting into this? For dev work I used to just start a project to learn something new, for learning this i've no idea how to get started

I echo the comments that OP seems to focused on money, recipe for disaster with anything
 
robotCocks said:
are you obsessed with money or something?
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No I'm not, but you do have to consider possible income potential when thinking about a new career. It was more a case of wondering how good you really need to be, and what skills and abiliies you'd need to have, to be able to get a contract position at £300 per day.
 
I kinda of do this for a living.

Everyone has their own personal opinion and that is fine, but it depends on the type of person you are. Now I find it very interesting finding vulnerabilities (almost like pen testing) and breaking the system.

But there are 2 different types as stated above, Manual System Testing and Automated.

Manual system testing is relatively easy to get into and the qualifications are easy. Depending on the project/company you are working on expect to write your own test scrips.

Automated testing, we use QTP at my company and you need to have some programming knowledge to make use of it (VBScript).

So i'd say give it a go, you won't know what it's like until you try something.
Just don't get into User Acceptance Testing (UAT)... That seems like a drone job, System testing is where the skill is needed more.
 
radderfire said:
No I'm not, but you do have to consider possible income potential when thinking about a new career. It was more a case of wondering how good you really need to be, and what skills and abiliies you'd need to have, to be able to get a contract position at £300 per day.
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with an attitude like this you'll likely be unemployable after your first contract.
 
robotCocks said:
with an attitude like this you'll likely be unemployable after your first contract.
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Why? It's a perfectly valid thing to say. I've considered training as a paramedic and doing that for a living, but the main concern is that the income doesn't cover expenses. One of my questions was "at what point will I earn the same as I am now" and "what can I cut out to make do with the lower wage!"

I'm also waiting for you to make any valuable contribution to the thread, or anything other than trolling.

arfoll said:
I think you're dreaming a bit, I've never heard of anyone making that much in QA...
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Actually, I saw a job advertised on the job center 3/4 days ago, £250-300 a day but list of wants was massive with detailed knowledge of over 20 areas including web/mobile/c++ etc.
 
We (my employer) employ QAs for £50k+. Generally speaking it is their job to literally assure the quality of the product. In practice this means they will assist in determining acceptance criteria and how to appropriately test for those criteria. Automation is big. As little manual deterministic/acceptance testing as possible (I.e. this should be automated) with a healthy dose of exploratory thrown in on the side.

We expect our QAs to have good collaborative aptitude with both technical and non-technical people and knowledge of acceptance testing, behavior driven development, etc.
 
If you are concerned about money then QA wouldn't be a consideration. You will almost certainly get paid more as a developer. He,s, a senior QA role will pay but applying the same experience to a good developer will lead to positions paying substantially more in most circumstances. Moreover, you will get paid more as a manager.

If you really want a fascinating job with huge salary then a wall street quant has a starting salary of $250K.

If money motivates you then working for a start up might be a good idea, e.g. I have sufficient shares such that if the start up is work for really makes it to public IPO (incredibly small chance to be honest) then I'll net 2-3million at typical rates (much more likely I will work incredibly hard and get zero bonus, and be out of a job by the summer, it is pretty much as useful as a lottery ticket)
 
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I stumbled across this thread whilst searching for something else, so whilst it's a couple of months old I thought I'd add some input.

I specialise in performance testing using some HP ALM testing tools and started out as a graduate before working my way up to fully fledged consultant.
I'd say that the pay is fairly good and if you get a few years experience you could go contracting for £4-500 a day, but be prepared to travel.
 
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