I have worked over 9 months as a Quality Assurance Analyst. Some of the skills I feel are important for a newbie in the testing industry include both soft and hard skills.
As engineers, most of us are trained to be result driven and focused pupils. But in software testing your skill of being a great communicator, problem solver and handling tough situations strategically are very important if you want to grow and make your career in this field.
A Quality Assurance Analyst or software tester must know that the development team and the tester are not enemies, they are working together to build the same thing by using different approaches. So while a QA has an authority to critique developers applications, he must be very moderate and considerate. Following are some of the tips I learnt overtime. Hope that they can help you.
- Talk to developers
- Ask Questions
- Collaborate
- Understand their position
- Don’t be a rockstar
- Its okay to disagree
- Follow constructive escalation
- Be nice but don’t be a pushover
- Talk Talk Talk for team work
- Speak about testing
- Read about testing
- Collaborate with other software tester
- Discuss with professionals
- Admit you can not know everything
- Phrase your questions rightly
- Quality is everyone’s responsibility
- Take agile meetings seriously to reduce your workload and make others realize the importance of work you do.
- Be Positive
Some other tips that can make the job of bug reporting more efficient and effective is to make use of technology. To be sure when and how exactly the bug occurred is an essential part of a software tester. This can be done in variety of ways from note talking, writing steps down to more latest techniques so that you can attach the bug history to the life cycle document.
- Use screen recording
It’s easier for the developer to replicate the bug by seeing than by reading long passages of steps and procedures. This is an efficient and less time consuming method.An application Licecap can be used to record small low quality videos or even gifs to second your bug report.They are not the replacement of bug report but just a visual aid and a proof. - Chrome Developer tools for performance testing
Use free chrome developers tool to look us at the code elements, errors, file size (network tab), time for the elements to load (network tab), status of elements (network tab).Also the performance tab on chrome developer tool kit helps you to verify the performance delays if any exist by simply record and play. - View the log files:
Locate the log files folder. Sometimes it is easy to locate them but if your system has microservices or distributed services then its better to seek help from the developers team. Learn to read the log files. - Software Audit:
Software audit is a complex, time consuming and technical task but some softwares can automate this task and save many hours. While such softwares is highly paid, google chrome offers a small automated tool that can provide lots of information about various metrics of your website. Lighthouse has been integrated into the development tool kit for free. It generates a very helpful visual audit report around several metrics such as performance, best practices, SEO etc/. It can be downloaded to attach to the audit reports as well. But it must be understood that it is not a stand alone software for auditing but just a stepping stone. - Be technical without coding
Learn to source codes from GitHub, read log files, set up VMs and ssh them,knowledge of databases, writing custom queries to access databases and their backups. Setting up testing environments, knowing how containers work, how to set up a container by using docker, learning using development tool kit, reading and making pipeline diagrams. - Maintain visibility
Keep your work visible, make sure the entire team should know the progress of quality testing. Make use of bug alerts or metrics in the software work cycle environment to notify the developer automatically if the bug appears. It is an essential if you are working with a virtual team. - Mobile App testing
If you encounter mobile app testing, it’s better to use the actual devices but in case you are low on budget then go to android or iOS emulators, you can even use the chrome developers tool kit or AWS device farm. - API testing
API testing revolves around two types of testing. One is called functional testing and the other is called contract testing. Functional testing just makes sure that whenever the request is made a correct response is generated or produced. However, the contract testing just makes sure that two services (such as microservices) are compatible with one another regardless of the correctness of the result. The pact foundation is the best place to start with contract testing.