How to become a Software Testing Expert in your Software testing career?

This is a guest article by Author “Swati Chaudhari”  She is currently working as QA Lead in the IBM, Pune. She is having total 7+ years of experience in the IT industries.

In today’s article we are seeing “How to become a Software Testing Expert in your Software testing career?“. There are many strong reasons to become a software testing expert so let’s get started.

First of all latest discuss “Who is a software testing expert?” Different people has different opinion when somebody says an expert, however I am thinking an expert is very highly skilled professionals who is able to produce great results.

The next question is “Why Become An Expert?” There can be reasons of prestige are greater professional satisfaction but in my opinion biggest reason of becoming an expert is that it ends up giving you more money, the main reason behind this is that it provides you more and better work opportunities and it provides opportunities to make more money.

The next question is “How to Become an Expert?” There are two steps to become an expert, first you should become very highly skilled in software testing and the second one is you should build your reputation in software testing industry.

Depending on your ambitions you may want to become an expert in your team, department, unit, company, industry, even in your country or the whole world. Depending on you do things and your efforts to become a software testing expert you may become an expert in any of these ramps.

Let’s see the first step in how to becoming a very highly skilled in software testing. There are some things you should do in order to become highly skilled in software testing. The first of all make a long term commitment to software testing, becoming an expert not an overnight process. So you have to make a long term commitment to getting very highly skilled in software testing. Then learn on a daily basis, there is a wealth of new articles, new blogs, discussions on software testing, videos on software testing that published every day. So make it a point that you learn something new about software testing every day. 

Simply learning new things in software testing is not sufficient; you should also practice testing every day. Then whatever you have learn and whatever you have practice, try to integrate that your existing knowledge.

When you work on projects to provide big values or results to your clients and always focus on the results, understand why clients want their systems tested and what will give the biggest return on their investment in you.

How to Become Highly Skilled in Software Testing Professional?

When you are working in projects, some of the things that can help you produce results for the following:

• Review the system requirements often, that will give you a better class of the system requirements and also review the changes to the system requirements are there any changes to system requirements and you tested immediately to and you may find the better bugs.
• Design and test with interesting test data, you can use several test design techniques like equivalence class partitioning and boundary value analysis, state transition diagrams, pair testing and so on and that will give you better results in your testing.
• Negative Testing: Don’t be satisfied with testing positively but also test negative to see if negative inputs are given then the system is able to handle negative inputs correctly.
• Test external interfaces and system configuration settings:
• Instead of just focusing within the system make it a point to test the external interfaces and interfaces to other system. So these other systems can also change and the system you are testing should be able to communicate to and fro with these external systems correctly. One of the areas that are not tested very much is the system configuration settings. So you can make it a point to test out this system configuration settings and that lead you to find better bugs.
• Generate ideas from prior bugs; you can also generate ideas from the prior that have been found in the system used to test ideas for better testing.
• Create a To-Do list as you test for later testing, when you are testing you may get some ideas, so have a running to do list and when you finish your test you can go back to your to do list and do those test also.
• Also test outside of your area, You don’t be satisfied with just testing the area that is assigned to you but also test outside your area that way you’ll have a bigger scope in which you find out more severe bugs or bugs that are across the different areas of the system.
• Test at different speeds: One technique that you can use as to test at different speeds instead of just going through the test very rapidly slow down, when you slow down you will start to observe other anything that you were not observed before. That way you can do a more through testing.
• Keep track of your bug reports, always keep track of the report the you logged, so that you can learn more from them.

Apart from these points you can bring your own methodology to provide the big value in testing. That is when you are testing in your project. So would you do if you’re not any project, still you learn everyday and you test every day? You can have a favorite or a pet project that you can test every day or you can contribute to any of the large number of open source projects out there and contribute to them with your testing. But make sure that you learn on a daily basis and practice testing on a daily basis.

How to build you reputation in Software testing?

The next step to becoming Software Testing Expert is to build your reputation in software testing. It is not sufficient that you are highly skilled in software testing, other people should know about but specially the people who can provide you better opportunities and better money. You also need to build a reputation in software testing. Here are the ways to accomplish or build your reputation:

• Update your professional profile: if you are going to aim to become a software testing expert within your company, you should update your professional resume that is within the company updated with all the different skills you have. You’re different achievements or accomplishments, the results that you have provided. If you are looking to become a software testing expert like in your industry or even globally then you should update your public professional profile and add the different skills and your achievements over there.
• Communicate often: It is not enough that you know a lot about software testing, you know how many different insights about software testing, and you should also share these insights with other people so that they also know that there is a lot to be learn from you in software testing.
• Nurture your Supporters: The next thing to do is to nurture your supporter as you start to become a software testing expert you will find that there are some people who genuinely like you and who promote your work, who promote the good things that you do, so identify these people so that they can provide testimonials for your very high level of scale in software testing, provide you recommendations or generally spread the word about your accomplishments to others.
• Go for difficult projects: then don’t shy away from difficult projects, so always volunteer for the more critical or more expensive or longer projects with more difficult projects. This will enable you to put all your skills to the project and then you will learn a lot from his projects and your contribution to such projects will be admired more by the people.
• Share your Knowledge: If you have developed your own tools for your own software testing techniques or some documents don’t keep it to yourself. If you want to become a expert in your team then just share your tools, share your documents with other members of the team if you want to become software testing expert in your company.
• Be interested in other projects: If you want to become an expert in your company, don’t just be interested in just your own project but also interested in other projects. There may be opportunities for helping others with your insights and your guidance.
• Look forward to future: Always look forward to the future and try to find out what is happening in the software testing industry which way the industry is going. For instance years ago, projects use to execute in Waterfall models, however nowadays things are changing rapidly, so nowadays agile software development life cycle is more popular in software industry. You should check what new tools are coming in the market, what are what is the new process in software testing that you can prepare for the future also.
• Be open to criticism but always respond logically: When you are becoming a software that some people may like to challenge the things that you say or some people may want to question you so always be open to criticism and this is a very common part of becoming an expert in software testing. But make sure that you always respond logically, build your case, provide data and recommend certain things on why you don’t recognize that certain things and respond logically.
• Write and Speak: Depending on your aim towards the software testing career you should take necessary steps. If you want to grow in a software company then you can write in the company newsletter and if you have to speak then in the company you can speak in the training, in meetings. You can start your own blog if you want to become expert in a bigger. If you want to become expert globally in software testing then you can speak at the different conferences. In the initial career you may not get an opportunity to speak the bigger conferences but you can start with small and get opportunities to speak. So whenever you get the opportunity to write and speak to use those opportunities build your reputation in testing.