Software development is an area that will only grow in the near future, despite neither the epidemic nor the economic crisis. Accordingly, the shortage of technical specialties related to development will increase.
One of them is software testing. Looking ahead, let’s say that almost all companies that create software and services need testers. As for the entry threshold, the requirements for software development and the salary of testers, this article will help to understand this issue.
QA, QC and testing
Software testing is a broad concept that includes planning, designing, and actually executing tests.
What is the scope of software testing
QA (Quality Assurance) – ensuring the quality of the product. A QA specialist controls and ensures the quality of the company’s product. He is also responsible for individual stages of software development. In particular, for the choice of tools for development, the prevention of possible problems. He is also involved in the product development process. QA covers all stages of development, including the description of the project, the actual testing, release and, often, the post-release stage.
QC (Quality Control) – product quality control. The task of a QC specialist is to check a specific product, which includes analysis of the product code, design, plus testing. The QC engineer develops a testing strategy for well-defined testing, interacts with developers, and organizes the testing itself.
The tester is responsible for executing tests. Testing is the verification of the compliance of the results of the software product with the specified criteria. Testers are engaged in testing the entire product as a whole or individual components. Testing plays a critical role in ensuring the quality of a product.
By the way, there is an external branch – the modern direction of testing Developer in test. Specialists in this area are like developers, but they are engaged in ensuring the quality of the product being developed.
What should a good tester know and be able to do?
Based on everything that has been said above, it is difficult to single out specific knowledge or skills. Everything strongly depends on the project on which the specialist works, respectively, and on the stack of technologies that are used on this project.
If we talk about juniors, here we can distinguish general skills:
* Good knowledge in client-server architecture.
* A good tester must understand the mechanism of interaction between web applications, be able to localize the problem, regardless of whether it arose on the frontend or backend.
* A specialist needs to have basic skills in using specialized software, be able to use DevTools tools, have an idea of how sniffers work, and know basic Windows console commands.
Soft skills are extremely important:
* Ability to express thoughts clearly.
* Ability to clearly describe the problem to the developer.
* Ability to work with documentation.
* Understanding of software development standards.
* Attentiveness.
* Willingness to prove and defend one’s position based on documentation or common sense.
There is an opinion that you can become a professional in the field of testing in 3 years, subject to the presence of a technical background. In the first year, a young specialist begins to understand what is required of him, in the second year he understands how to do what is required of him, in the third year he tries to improve the built process by adding his own vision.
As for testers with extensive experience and extensive knowledge, it is imperative for them to constantly expand their skills, follow trends in the IT world, look for new approaches to solving yesterday’s problems and always be on the wave.
Different companies have different requirements for testers. Some people need Developer in test, but for some, the soft skills of specialists play an important role.
Myths about software testing and testers
For some reason, the misconception is becoming more and more common, according to which testers are engaged in simply pressing buttons and entering random information into different fields of the program. In fact, this is not the case, if testers randomly clicked on buttons and entered random data, then the test results would not bring any value to the developer. The results would be unstructured information from which it is impossible to get an idea of how good the product turned out to be and how convenient it is for users. Testers always have a work strategy, a plan that allows you to get an objective description of the current state of the product.
The second myth is that testers are responsible for software quality. In fact, the entire team is responsible for the quality of product development. Testers, on the other hand, help improve the quality of development, and also identify problems at an early stage.
The third myth is that there are a lot of testers. In fact, there are few good specialists on the market.