Effective Software QA'ing

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Software testing and any other profession for that matter is a continuous learning process and every project that you do, would teach you something or the other. Such learning can then be taken along as you travel further into your career.

Based on my experience in the industry so far, these are my thoughts about few essential qualities required in any software test professional.

  • Be curious: Software testers need to be curious all the time, while understanding the product they are going to test, while deciding on what to test and how to test that, writing test cases, writing bug reports and even while convincing developers about why your bug is legitimate.
  • Be open to learn: Any profession does require continuous learning and software testing is not an exception. In fact, software testing requires a bit more learning and knowledge upgrade than few of the other professions. Why so? A constant change is a property of the IT industry and with the pace that technology is changing, one need to keep self upgraded in terms of knowledge. So being open to learn new things always help.
  • Be technical: I personally believe that unless you have an in depth understanding of the product you are testing, you really won't be able to test it effectively. For example, if you are testing a Storage array; just knowing the basics of SAN and NAS would not help much. But if you know how filesystems work, how storage protocols work and how various storage components are integrated with each other and the way they function together as a system, would greatly help in developing test cases or writing good test plans.
  • Develop your QA aptitude: Being a QA it is really important to be creative and having an ability to look at the product from different perspectives. Many a times, you may face a challenge of writing crisp and in-depth test plans and also being asked about the overall test coverage you are achieving thru them. A QA need to put self in various roles while testing the product, for example - he will have to play an end user. The product under test and more specifically the type of access you have on it as a QA, may differ than what end user will have. So it is very important to think about scenarios, use-cases from end user's point of view to validate the product effectively.

Happy Testing!

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