Making Careers in Software Testing

What is Software Testing?

Software testing is the process of execution of an application with intent of finding defects in its functionality. Testing ensures the quality, correctness and completeness of the product according to the customer requirements.

It is the process of validating built software to give complete report on its capability of meeting requirements and expectations.

In simple terms one can say that software testing process is to know whether the software is as per the measures for which it is built and designed for. Software testing life cycle plays an important role in entire development life cycle.

Why has testing gained prime focus in SDLC?

Testing is introduced in the early stages of the SDLC (software development life cycle). The cost of fixing the bug rises exponentially with the time of detection of bug, the more the delay in time of detection of bug the more is the cost of fixing. In this competitive world of software, a product with good quality and with best end user satisfaction stands long time. This is the reason why organizations building such huge space for its quality.

Many organizations will have its own team, for Quality Assurance for the products which they develop. Now-a-days it is trendy to get associated with some other organizations which have testing services independently. These organizations works on the principle of Testing as a service.

Testing Process
Software testing process is a sequence of phases that are followed systematically to ensure the quality of the product by considering customer requirements, expectations, time of delivery and budget constraints.

Software testing life cycle includes the following phases:

1. Test requirements analysis.
2. Test environment Setup
3. Test case development
4. Test case Execution
5. Defects raising and tracking
6. Test closure.

Different Domains in Software Testing

There are broadly 4 types of domains in software testing. The young graduate selected for testing job will be placed in one of the following testing domains:

1. Manual Testing
2. Automation Testing
3. Performance Testing
4. Mobile Application Testing

Manual Testing
Manual Testing is very basic type of testing which helps to find the bugs in the application under test. It is preliminary testing, must be carried out prior to start automating the test cases. Testers need to play the role of the end user & execute the all test cases as per the end users point of view. Most of the time in manual testing test cases is authored by identifying scenarios, and writing test cases for the application under test.MS Excel, HP quality center, TestRail, Testlink and IBM Rational etc.

Automation Testing
Automation Testing is aimed to reduce the recursive tasks of manual testing. When there is requirement of building multiple versions of product, Old versions are tested against the new changes by automation testing. The Functionality of the application under test is tested using scripts by making use of programming language with tools like selenium, QTP, Renorex and RFT etc.

Performance Testing
Testing the application’s scalability and responsiveness at certain conditions will come under performance testing. Application under test is tested by giving maximum load on it. For example testing a online shopping site at festival season. There are multiple tools for this purpose like Load runner, JMeter, Silk Test etc.

Mobile Application Testing
In this era of Mobile technologies several shopping, transportation and social networking applications are developed as for Mobile applications. These applications were tested with several mobile operating systems, different devices before releasing it into the market. This type of testing has some of the tools which makes testing process automated and efficient. Tools such as See Test, Appium, FoneMonkey etc.

SKILLS NEEDED

There is a immense demand for the good testing engineers in the software industry, as the entire quality of the software product depends on them. Let us see some key skills that a graduate need to possess if he is ready to take up his career in testing platform.

A good Test engineer is the one who thinks in end user’s or Client’s perspective and tries to break the code. A tester needs to understand the requirements and functionality of the software which need to be tested.

Analytical Skills
For an aspirant who is looking forward for a career in Software testing should possess good analytical skills. All he needs to do is to understand the complex applications by breaking it into smaller functional units, which helps him to attain better knowledge on it and to test from the scratch.

Technical Skills
The basic skills being taught in the graduation subjects is just a theoretical foundation for the testing career. So as to obtain the real time knowledge students are advised to take an internship in a company, so as to apply what one has learnt in theory and also gain practical and domain knowledge. Say if one wants to pursue career in automation testing, they should work up on gain knowledge on programming languages and tools like QTP, Selenium, and Load Runner etc.

Good Written and Communication Skills
A good application tester should have both written and verbal communication skills, as he will be involved in all client calls which are part of QA process. A good communication skill enhances the client interaction and helps to find out client requirements, which results in effective testing and but free application.

Productivity
Software product release is mainly responsibility rests on testing team. The key to crack this situation lies in managing the workload in an efficient manner, with optimal time management and with minimal supervision. Also one has to develop attitude to prioritize the tasks to deliver maximum productivity.

Great Attitude and Passion
Right attitude and peachy passion are two important to focus on the career goal and achieve it. Even you should have confident that you have interest in this profession, then only you should go ahead with the training. Suggest process improvements, willingness, detail orientation and test to break are some of the major factors that you should keep in mind for becoming a good tester

Smart Work
Today globalised World felicitates the smart work than mere blind hard work. Testing process is mere smart work, where we will have recursive cross checking the functionality of the application with respect to its requirement. Even a minuscule change in some nuke and corner of software results in testing entire software, in these cases finding smart ways (like using tools) gets your job done in effective way in less time scale, thereby reducing the overhead of the recursive tasks.

Roles and Responsibilities in Software Testing Industry
Test Manager:

• Test Manger defines the Test strategy and is responsible for initiating and handling the testing process in entire life cycle of the project.
• Entry and exit criteria of whole testing process are handled by him.
• Test manager manages the technical aspects and resources as well towards the productivity.
• Test Manager is the one who involves in all high level meetings with client handling their requirements.

Test architect:

• Test Architect role is a senior position in the organization and is treated equivalence to Management positions in terms of rewards, recognition, visibility and influence.
• Test architects focus on a diverse set of goals and perform a wide variety of tasks and plays major role in providing technical leadership and strategic direction in terms of testing the product or software.
• Develops and designs testing infrastructure, test authoring frameworks and responsible in evaluating requirements for suggesting efficient solution.
• Test architects should drive quality across all disciplines, providing guidance, feedback, and suggestions to improve quality practices across an entire engineering team.

Test Lead:

• Test lead is responsible for management of all Quality Assurance functions include planning, strategy, and testing execution process.
• Involves in giving estimations for the test tasks and responsible for making team to complete them in time.
• Develops the test plan for the tasks, dependencies and participants required to mitigate the risks to system quality and obtain stakeholder support for this plan.
• Leads the teams from the communication end, by addressing the regular client calls and discuss the weekly status with the client.
• Track and prepare the report of testing activities like test testing results, test case coverage, required resources, defects discovered and their status, performance baselines etc.

Test Engineer:

• Main responsibilities are testing software and reporting defects
• Going through the requirements document specifications and clarifying the queries on the product’s functionality and designing.
• To work closely with Test lead for accomplishment of tasks like creating own test plan, Identification of test scenarios based on the requirements and other documents
• Involved in authoring, execution and reviewing of test cases with respect to the product requirements
• Report defects (usually in a defect database) to the stakeholders, Create test logs
• Report test results to the stakeholders, Reply to returned bug reports (for example, when a bug report is returned as not reproducible)
• Re-test resolved defects and closing the defects.

Published date : 15 Nov 2014 10:20AM