Master the test profession
Jun25
It’s not obvious when you’re a good tester. It’s even more difficult to point out who are excellent testers. It’s hard to measure the quality of a tester. Can you express this in a certain amount of bugs, The amount of articles, reviews, visits of conferences or the power to convince people? It’s not easy to say when you really a master in the test profession.
This post is inspired by a lot of other blogs as you can see below the image. Reading all these blogs points out that masters the test profession exist in multiple parts.
However it’s hard to determine what makes you a good tester there are some characteristics. The figure below shows, in my opinion, the most important aspects of being a good tester. You can have a couple of them, but the more you have, the better a tester you are. All these aspects are related to each other. Indeed you can be a very good tester with a lot of method and tools and domain knowledge, but if there is a lack of communication skills it’ll be hard to make the results clear for, for example, the business.
Click at the image to open the large picture!!
Let me give you some interesting links, food for thought and food for reading!
Soft skill
A blog I will mention in this case is a post of Pradeep Soundarajan, in the post “Coaching testers on Bugs reports, Advocay & Credibility” he mentions a couple of things that are directly related to the soft skills you as a tester must have. Review, interview and communication skills, but don’t forget the ability to make estimations about the message you send out to the organization and the way you describe these things.
Open for feedback
A good example of helping each other with feedback is the post of James Bach, “How challenging each other helps the craft”. It not only helps the (testing) craft, but it also helps you to grow in skills and profession.
Domain knowledge
The better you understand a certain domain, for example payments, the better you can determine the impact of a certain bug. If you have to test, for example the applications at your EMV chip (the new chip of your banking card) of your payment card you need to know a lot. Think about the payment schemes,transactions in the background, how an ATM works, what the different applications in the chip are, how you can read that kind of data and what it means.
If it’s not clear what I mean go on reading the next paragraph, maybe this is applicable for you. Do you know some interesting posts about having domain knowledge? Please let me know!
Continuous learning
If we speak about continuous learning everything can be an object for study. The test object, as well as our own skills and knowledge. Challenge yourself, best practices, other testers and feel free to write about it. Rob Lambert points it out in short post “Don’t be a follower, be a tester” This post holds a couple of interesting links to other stuff and to the video of the buccaneer tester by James Bach.
“The Tombstone Puzzle” by Selena Delesie and the post “a testing challenge” by Matthew Heusser are good example of how we can learn continuously.
Another good movement is weekend testing. A lot of people are writing about this. Jeroen Rosink write about this topic in the post “Test fishing for bugs and mismanagement” and “Thinking about testing and learning”
Knowledge of methods and tools
The discussion about the value of certification and the different methods is a discussion I like. People have their pro’s and con’s. Check the blogs I mentioned above and find these discussion.
The knowledge of tools is a very important one. Not only IE or Firefox, but also spiders, analyzers and proxy tools for example can be useful. The more knowledge you have about this topic the better you can manage the test profession. Read my blog “Hidden treasures for everyone” to see how a free tool can help you finding security bugs.
To master the test profession you have to improve yourself for all these and more of these aspects! More about the characteristics of a tester can be found via the following links:
#1: Attitude or methods
#2: Testers are priests
#3: Focus on result starts with the business
#4: Master the test profession
June 25th, 2010 at 11:50
I saw a lot of posts on this issue and I think each try to answer it. The work done is hard to measure by the apparent moves bugs,test cases or some other stuff. Its like when measuring a person value, can you measure a man? By what ? By how much he works in the gym, by how nice he talks, by how many “hello” he sends per day? But there is a value though that is sensed and also measured. It is not so impossible to measure the prevented issues and costs, the help to other team members.
Sebi
http://www.testalways.com
June 25th, 2010 at 16:13
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mohinder Khosla, EuroSTAR Conferences, Markus Gärtner, Andreas Prins, Markus Gärtner and others. Markus Gärtner said: Great piece from Andreas Prins: Master the test profession – http://bit.ly/cblJmq [...]
June 30th, 2010 at 15:31
Genial fill someone in on and this enter helped me alot in my college assignement. Thanks you on your information.
July 23rd, 2010 at 20:39
It’s very informative post. It helps me lot in my testing workshop.
May 7th, 2012 at 16:26
Tamron A09…
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May 17th, 2012 at 12:24
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