Software test engineer’s persona and practice

What I have come to know through my experience as a software test engineer is this - If you want to be a good test engineer, you must have good technical knowledge, positive attitude, good communication skills and last but not the least, you should have very sound domain knowledge of the system you are working on. Somehow we all lack somewhere in one or more areas, I think this is one of the areas where testers are always considered to being one step behind the development team. If you want to be one step ahead of developers, you should be one step ahead in all the above mentioned areas.

As I mentioned, you should have good technical knowledge means you should have knowledge of:-

1) SQL – you must have good command over SQL, this is the basic need to be a good tester. Validating the data by queries increase your efficiency and save time.

2) Automation tools- It is quite obvious that you have not got an opportunity to work on automation tools, don’t worry, you can think that you fall in 70% testing work force of the world. If you don’t have working experience, at least you should have certification of any one automation tool, it increases your chances of getting the automation project.

3) Different operating environments – We all know windows and are quite comfortable working on it. Knowledge of UNIX is a must for a test engineer. Most of the servers use UNIX as operating system. There may be possibilities where you have to test directly on server or you might get a project of UNIX environment.

4) You should have knowledge of office suites for documentation purpose, you need to carry out much documentation work as a test engineer. Writing macros is equally important as some project needs specific data to be used for testing purpose, you can easily manipulate data and prepare your new set of data very easily with the use of macros.

Software testers face tough situations in their day to day work. Most of the testers think all the bugs logged by them should get fixed. It is not always possible or sometimes just deferred by Project Manager to be fixed in next releases. Even you can face a situation where a developer is standing on your head to replicate the issue in front of him and you simply fail to do so. Don’t underestimate yourself, it happens with most of us. Don’t take it personally, just think he has to work on it so it is very necessary that issue must replicate. Your positive attitude gives you all needed to face these kinds of situations.

Good communication skills are needed because, as a tester, you have to interact more with the development team and with the client too. Written communication should be very good as I said earlier that as a tester you carry out much documentation work as compared to developer.

Good Domain knowledge is very important to testers, you can say “how”. Take example of a trading project in finance domain. In a trading software two most commonly used term should be bid and ask. They can be only two columns for the developer to show on specific place on application. If the developer doesn’t know the domain he will never put a check on the fields that ask should always be greater than bid. A Good tester is one who tests the application as an end user. How can you test the trading software as an end user when you don’t know how to trade.