3 Things That Have Helped Me in My Testing Career
This piece is my participation in a blogging challenge from Ministry of Testing. I want to try myself in this but I also hope it’s useful to some!
(1) Conferences and Testing Community
I was very close to quitting my job and the whole software testing career, when my company sent me to Agile Testing Days 2019 conference in Potsdam, Germany. It was my first testing conference to attend and that’s how I knew the testing community is like no other community I have been to. I got to meet people who are eager to listen to my challenges, help me think of solutions and even dream big on my behalf. A significant effort was put into helping conference participants become conference speakers themselves, how cool is that? It was an absolute eye opener for me. I got to know about the latest trends in testing and realized, this field has a lot to offer, and it was on me to bring that awareness back to my team. I went back home with a feeling that I finally found my people, and I wasn’t going to give up on software testing so soon.
Fast forward to Nov 2020, when it was time for the next, fully virtual version of Agile Testing Days. My reality was of course very different at that point in time. On a personal level, I was stuck at home in a new city, and professionally I had no mentor for my first job as a test automation engineer. My role direction would change every month or two, and so did my learning objectives. So the strategies I set for myself wouldn’t survive the challenges. As soon as I was done with the virtual conference I realized, a 3-day interaction is just not enough to fill the void, I need this community most of the time given my personal and professional situation, and therefore I joined the Ministry of Testing (MoT) community. I participated in the virtual coffee dates almost every week, where I met with testing experts and newbies from all over the world. We shared experiences, advice, laughs and complaints. Those calls gave me some sense of grounding and were super fun at the same time! Above all, the community made me feel less alone in the world as a tester and human being. I also found a lot of online courses, workshops and talks that were super insightful for my role and my teammates.
(2) Collecting material and personal templates
So there is a lot of material I have collected and used since joining MoT. I add such material to Evernote, where I assign tags like Cucumber, Exploratory Testing, API Testing etc. And then I go back to this material when I need it. For example, when I finally decided to run a testability workshop in my team (eight months after I joined the original MoT workshop), it was the time when I really consumed everything tagged with “Testability”. However, collecting material without an end in mind could be a waste of time, that’s why having an output like a personal template is highly recommended and will come in handy at some point. I had always used my personal “Test Strategy” template in my previous job, and in my first month at my current company I used the “Rapidly learning about systems” model, thanks to what I learned from Automation In Testing workshops. Getting to know a new product from scratch was a fun process. Not to mention the Test Sphere cards which made my initial exploratory testing even more colorful!
(3) Keeping work logs
Despite the true necessity of having a reliable task management tool where I check items off my list, most of the work items I deal with are not just one-time or even periodic tasks to be ticked off. Usually I have ongoing stories and bugs that I don’t just investigate, manually test or automate in one go. Moreover, the steps I go through are not always the same. That’s why I’m using Trello to record what I did today and where I stopped, so that tomorrow (or next time) I can pick up from where I left off. When it comes to testing tasks, I also attach screenshots, logs and sometimes videos of my testing to the card dedicated to that test. This has been of immense help especially when I report issues or ask questions. As a new tester in my team, I’m constantly asked questions like: “Did u try X? What happened when you tried Y?” “Did you try changing this condition or that variable?” “What was the error number?”. And I believe this happens in most tester-developer interactions, not just with new joiners. But I also struggle with bad short term memory, and this kind of recording helps me a lot. This also helps in tracking progress through a long online course, or figuring out a new tool! Trying to find solutions to configuration problems on the internet, I’d easily lose track if I’m not recording my steps. Saving this info saves me a lot of time wondering, what was actually blocking me before the weekend?
So far those are the three main things that are helping me as a software tester, and every now and then I discover new opportunities to improve the quality of my work. I’m curious to know about yours!
