Navigating the waters of Quality Assurance
This is my third week of working as a software quality assurance engineering intern at Cotta & Cush and as much as I want to talk about how awesome my workplace and my colleagues are, that’s not what this article is about.
My prior knowledge of software quality assurance was very vague until I had to perform some interview tasks; that was my first encounter with a number of QA terms (test cases, automated tests, test documentation) and tools (Codecept, Selenium etc).
On my first day, I was assigned to a mentor, Gbenro, a QA engineer, (this guy has to be the coolest teacher ever), he introduced me to even more QA related paradigms and made me realize that my approach to solving the interview tasks wasn’t exactly ideal (P.S: I was feeling fly about the interview in my mind). Considering that I crash worked on the tasks just so I could submit before the deadline, I had forgotten some of the things I researched and learned about. Thankfully, Gbenro was patient enough to put me through some of them again.
The first few days were for on-boarding me as QA tester for current projects after which I was handed over a project to oversee and test extensively. I was excited that I was finally going to be doing some testing. There were lots of tickets to test and the superman in me assumed I was going to clear everything in a few hours. I spent the whole day testing just 2 tickets. lol. It wasn’t as easy as I had envisioned. I assumed the UI testing would just mean me making sure it looks like the mockup (I mean how hard can that be?) until I was told there were dimensions to check it against (yeah, mockup dimensions must align).
During these three weeks, I have learned how to write automated tests, perform API tests and write test cases. I have researched and read a lot about software testing. I have bought and almost completed a course on Udemy. Yet, I know I am still far from covering a sizable aspect of testing. I have a whooooole lot to learn. Software quality assurance is way more than people think it is. It is a huge field that is largely under-explored in Nigeria and I believe I can help change that with time.
So, starting with this article is a plan to document my learning process and anything I find useful hoping it would serve as a guide to someone out there who is interested in being a QA engineer and maybe, just maybe lure some others into becoming one.
