On the way to IT job market: Is it so easy to become a software test engineer?
More and more people are willing to dive into the fascinating world of information technology looking for options to make it as painless as possible. Once you are done with Google search, you can come to a conclusion that a software tester is one of the easiest IT professions. Is that true?
Over the past three years I’ve managed to be engaged in completely different projects, both large and small. There had been times when I had worked on mobile games, AAA games on consoles and PCs as well as various sorts of apps.
Now I am working at e-Legion. We offer mobile app development services for large businesses, host MBLT and MBLT Dev international conferences and meetups (for QA professionals as well). Next year we will arrange the joint conference called MBLT+, both for business players and developers.
The text that follows is solely the author’s thoughts on whether it’s easy to land a job with an IT company, and you own all the right not to agree with me. It’s absolutely ok, and I like you anyway. Feel free to correct me or just share your thoughts with me :)
Is software testing an easy career path?
Well, what is a tester supposed to do? Sit back, verify apps and websites, keep track of bugs and flaws as well as set a bunch of tasks for a development team. Sometimes it does happen so. Does your website layout look wrong? Take a screenshot and upload it to a bug tracking system. Have you experienced page-loading errors? Wow… copy the URL in your browser and… You get the idea.
In fact, everything is much more complicated than it may seem. Truth be told, you don’t need any specific knowledge to reveal the most obvious problems. But what if you’re already tasked with checking API integrations? On top of that, imagine that something has changed in the app architecture, and you have to make sure that you have all your ducks in a row? Don’t even get me started on different online purchases/subscriptions or any other ways of debiting users’ bank accounts.
These are, of course, just the examples, and there are much more challenging issues in terms of test engineer career. The point is that you can no longer get away with just user’s visual experience of other sites and applications.
It is good to know a little bit of everything
If you’re a part of a team that develops a software product, you will need to interact collaboratively with all of its members. That’s great if you have at least basic knowledge of the specific areas your colleagues are experts in. It often happens that you need to ask a designer about something, go into certain authorization features in the backend, carefully examine the interaction between two different systems or give a more precise description of a frontend bug. If you understand how it all works from the inside, then you will be on the same page with a working team of yours and will no longer need to ask them to put their thoughts in the way normal people speak :)
Why are soft skills so important?
In order to effectively communicate at your workplace, you should be able to get to the bottom of a problem, even if you have to bother five different people or more. It’s often the case that a requirement specification is not completely ready by the development commencement date or not all the partners you need to integrate with keep track of the software engineering practices you use or vice versa. Your contractual partner modified some features and simply forgot to tell anyone about that. These are the very moments when you have to try to turn into an extrovert and demonstrate your good communication skills.
Please don’t come down hard on developers or analysts no matter how challenging the situation is. They are people, too. This is exactly where your soft skills come into play: the ability to properly explain your messages in language that is appropriate to your coworkers or ask the person to spare a few moments of his time and see into the problem together.
Responsibility issue
On top of all this, a test engineer is responsible for delivering a high-quality end product. Thus, a software tester (being the QA in a development team) is the one who is in charge of the last validation phase before product release. To put it another way, it rests with you to decide whether a product is ready to be delivered or not. The whole situation is pressured by deadlines, business requirements and a wide range of other factors, so you need to be able to properly assess risks, inform the people involved, and most importantly, get reasons why this or that decision was made across to them (and everyone else).
Key takeaway points
Ready to sum it up? Obviously, anyone can become a software test engineer if you want to. It’s not an exclusive membership club or some kind of caste. That’s totally great if you are passionate about some related things for quite a long time, for example, you have mastered a programming language, tried to make websites or just have that desire to always learn something new about technology. In that case you are able to smoothly start your career as a software test engineer because a lot of things are already familiar to you.
However, as in any other profession, you will have to constantly keep learning, be proactive, and above all else, do your work well. You will have to come to common terms with completely different people, keep up with all app development stages and get used to this feeling of pressure as the end product delivery date approaches closer and closer.
