New Testers, Our Training Strategy !

In this article, you will know more about our new testers training strategy:

Know Their Background

Firstly, make sure you know about your new tester technical background!

• Do they have any previous testing experience?
• Have they worked in another technical role, like a developer or support position?
• Do they have domain knowledge?
• What kind of testing things do they love or hate doing?
• Understand why they joined the team and their career goals?

Knowing the answers to these questions can help you to pitch any training you give at the right level and work out what level of supervision is needed. Are you training someone how to be a tester? Or building on their existing testing experience to fit into their new role?

Explore The Product

Letting a new starter get their hands on the product as soon as possible is a great jumpstart to learning it. Encourage them to ask questions so they build their understanding.

• Allocate time for new testers to work through an initial exploratory session, mapping out the main features of the product. By the end of the session they should have some insight into where information can be changed, potential risk areas, and how the product interacts with other systems. Ask them to explain to you what they have discovered.
• You might have product documentation. A getting started guide, product help files, an internal wiki or knowledge base, containing all sorts of useful product information. Make sure new testers know how to access this.
• If the product requires installation or configuration, or test environments need to be set up from scratch, ask them to work through this process. It may help them see what the different components of the product are and how they fit together. They can use this knowledge to develop their own models of the product to assist them in testing.
• Provide details of how to access any log files which might be part of the product.
• Product demos will help them see how the product is meant to be used.
• An overview of upcoming product releases and goals can help a new starter get a feel for where the software is going and the company vision.
• Share stories on successes and failures your product and team have had. It could really help the new tester avoid unnecessary effort or mistakes.

Get Them Thinking Like A Tester

The best way to learn how to test and become familiar with a product is by doing some testing. While it might be tempting to assign a list of test cases for your new tester to run, this might not help them to learn how to explore and question the product. A lot of good testers have a curiosity which leads them to ask ‘I wonder what happens if….’ and inexperienced team members need to be encouraged to develop this. Make sure you provide positive feedback and constructive criticism, at all stages.

• Assign them an existing feature of the product to test where you know there are issues. Explain how they could use a testing charter to focus their efforts and ask them to document the testing they do. If they find some of the issues but not others, suggest how they might generate other test ideas which might enable them to uncover these bugs.
• When they find a bug ask them to reproduce the issue and investigate it. Have they discovered the circumstances under which it occurs? Can they hypothesise as to what might be causing the problem, isolate it, then refine the information they have?
• Ask them to write up a bug report for one or more of the issues they found. Give examples from your bug tracking system of what you would class as a good bug report. And of course, make sure the bug hasn’t already been raised.
• Ask them to create a mind map showing how they might test a feature. Do they focus on functionality only? Do they consider Performance? Security? Usability? Do they perform tests below UI level? Do they suggest any tools they could use?
• Schedule pair testing sessions with other members of the team. No matter how much experience a tester has they can learn from these.
• When they start testing new features, review the testing they do. Make sure they aren’t just confirming the acceptance criteria or requirements.
• Assign them bug fixes to retest and ask them to explain how they tested these. Do they focus only on the described steps or explore around the problem?
• Explain what oracles and heuristics are and how these can assist them.

Start To Build Up The Technical Stuff

Your team might use all sorts of technical skills to test the product, and by technical I don’t just mean writing automated checks, important as these may be. There are so many different technical skills we might use as testers, think about some of the others too.

What tools do you use to aide testing? Browser tools, add ons, proxies, or system tools are some examples. Ask your new tester to spend some time finding out about them and how they work if they don’t already know. Share how they are used in your context and why they support the testing effort. Demonstrate any important tools and how to use them to make sure sufficient information is gathered during testing.

You might also want to consider the following:

• Databases — Ensure they know how to view or manipulate information in any databases you might use as part of testing.
• API testing — If your new tester has not tested without a UI before they’ll need to know how to explore an API and interpret the responses.
• Security — An important consideration in all application types. What techniques need to be used here?
• Performance — What are the performance requirements for the product and how are these tested?
• Programming — Where automated checks are a priority, provide resources to help them get started with the necessary programming language.
• Automation framework — If they do have programming experience, walk through how your framework is put together. Ask them to pair with another tester to create some automated checks and perform a code review.

Get them know the processes

The processes we use can make a huge difference to the outcome of a project, so new starters will need to get to know how they should be working. The following are some things you might want to consider:

• Get them involved in team or sprint meetings as soon as possible, they will get to know the team members, their different roles and the way you all work together.
• Make sure they understand the purpose of these meetings, perhaps they are new to an agile methodology and could be standing there wondering ‘Why do we need to do this?’.
• Let them spend some time sitting with a developer so they can see what they are working on. Do they write unit tests? Do testers contribute to this process?
• Where do automated checks fit into the testing process?
• You might use Continuous Integration, explain this process and it’s benefits.
• Are there standards or legislation your team must comply with?
• How does the team prioritise bugs? Is it the responsibility of the tester or a whole team activity?
• How is testing recorded? Provide examples of how your team does this and give feedback on testing they document.

As testers we’re always looking for new ways of doing things and when a new person with a fresh perspective joins a team they will often ask questions which can make us re-evaluate our process and even lead to improvements. Where you are involved in training new testers you should make sure to let them know they shouldn’t be afraid to suggest new ways of working, and how participating in things like retrospectives can facilitate this.