Software testing talks: QA coordinators, “superstar” or “rockstar” devs, and some more goodies

Our ‘Software testing talks’ blog posts cover all significant events of the quality assurance world and the most active discussions from different communities. We gathered the most important things here, so you don’t need to follow dozens of groups and channels.

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Briefly, here is what folks were talking about last week:

• What are your experiences working with a “superstar” or “rockstar” dev?
• Interested in QA with no experience, where should I start?
• Does your company have a QA coordinator?
• Do you know any engineering managers in testing/quality who also are hands-on and contribute towards technical tasks?
• Is your employer ok with you studying during working hours?
• Why do testers never buy new tech gadgets right after their release?
• Will automation testing fully change manual testing?

Let’s see what this week was about and the IT community discussed in February:

What are your experiences working with a “superstar” or “rockstar” dev?

“I saw this post in r/ExperiencedDevs and it reminded me of a slightly related question – what have been your experiences working on a team with “rockstar” or “10x” dev(s)? Pros and cons, from a software tester’s standpoint? You are welcome to share good or bad experiences.”

>> check this tread out in the r/softwaretesting Reddit community.

I think in some ways this is a very good point of view:

Interested in QA with no experience, where should I start?

“Hi, I am a 22 year old college student currently an English major working towards becoming a writer or teacher. As I get further along in my life in college I find myself getting more and more discouraged in my choice of writing as a major. I live in Seattle, so there is a large emphasis on tech and computer science here so I have recently been looking into QA because it seems like something that would be doable and relatively fulfilling for me if writing doesn’t work out. There are also quite a few game developers in my area that I would love to do QA for if possible at some point down the line.

My main question is where can I start? So far I have been looking into Codecademy to start learning as much as I can about programming. I am feeling pretty lost in terms of my future right now and I have been struggling to focus on anything because I’m so stressed about not spending my time right. Any word of advice would help very much.

Thank you”

>> check this tread out in the r/QualityAssurance Reddit community.

It is always cool when people share their experience instead of just saying “Hey, google this”:

Does your company have a QA coordinator?

“Hello everyone!

I was wondering if you have QA coordinator in your company and what are the responsibilities related to job? We are hiring one and it is really hard to find any information about this title.

Thanks for any info you can give me. :)”

>> check this tread out in the r/QualityAssurance Reddit community.

I personally have never heard about this position but I would imagine this can very handful for QA teams:

Do you know any engineering managers in testing/quality who also are hands on and contribute towards technical tasks?

“I’m trying to understand how engineering managers in testing/quality do their day to day work.

Please note I’m not talking about test managers / QA managers who are focused purely on managerial aspect of testing activities or testing teams.

Have you come across engineering managers in testing/QA who apart from heading/leading quality engineering initiatives also contribute in the form of hands on implementation?”

>> check this tread out in the r/QualityAssurance Reddit community.

These two answers give some insights into why engineers rarely participate in testing:

Software testing influencers weren’t too active this week, but I still found a couple of discussions worth taking a look at.

A controversial topic about if testers should learn on their own time or an employer should help with allowing them to learn during work hours:

>> Check what people think about this under this tweet here.

Harsh truth why testers have to check everything several times before to give the item further. And the same about gadgets – trust but verify: 

>> Check the discussion under this tweet here.

I love this idea about automation. It is very helpful while testing but testers are still the core of any quality assurance:

>> Check the discussion under this tweet here.

I hope this little dive into events of the week was interesting and now you know more details on what the software testing community likes to discuss. 

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