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This week was inspired by automation and education:
- Is there hypocrisy in quality assurance?
- How to automate your testing if you lack skills for this?
- How not to waste money on necessary books
- How one vacuum cleaner can ruin the entire development progress
- The central myth about Agile
- The pleasure of a mistake
- All testers need at least two of them — guess what.
Unfortunately, the contribution of testers to product development is often underestimated, and many of them have to push management staff to get them to listen to their ideas. Sometimes this leads to irritation in the team, professional burnout of testers and reinforcement of the impostor syndrome, which can also negatively affect the quality of work. Another problem can be considered that testers are often not fully involved in the development and it seems to them that they do not have a vision of what should turn out as a final product.
The software testing industry is extremely hypocrite
“I personally know very well what software testers do.
A qa tester is part of a team that is involved in the SDLC of a said product.
Modern QA testers work in an agile based environment and have direct involvement in the process of developing features for a software. They have to be a part of a team that maintains constant communication with other parts of that team, including developers, product managers, project managers, and scrum masters.
They have to create test cases/ test plans, based on user stories made by the project managers.
Including the nature of that project, they either operate manually or use different tools and write code that would automate the process.
They also write documentation, write reports, and come up with ideas that would improve the features they test for the final clients.
Please correct me if I am wrong and I what I said was bullshit.
The hypocrisy wall that I always end up bashing my head is that every single time when I want to participate in this process in order to gain some experience in the field is that I am always told to “go and test something by yourself”.
Dude, are you for real?
How the hell am I supposed to perform QA tasks by myself, I can’t just go around and write test cases, test plans, and test random stuff. I don’t gain any actual relevant experience into this field by doing that.
QA IS NOT DEVELOPMENT.
You could develop software by your own, but you can’t just test random software by your own without being involved in a structured team, and getting in touch with the developers.
Tell me if I am wrong
I just want to gain experience in QA.”
One of the answers just disputes this point.
>> check this thread out in the r/softwaretesting Reddit community.
Sooner or later, any tester will need help speeding up their testing. It is obvious that the only solution, in this case, can be automated testing. But it turns out that if you are completely new to quality assurance, this may require additional knowledge and finding a reliable source on how to automate can turn into a real challenge, especially in the gaming industry.
Resources for transitioning from QA Lead to Automation Testing
“Hey Reddit,
I am a current QA Lead for a company that does vendor QA in the video game industry. I started as an entry level manual tester, worked hard and was promoted to QA Lead very quickly (less than 6 months after joining).
After having just over a year of experience in the role I have been looking for resources to move back to the testing / engineering side of things, I am not liking the manager role I am in. I am overworked and underpaid and looking to change.
Any people here that went from manual QA to automation and have any resources that I can start to study to transition to automation? I have some coding experience and am currently learning python on Udemy.
Any suggestions or info would be greatly appreciated!”
This answer seemed interesting to me because, in the end, it led to a detailed discussion. Therefore, I recommend looking into the thread and reading all the comments.
>> check this thread out in the r/softwaretesting Reddit community.
Don’t judge a book by its cover — test it. A few nerdy jokes about quality assurance, although the topic is really interesting. Agree that spending money on not very useful books about testing is not the coolest idea, both financially and in terms of wasted time. Therefore, thanks to those who discuss and advise what books to read instead of blindly wandering among the shelves of the store.
Recommended books for new QA Lead
“I was wondering if there are any QA Lead books or even courses I can check out? I’ve got a mild case of imposter syndrome since I lucked into this role as a very junior QA. I was upfront in the interview and they still liked my background in other roles that is still applicable to testing in this role.
Many thanks!”
I picked three very first comments to post here. The original links and the discussion you can find in the thread.
>> check this thread out in the r/softwaretesting Reddit community.
Apparently, with the advent of spring, Twitter began to revive a little and more and more activity appears among influencers.
The first post that flew into the trends was that testing is not always about development. Sometimes it’s about the environment
>> Check this tweet here.
Surely you can relate yourself to this situation when you expect one thing, but in reality, everything is much more hardcore. Just go and watch that video to totally dive into the atmosphere of true Agile.
>> Check this tweet here.
Sometimes errors can be a sign of significant progress in your software development.
>> Check this tweet here.
The essential question of all IT industry employees — “How many screens do you need to use for your productive work?”. I found it’s convenient to use at least two of them.
>> Check this tweet here.
Hope our weekly overview of events in the IT industry gave your some insights into what is happening lately.
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