Many number of times,people enter the field of testing with a perception that it does not require any special skill.But to the disappointment of all,it is a very creative field and requires lots of brains. As they say,"Its easy to commit a mistake but difficult to find a genuine one " :) .
I believe that it is very underrated skill and this aura is created by none other than the developers. No offense intended,but in my career I have met many developers who think of testers as nothing but just an additional load on the organization.What they forget is,that hadn't the testers been there,owing to their negligence,the software would never have gone live or the customers would have just run away.I don't only blame the developers for that.
Some organizations also think of testers as one level lower to the developers and I want to ask a question here, Why?
In my own organization,I felt this rift. We all were working so diligently for the release of one of our products,the best of the efforts were going in,be it testers,developers,PMs, everyone was trying hard and achieve the milestone. Suddenly we heard about management giving away incentive awards to boost the morale. Everyone was elated and then came the real bet, the incentives for the R&D team and QA team has a difference of INR 5000,R&D gets more.
The reason when asked, "This is how the management has decided and its just a little bit of difference." "Its not about the money", we argued and they said nothing but "concentrate on your work,you are getting the incentives". Hard to believe but it is the truth of the industry.
Agreed,testing(manual) does not need technology but what about the soft skills a tester needs? And when it comes to automation and white box, testers are no less than the developers technologically rather I would say more technically sound because they have to find the problems in the code.
Before erasing it from the mind of people working in the organizations,the organizations themselves have to believe in the equality of the streams.They have to believe that QA and R&D compliment each other.And this does not just have to come in words.Actions always speak louder than words.
And guys remember,testing is not a no brainer's job,so gear up before getting into this field.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
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4 comments:
Did see this link
http://quickduck.com/blog/2008/02/18/unit-testing-mocking-and-dependency-injection/
Hi Jaanvi,
You are right but we have only 1 weapon against this critisim & thats our skills.
No automation tool can gain it what we have. Let people talk rubbish but we shouldn't pay heed to that.
I glanced through this article and found it to be a nice read. Though i dont agree with you completely on the below statement-
Agreed,testing(manual) does not need technology
This is quite untrue from the experience that i am coming from. To master manual testing one needs to have a technical bent of mind as well. I have worked in the applications requiring quite a complex setup basically simulating what customers have, and it requires in-depth knowledge of OS, Networking and many many other technical concepts.
On the other hand, the troubleshooting aspect which is often related to Follow-up testing requires a tester to understand the underlying technology to come-up with meaningful tests.
To perform manual testing effectively one needs more technical skills than what are generally percieved.
Regards,
Anuj
http://anujmagazine.blogspot.com
@ Roshni
Thanks for stopping by.I agree,its our skills that speak... but what i pity more is the view of the organizations.
@ Anuj
I admit the mistake,creating the setup,hardware configurations,working with third party softwares and simulating customer scenarios do requires a lot more technical knowledge on the tester's part.
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