Is learning a testing career easy?

Miscellaneous
1

In our community forum, there are many students and Tester at entry level or someone switching their career. A common question for those is whether pursuing a career as a software tester is considered relatively straightforward?

Or

:interrobang: are there certain complexities and requirements that individuals should be aware of when embarking on this path?

Leave your quick idea here:

  • Easy and Straightforward
  • Easy but needing some investigating time
  • So-so
  • Difficult but fun
  • Very difficult and taking much learning time
0 voters

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2

To start a testing career is relatively easy, provided the person has some basic skills like pay attention to details, have imagination to break stuff and some curiosity to understand how thing works.
To advance in the carrer it only depends on self motivation.
I know people with more than 10 years experience in testing still at manual testing level because AQA is not at their taste.

3

Although my answer might be a bit late for you, it could still be helpful for others with the same question. If you’re aiming for a successful career in SAP, considering your background in Mechanical Engineering, the SAP module that could be a great fit for you in SAP Plant Maintenance (PM). It aligns well with your industry experience in healthcare and allows you to leverage your engineering skills.

4

Don’t think too much , do the work and leave. Often I see a lot of dramatisation on Linkedin LOL

5

Starting a Career as a tester is based on the type of project they start with

  1. If you start with a ERP-level project that is dynamic in nature it is difficult to deal with but I would say you will learn much from it.

  2. If you start with a simple project that will be easy and there is nothing much to learn from it. but you will get a lot of free time to learn something new.

To start a career as an Automation tester you should have basic coding skills and a good strategic approach to create an automated test.

6

Software testers don’t ‘break’ things, as the cartoon above states - it was already broken! Sometimes finding that breakage can be a simple or complex process

7

Late to the party here, but I’ll give my experience regarding this question.

If by “learning a testing career” you mean manual testing, then I would say yes, it’s relatively easy, particularly if you are a millennial or younger like myself. That’s because we grew up immersed in application usage, and can easily tell a broken app from a solid one, and can more easily think of ways to abuse/break the app if so inclined. Not to say that if you aren’t in this demographic that it would be harder, as long as you’re somewhat tech-savvy.

If instead you mean automated testing, you have to have the manual experience plus programming skills, which of course takes way more time to learn. Relative to other software development “flavors”, in my experience, it isn’t any more or less easy or difficult to learn, it just takes time like anything else. There are so many specializations in the software development world, and test automation is just one of them (and also the most fun one, in my humble opinion :smile:).

One unique challenge for automated test development that you absolutely, 100%, without exception, MUST master is how to future-proof your code, arguably more than any other subgenre of software development. This is because you are writing code that essentially mirrors the application you are testing, and if that application is undergoing rapid development, your test code will break just as fast unless you are smart about it’s implementation. This is why it’s so important to follow patterns like the Page Object model to keep your scripts healthy and to keep your maintenance costs within reasonable limits. If you are lazy and use things like recording software as your way to “develop” scripts, you are in for a world of hurt and will end up spending way more time maintaining your test code instead of adding to/improving it. This is what truly sets the boys/girls apart from the men/women, and the engineers from the testers.

There are many more challenges unique to this career, obviously, and even within this branch of development there are so many ways you can take your learning and specializations to follow. Do you want to focus more on behavior-driven design (BDD), test-driven design (TDD), data-driven testing, etc.? Which technologies do you want to use in your stack? What type(s) of applications are you testing? This is where I think Katalon is great for both experienced and new testers, it can accommodate all of these in one tool.

Anyway, I could probably go on and write a novel on this subject. I’m actually in the middle of developing an entire set of learning modules for this career path that should be available on one or more of the popular learning platforms out there within a year or so. I’ll link it when I get around to finishing it :slight_smile:

Cheers!

8

I spy with my little eye, a collaboration opportunity with @viet.nguyen and @thao.tran from our Academy team :eyes:

9

and validate it. let us do not forget the responsability of a QA engineer.
The scope of a developper work ends when he pushes the fix.
To validate a release for production goes into the QAlification process.
To test is easy. To block a release, is not for mortals.
You need balls.
(may not sound politically correct but i know women’s with biggest ‘balls’ than 'men’s)

with this in mind, i strongly advise against ‘mirror the aut code’
propper testing should follow blacbox testing principle.
you may take a sneak peak into the aut code to get inspired but do not use it
write your own, add as more validation as your imagination goes.

10

The ease of starting depends on the environment you start in and of course the mentoring you have around you. Staying in the game beyond a 1 or 2 company position usually means that your embracing your profession as a software engineer, and thus starting to learn how in depth you can go in different testing methods, tools, and types of testing to catch different types of defects. Thus making your department more valuable to your business and its users.
That said. I know testers who have stayed manual testers for 30 years and haven’t pushed their knowledge beyond the single application they support and they are very happy. (although much less marketable skill set wise).

So is learning a testing career easy ? I think it can be. It mainly depends on your support structure