How To Become a Software Tester (Career Path)

 This guide will walk you through the In's and outs of software testing. If you are going to build a career in software testing, this is a MUST READ!

Who is a Software Tester?

A software tester is a professional who certifies software functionality against required specifications. They detect bugs and problems, so that the software is of quality and meets user needs. Their sharp eye for detail and analytical mind play a key role in streamlining software performance.

What Does a Software Tester do?

On any given working day, you would be engaged in reading requirement documents, developing test cases, running test cases, reporting and re-testing defects, review meetings and other team bonding activities.

Technical and Non-Technical skills to become a Software Tester

We will elaborate the Technical and Non-Technical to become a Software Tester

Non-Technical Skills

Skills needed to be a good Software quality tester are:

Compare your skills with the following checklist to assess if Software Testing is a reality for you

Analytical skills: A well-qualified software tester must possess keen analytical skills. Analytical skills will assist in dividing a sophisticated software system into pieces to understand it better and formulate test cases. Unsure that you possess good analytical skills – Refer this link – if you are able to solve at least ONE problem you possess excellent analytical skills.

Communication skill: The ideal software tester should possess effective verbal and written communication skill. Test artifacts (such as test cases/plans, test strategies, bug reports, etc.) produced by the software tester should be readable and understandable. Handling developers (in case of bugs or any other problem) will need a touch of discreetness and diplomacy.

Time Management & Organizational Skills: Testing at times might be a challenging task particularly while releasing code. A software tester needs to manage workload effectively, be highly productive, show maximum time management, and organizational skills

GREAT Attitude: To become a good software tester you should have a GREAT attitude. An attitude to 'test to break', attention to detail, desire to learn and provide process improvements. In the IT sector, technologies keep changing with an overburdening pace, and a decent software tester ought to enhance his/her technical Software testing abilities with changing technologies. Your attitude should show a certain level of independence where you become responsible for the task assigned and deliver it without excessive direct monitoring.

Passion: In order to be good at any job or career, you have to have a lot of the passion for it. A software tester should possess a passion for his / her line of work. BUT how do you know if you are passionate about software testing if you never tested? Easy TRY it out and if software testing doesn't thrill you do something else that interests you.

Technical Skills

This is a long list, so bear with us

Basic understanding of Database/ SQL: Software Systems have a tremendous amount of data in the background. This data is kept in various kinds of databases such as Oracle, MySQL, etc. in the backend. Therefore, there will be scenarios where this data has to be validated. In that situation, simple/complex SQL queries can be employed to verify whether correct data is kept in the backend databases.

Basic understanding of Linux commands: Majority of the software applications such as Web-Services, Databases, Application Servers are installed on Linux machines.So it is essential for the testers to know about Linux commands.

Knowledge and experience of a Test Management Tool: Test Management is a vital part of Software testing. If software testing process lacks proper test management techniques, then software testing process will be a failure. Test management is nothing but handling your testing related artifacts.

For example – A tool like Testlink can be used for tracking all the test cases written by your team.

There are other tools available that can be utilized for Test Management. So, it is important to have knowledge and working experience of such tools because they are used in most of the companies.

Knowledge and experience of any Defect Tracking tool- Defect Tracking and Defect life cycle are important areas of software testing. It is very much crucial to manage defects appropriately and track them in a proper way. Defect tracking is required because the entire team should be informed about the defect like managers, developers, and testers. There are many tools which are used to record defects such as QC, Bugzilla, Jira, etc.

Knowledge and practical experience of Automation tool: If you can visualize yourself as an "Automation tester" in a couple of years of working on manual testing, then you need to master a tool and gain in-depth, practical knowledge of automation tools.

Note – Knowledge of any Automation tool alone is not enough to crack the interview, you need to have good practical experience, so practice the tool of your choice to master it.

Any scripting language knowledge such as VBScript, JavaScript, C# is always beneficial as a tester if you are finding a job into automation. Some organizations also utilize Shell/Perl scripting, and there is a huge need for testers who have the same knowledge. Once again, it would be based on the company and which tools they utilize.

There is also much scope for performance testing tools as applications have to be tested on their performance which is a segment of non-functional testing.

Software Tester Career Path

Your career development as a software tester (QA Analyst) in typical CMMI level 5 company will look as below but will be different company to company. Browse through this list of established software testing service providers to know more about various companies and what they have to offer.

QA Analyst (Freshers)

Sr. QA Analyst (2-3 years of experience)

QA Team Coordinator (5-6 years of experience)

Test Manager (8-11 years of experience)

Senior Test Manager (14+ experience)

Alternate Career Paths as a Software Tester

After getting your hand dirty with manual testing, you can follow below-mentioned specializations

Automation Testing: As an Automation Test Engineer, you would automate manual test case execution that otherwise might take time. Tools utilized IBM Rational Robot, Silk performer, and QTP

Performance Testing: As a performance test engineer, you will be taking care of application responsiveness (time taken to load, max load application can undertake), etc. Tools utilized WEBLoad, Loadrunner.

Business Analyst: One of the biggest strengths Testers have over Developers is that they possess an end to end business knowledge. One very clear Testing career path for testers is to be a Business Analyst. As a Business Analyst, you will analyze and evaluate your company's business model and processes. As a BA, you will merge these models and processes with technology.