10+ Tips to Survive and Progress in the Field of Software Testing

TOP 10 Tips that will help you progress and excel in the field of Software Testing are included in this article.

These tips are explained with simple and easy examples for your clear understanding. They will not only help you to survive but also guide you to advance in your software testing career.

Make sure that you follow them to enjoy success.

Let us read through each TIP one by one.

Top TIPS to Survive in Software Testing

Tip #1) Written Communication – I repeatedly say this on many occasions to keep all things in written communication. No verbal communication, please. This is applicable to all instructions or tasks that are given to you by your superior.

No matter how friendly your lead or manager is but keep things in emails or documents. Keeping things in written makes all the tasks recorded and it becomes easy to keep track of the things.

For example, if you find a bug during testing, it is always better to report an issue in the test management tool rather than communicating the bug verbally to the developer. Because later on the developer might forget about fixing the bug you mentioned and the rest of the team will also be unaware of it.

However, if a bug is reported on the system, everyone will be on the same page regarding the bug status.

In the further reading section, I have embedded a few links to the articles that will help you to brush up your communication skills.

Tip #2) Try to Automate Daily Routine Tasks – Save time and energy by automating daily routine tasks, no matter how small those tasks are.

Example 1: If you deploy the daily project builds manually, then write a batch script to perform the task in one click.

Example 2:  You need to open the issue management application many times a day to check for bugs and their status. Generally, you do all such tasks manually. What I suggest is that you may go a little more innovative and write a script that can automatically run on a periodic basis and fetch you the current status of issues/bugs.

Tip #3) 360-degree Testing approach – You need to think from all perspectives to hunt down software defects. Apart from your SRS documents, find all possible information related to the application under test. Use this information to understand the project completely and apply this knowledge while testing.

For example, if you are testing a partner website integration with your application, then make sure you fully understand the partner business before starting to test.

Think from the viewpoint of all stakeholders while doing the testing. For example, the look and feel of an application might be just fine for you as a tester but a business user might not find it appealing. So, you need to think and behave like an end-user while doing user acceptance testing.

Tip #4) Continuous Learning – Never stop learning.

Explore better ways to test the application. Learn new Automation tools like Selenium, QTP or any Performance testing tool.

As per the current software testing market, some of the key areas you can focus on to learn are open source testing tools, Agile & DevOps, Performance Engineering, Big data testing, mobile testing automation and merging development & testing together – SDET (Software Developer in Test).

We have embedded some article links in the further reading section regarding agile testing & automation testing tools. You can explore more at STH!

Tip #5) Admit mistakes but be Confident about whatever tasks you did – Take a lesson from each mistake you make during the work and avoid doing the same mistake again. This is the best method to learn and adapt to new things.

Tip #6) Get involved from the beginning – Ask your lead or manager to get you (QAs) involved in design discussions/meetings from the beginning. This is more applicable for small teams without QA leads or managers. You will be able to do better testing if you know in and out of the application.

Tip #7) Keep notes on everything – Keep notes of daily new things learned on the project so that you don’t need to ask the same thing again and again to the fellow testers or developers.

This could be either just simple commands to be executed for certain tasks to complete or complex testing steps.

Tip #8) Improve your Communication and Interpersonal Skill – This is very important for periodic career growth at all stages. As you count the number of years of software testing experience, you should parallelly grow as a professional.

Tip #9) Make sure you get noticed at work – Sometimes your lead may not present the true picture of you to your manager or company management. In such cases, you should continuously watch the moments where you can show your performance to the Top management.

Warning: Don’t play politics at work if you think your lead or manager is kind enough to communicate your skill/progress to your manager or top management. In that case, there’s no need to follow this tip.

Tip #10) Software testing is fun, enjoy it – Stay calm, be focused, follow all processes and enjoy testing. See how interesting software testing is. I must say it’s addictive for some people.

Few Additional Tips

Tip #11) Stay tuned with the latest Software Testing trends – It is very important that you are aware of what is going on in the software testing market.

You can refer here to read the latest software testing news.

A few days back, I just read that according to a forecast, the global software testing integration market will grow at a rate of 14.6% by 2020. The reason behind this is the quick adoption of agile methodology across organizations worldwide.

So, if you are looking for a great future in software testing, then you must now start learning agile methodology & integration testing tools.

Another hot trend is mobile app automation testing and this will even grow big in the future. So, it will be really helpful for you if you have knowledge of any automation testing tool for mobile apps.

Tip #12) Connect to other people who are into the same profession – Building a strong network helps you to stay updated and learn new things. You can also find good career opportunities through referrals.

Bonus tip

Last but not the least – “Read, read and read” – Keep on reading books, white papers, blogs, magazines and case studies related to software testing and quality assurance. Always stay on top of software testing news and QA industry. Or keep reading this blog to keep yourself updated 🙂

Further Reading

• How to Become an Excellent Communicator as a Tester – A 4-Step Process
• How Important is it for a Tester or Developer to Communicate with Each Other?
• 9 Ways to Quickly Improve Your Writing Skills as a Software Tester
• Top 20 Best Automation Testing Tools: The Most Comprehensive List
• 7 Tips to be More Innovative in the Age of Agile Testing to Survive an Economic Crisis

Have fun testing! Explore our other interesting posts on Software Testing tips and tricks. If you like these tips, kindly take a moment to share it with your friends. Also, don’t forget to join the conversation below to share your best testing tips!