JuniorLearnsToCode

Recently, I was creating a simple services website in WordPress for a friend. I haven't touched WordPress in 5-6 years, but I still recall a few things about it. At that time, I was trying to get some freelance work on the side, and WordPress seemed like a good choice.  I picked up some PHP along the way and worked for a few smaller clients via Upwork, one of the most exciting projects was one where I got to make a custom template for that client. Other gigs were mostly about configurational stuff, figuring out why certain plugins are causing issues, writing some customer CSS here and there, those sorts of things. Image borrowed from WIP Fix It I remembered that after figuring out how some of the more custom things in WordPress felt actually easier, like writing a bit of code to get something to work, than using stuff like visual page builder plugins. Each such plugin had its own way of doing things, and you had to learn how it does things, which, while not really too difficult, do...

Some software Testers may get tired of a long career in testing or do not want to pursue a career technical career, such as becoming an automation specialist, or a developer. Such software testers can go on to become product owners, business analysts, scrum masters, project (program or product) managers, or engineering managers. There are many other non-technical roles to choose from, but here I will focus on the most common ones. Let us explore these non-technical career options and dive into the details of each of them. Final remark before we go on: even though these roles seem non-technical, each of these roles benefits if the tester has a technical background, and most contemporary testers do.  Product Owners As a tester often you would think about in what way would a customer use a product, and how a particular functionality could be made easier for the customer to use. As a product owner, you would be able to influence those kinds of decisions - after all the product owner is...

Very often, when applying to jobs you may get a task to test an app you're not familiar with, or you might not know who to start testing the product on your new job. In these situations, you can try to use heuristics (general rule of thumb) if you are unfamiliar with the application's domain. For the issues you do find, try to think about the from the user's perspective: is something blocking (like login or registration being completely broken) you completely from accessing the rest of the app? Is an issue annoying, but you can work around it? Is it a minor glitch or a text typo? To help conceptualize this approach you can use Personas-based testing. Here is a list of some techniques that can be helpful for testing most apps. For a lot of apps, you can use the CRUD approach to testing: Can you create resources, like registering for an account? Can you read data, like opening website pages without issues? Can you update data, such as changing your username? Can you delete ...

The International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) offers a range of certifications for software testers. The important thing to note is that the CTFL (Certified Tester Foundation Level) certification is the prerequisite that unlocks all other ISTQB certifications. Getting ISTQB certified can have several benefits, so let’s have a look at the situation. Benefits : Validation of knowledge: The ISTQB certification exams test a candidate's knowledge of the software testing process, including test design, test management, and test techniques. By passing the exam, the candidate demonstrates that they have a certain level of knowledge and understanding of software testing. It’s a good way to show that you know the terminology and possessed the required theoretical knowledge of software testing. Career advancement: Many companies require or prefer candidates with ISTQB certification for software testing positions. The certification can help a candidate stand out in a competit...

This year has been pretty active for me and there were a few achievements that I'm very happy about. The biggest thing I achieved was the fact that I was able to get my stage fright under more control. I practiced the speeches I delivered at conferences beforehand, and made sure I also recorded myself while rehearsing which to me was the most helpful of all things I've tried. Delivering your practiced speech in front of a mirror can also be a good idea, but a recording allows you to listen and analyze your speech and see what can be improved. This year I spoke at two in-person conferences (long overdue, thanks to Covid) and one online conference, and one in-person meetup. Here's a detailed round-up of what I was up to, first of all, conferences: TestBash Careers - How to market yourself better as a software tester Bosnia Agile Day - Modern Testing Principles - Natural Evolution of Agile Testing Testival - Keynote Why Community Matters, Philosophy and Drive QA Global Summit...

How come it’s not so obvious what we do, how we help a team/customers, and the value we bring? The work presented by the developers is more tangible, the same goes for many other professions such as designers, where they have a visual output of their work. For testers, this is different, since testing is not that visible to the customer, or sometimes the management. Testers can shed light on their activities by advocating quality and being proactive communicators - try speaking to everyone in their own language. For example, developers will wholeheartedly agree that good software architecture has a direct positive impact on the app's testability and overall quality - a well-architectured app will have a lot fewer bugs to find in the first place. And when dealing with managers, translate everything into the language of money. How much will the company lose, if a certain feature doesn't get the (minimum) testing needed after we have assessed and accepted the risks we discover. Wh...

I recently came across a forum topic about a QA portfolio and what it should look like. Since i t is a bit more demanding for us testers than it is for designers and developers, to have presentable work for our portfolios. They just put work samples of apps they designed and developed, and for us testers we need to get a bit more creative: If you have your own blog or write articles for others you can showcase those on your portfolio Any public speaking activities you should display as well, such as meetups, conferences, workshops, etc. Also, if you are a volunteer or a member of any testing communities I’d show that too. If you know automation or are learning it, you can include links for GitHub repositories with your automation code - just try to add a bit of variation, do some UI, and some API automation, and play around with different frameworks to demonstrate that you are a keen learner. You can get even more original and add samples of how you perform regular QA tasks, a sample ...

 Let me tell you a spooky story about an irreproducible bug. It took a place a long time ago, before seven companies, and seven projects, there stood an irreproducible bug! At the time this happened I was working on a fairly large enterprise project,. The whole system was made up of various applications, written in a few different languages, over time, by many different teams.  The core defect was a bit of an edge case, where just users with certain country codes would not get eCommerce promotional emails sent to them. It was a wild goose chase, I was the first to investigate the bugs, as I was in the application support team at the time, about 20 hours per week. I tried in different environments, but to no avail - I could not figure it out. Used a test harness to trick the dates, as it was a kind of email that gets sent 24 hours after registration. I got very stubborn about it and spent about 4 hours without getting up from my chair, trying to figure out the root cause. Why w...

 In this blog post, I just want to share a list of resources, for learning software testing. An excellent book on Agile Testing, by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory: https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Testing-Practical-Guide-Testers/dp/0321534468 BBST courses are a great way to tackle fundamental concepts behind testing https://bbst.courses/videos/ Awesome book on Exploratory Testing, by Maaret Pyhäjärvi https://leanpub.com/exploratorytesting Nice course to get a broad idea about testing, Udemy has a lot of similar courses and they have sales all the time: https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-quality-assurance/ Prep for ISTQB certificate, useful to get to know the terminology and theory https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Software-Testing-ISTQB-Certification/dp/1844803554 ISTQB syllabus - if you are learning for the CTFL and if it's in demand in your market https://www.istqb.org/certifications/certified-tester-foundation-level Pluralsight has a certification path for ISTQB CTFL a...

Full honest disclaimer: I haven’t used many no-code automation tools, and the ones I’ve used have always been just out of curiosity, and I never went deep into any of those tools until now. I’m a QA who’s mainly focused on working with coded test automation frameworks and never had much time to look into such tools. So when the folks from testRigor approached me with a question if I would like to try out their tool, I was curious although a bit skeptical.   While in the past I disregarded any no-code automation tools, as I didn’t have a need for them, in more recent years I’ve become more open to the idea of giving such tools a try. There is a time and place for everything, and coding a complete automation framework can be a waste of resources - unless you produce it exceptionally specific in terms of testing. Hence, you need to utilize all the customization that is available to you. One of the reasons I changed my mind about tools like this one, was the fact that a couple of ...

Here are the three things that have helped my testing career: Building good relations with people I work with - from personal experience, is what has helped me the most in my career. People remember if they enjoyed having you as their team member and working alongside you. I always advocate that you should be polite and considerate towards everyone you work with, and never burn bridges behind you, as you never know when a previous co-worker can be your future co-worker as well, when you change companies. I got quite a few referrals from previous co-workers when they moved to new companies, and I recommended people who I worked with, so it goes both ways! Learning Continuously - about 5-6 years ago I tried hard to make a habit of trying my best to learn something new (almost) every day, the reason for this is because I'm lazy, and on the other hand people say consistency is the key to learn new things. If you spend 30 minutes daily learning test automation, in a year you will know...

For most testers, designing, executing, and maintaining test cases are regular activities, this is especially true for new testers and those in the early stages of their career. This post is inspired by some documentation I worked on, in an effort to standardize the testing process in one of my previous jobs. Bear in mind that in each company the approach to handling test cases can differ significantly, old-school (Waterfall-like) enterprises might favor very long and detailed test cases, where each step required to execute the test cases is described in great detail, to more Agile environment where testing is moving at a faster pace, so test cases in Agile are shorter and more concise. There is a great course at the MoT on this topic called  Optimising Manual Test Scripts For An Agile Environment , by Match Archer, the course is not too long and it's full of useful info, I'd highly recommend it. There is also a third alternative - no test cases at all! This has been a trend in...

Most of the time, when people hear the term "software testing" the first thing that comes to mind is just that - testing some software, which usually involves reporting a lot of bugs, designing test cases, doing exploratory testing sessions, working on automated checks, etc. But, there are a lot of other ways in which a tester can contribute to the overall quality of the product. So what exactly would proactive thinking be, from a tester's perspective? A tester does not have to be just a bearer of bad news, as a tester sees the system as a whole and gets plenty of chance to interact with it, the said tester can also gain a lot of useful insight into the system. One of the most important aspects of our job is to provide information, sometimes that information needs to be distilled down into more succinct formats, but also, a tester should proactively act on the information he/she gains.  Just because you might not find any obvious bugs in a feature you're testing it do...