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What Does a Software Tester's Job Constitute?
First time accepted submitter rolakyng writes "I got a call from a recruiter looking for software test engineer. I'm a software engineer and my job is development and testing. I know I mentioned testing but I'm pretty sure it's totally different from professional testing practices. Can anyone shed light on what a software test engineer's day to day responsibilities are? They said they'll call me back for a screening and I want to be ready for it. Any tips?"
Go down a list of features.
make sure they work one at a time.
then try to break them anyway.
The truth is that if one wants to find out what software does under different conditions, he shouldn't go the designer or the developer, he should go straight to the tester.
The job of a tester is to put together a meaningful plan - understand how the software is going to correspond to the business needs and test the main logical paths as well as some optional and failure paths and find out what the software really does as opposed to what people think it should do.
If the difference between what the software does and what is required is such, that the business will suffer because of it, this should be fixed, so this goes back to the developers.
Testers prepare test plans and test the software.
Good testers prepare the data and seed it, so that it is the same at the start of similar tests in each iteration.
Intelligent testers use various tools so that they don't do this by hand.
Excellent testers figure out what the business needs and actually provide good user-like (but better) feedback to the development.
You can't handle the truth.
telling the developer he's right about everything and the product is never broken, or the tester will get a tongue lashing.
As a developer who was fortunate enough to have an internal QA department I can say that your opinion is not universal. Hell, myself and fellow developers were annoyed when our QA people were moved to an adjacent building. We preferred having them one floor away in the same building so that we could more easily walk over to their cube to see what they see. Of course our QA people were trained, part of the company not contractors, etc.
Reading and understanding requirements....Writing testing strategies, test cases, and low level testing scripts that can be traced back to the individual requirements that they test....Understanding which test cases map to which functional blocks of a system....Identifying which test cases should be part of a regression pack and keeping that pack fresh through various versions of the software....running that regression pack when requested during future development cycles...performing change impact analysis to select subsets of the regression pack to test various changes...etc.
....and if it is a manager position then add in all the people stuff on top.
...and of course executing test cases and tracking the results.