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What Does a Software Tester's Job Constitute?

Posted by timothy on from the darts-glue-and-ping-pong dept.

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?"

3 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. Some developers appreciate their QA people by perpenso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Some developers appreciate their QA people by dotrobert · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm a QA engineer and I *do* consider the app developers to be evil, lazy and malicious. Well, not really, I just agree that I should assume so for testing purposes since they are humans. Also, in response to the parent comment, I'm REALLY glad that we work in parallel and directly with app developers. It gives them *and* us tremendous advantage.

  2. Re:Ummmm by fooslacker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.