How to boost up your QA Engineer skills

There are 5 important points that a beginner tester must get to know and integrate into the future work in the professional environment. One must keep this basic knowledge in mind and study new information, structure it and strive for new tasks and their solutions.

Let us start with the most important thing for each person  who connected their professional life with software testing:

1. Never stop on the achievements that you have reached, strive for new knowledge 

It is necessary to strive for the understanding that each piece of new information, each new thought is the part of the experience and skills that testers apply in their professional sphere. That is why it is important to be attentive to everything and get to know something new every day. It is even better to create a list or special assignment of resources and actions ( maybe even new skills)  that you will use in the near future. for example:

• create a list of top bloggers in  the sphere of testing and IT generally, for example: blog.qatestlab, qa intelligence, smartbear, softwaretestingmagazine, joe colantonio, qa mentor, softwaretestinghelp, 9lessons;
• do not forget to boost up  the fundamentals of testing, by learning new ways, methods and types of testing, getting inspiration from the following books: Ron Patton – Software testing; Lee Copeland – A practitioner's guide for software design; James Witthaker – Exploratory Software testing; Robert Kalberstone – Quick testing and so on.;
• apply your skills and knowledge in different types and parts of testing, try yourself in game testing, security testing and automated testing. One must look for a branch of testing where you feel comfortable and confident;
• be flexible in your skills and knowledge, work on your time management. Boost up your level of English as a prior language in IT.

2. Soft skills or how to improve the communication skills and behavior of the tester in work processes 

Beside the good level of hard skills, it is very important to pay attention to the communication with QA Engineers and developers. These skills are often ignored by the QA testing specialists and HR-specialists, which can lead the team to the high level of productivity or make the work with other skilled professionals a real nightmare. So, what key points of communication must be preserved for one to remain in the QA sphere and take part in any interview? Here is a short list of the most underrated skills in the QA sphere.

Know the right time for right questions

In QA field there is no projects that are the same, so it doesn’t matter how much you’ve been working on new projects, it is always better to ask questions like:

How will this application be used?

Who are the end clients?

What is a peak usage time?

What are the most common configurations of browser/ hardware/OS?

If you don’t ask the fundamental questions, your attempts will most likely lead to bug risks in an application. The ability to ask correct questions and know when to leave your question open and when to jump into details - are the communicational skills that are needed for anyone from the QA sphere.

Ability to listen

All of us have thoughts and we also enjoy sharing them. Sometimes even before the person finishes their thought, we intrude to suggest a solution. They can be actual and wisely created, however, they are not always greeted well. 

Listening is a skill and in your career path you won’t meet many people who are able to listen properly, without some pauses and actually hear what the speaker is trying to say. Correctly heard and understood information influences fast solving of the problem.

Focus on concerns of the interested sides

A QA manager or a tester that is responsible for a separate task must know how to change the QA speech in a way that it is a useful and understandable message. Their message must contain the information about the tasks solved and whether they correspond to the requirements needed. As an example, instead of the 30 slides presentation with the full diagram of the defect transformation, it is better to show one slide that contains the business risks, terms and so on. In such a way the speaker will conduct a speech on the language that is important for the owner of the product, product manager and the efforts of the team will be seen and evaluated higher. 

Broaden the circle of professional communications and be attentive to everyone.

Even in Agile and DevOps, where developers, sysadmins and testers must work side by side, there are often invisible boundaries between different functions. The best way to overcome this is to facilitate communication.

The interpersonal skills of your team members, and you in particular, are also essential to success. A person who gets along with others is important to your team and to you. It is very easy to establish communication processes with such people. By talking directly with the developer and asking what he was thinking when he wrote a certain piece of code, you can get a deeper insight into the program than by spending hours studying tons of documentation and spending hours in meetings.

Deal with bullies

Over the years, a significant amount of negativity has flowed towards QA. We're talking about when business stakeholders put a lot of deadline pressure on QA teams, fueled by endless harassment from developers. All this is the reason for one of the most important factors: not always QA can stand up for themselves in certain situations when it comes to project deadlines, eternal releases and very high pressure from project managers and other teams. Testing is the last step in the development process, while QA runs through it. You should be firm in your position, defend your decisions and support your assertions with real facts and arguments. It is worth avoiding such a problem as QA ping-pong, which means that the same ticket is manipulated several times by QA and developers. This can have various reasons:

• the developer doesn't want to accept that nobody is perfect and dismisses QA flaws without checking the broken issues, doesn't read the bug report or comments on it properly;
• QA marks the ticket as failed at each test iteration as soon as the first error appears without checking it further.

Before assigning the status of the defect as failed and handing it over to the developer, it is worth checking whether this problem affects further use cases or not. If not, you can keep testing to catch more bugs as early as possible.

3. Testing tools and techniques. Ability to properly use testing tools and techniques

Each QA engineer selects a set of testing tools that will be directly related to the specifics of the project he is currently working with. Knowledge of the main tools in testing should become the basis for the development of new skills and abilities of a beginner QA.

Here is a small list of popular tools that are used at various stages of testing:

Functional testing tools:

• Selenium
• Soapui
• Watir
• HTTP :: Recorder
• WatiN
• Webcorder
• Solex
  

Load testing tools:

• Jmeter
• WebLOAD Professional
• HP LoadRunner
• LoadStorm
• NeoLoad

Testing management tools and bug tracking system:

• TestRail
• Jira
• Mantis
• Trello
• Pivotal
• Bugzilla
• GitHub

Choosing an appropriate set of testing tools is the key to the success of all testing. Also, knowledge of various development tools and environments provides quick integration in the process of testing and developing a software product allows fast integration in the process of testing and development of the software.

Software testing methods

Since exhaustive testing is not possible, test methods help reduce the number of test cases that need to be executed, while increasing software test coverage. They help identify test conditions that are otherwise difficult to recognize. There are 5 basic and frequently used methods that every QA must know:

• Boundary Value Analysis (BVA);
• Equivalence class partitioning – (ECP);

• Decision Table Based Testing;

• State Transition;

• Error Guessing.
  

Let us have a closer look:

Boundary Value Analysis (BVA)

If the input condition is bounded between x and y values, then test cases must be developed with those values, as well as with values above and below x and y.

Equivalence class partitioning (ECP)

Equivalence partitioning allows you to divide a set of test conditions into partitions that should be considered the same. This method of software testing divides the input domain of the application into classes of data from which test cases should be developed.

Decision Table Based Testing (DTBT)

A decision table is also called a cause and effect table. This method of software testing is used for functions that respond to a combination of inputs or events. For example, the «Submit» button should be active if the user has filled in all the required fields.

State Transition

In this method, changes in the input conditions change the state of the program under test. This testing technique allows the tester to test the behavior. It can perform this action by entering various input conditions in the sequence. In the state transition method, testing groups provide positive and negative test input values to evaluate the behavior of the system.

Error Guessing

This method of software testing is based on guessing the error that may be prevalent in the code. In this method, the analyst-tester uses his experience, the experience of other specialists in this field, to guess the problematic part of the test program. The technique calculates a list of possible errors or error-prone situations. The tester then writes a test case to detect these errors.

Software testing methods allow you to develop better options. Every QA beginner should master each of the «Golden five».

4. DevOps & Agile Methodology: fundamental principles, methods and conditions of use.

Given the urgent need to meet development deadlines and software product availability, testers should learn the Agile & DevOps methodology as it supports collaborative and iterative work models. While the Agile methodology helps to reduce the cost of using time resources on a test project, DevOps helps in cross-functional teamwork from development, analysis and quality assurance, which allows for a high-quality end product with a faster time to market.

Learning these methodologies removes the complexity of understanding the role of each member of the development and testing process, allowing teams to focus on incremental development and continuous releases.

These principles and foundations are an urgent improvement of the interaction of various functional working groups in terms of the short terms of development and readiness of the software product.

5. SDLC – Software development life cycle (including systems and applications)

The concept of the systems development life cycle applies to a number of hardware and software configurations, as a system can consist of only hardware, software, or a combination thereof. This cycle usually consists of six stages: analysis, design, development and testing, implementation, documentation and evaluation. Quality assurance plays an important role in each phase of the SDLC and the QA professional must understand the significance of its impact on each phase. For novice testers, one of the most important steps to understanding testing processes is mastering the knowledge of the software development life cycle and understanding one's role at each stage.

If QA is introduced at each stage of the SDLC, it allows the company to verify the accuracy of each individual module of the program. This method helps to detect critical software defects at the very initial stage. The application must be programmed in such a way that it can work smoothly in any situation. If the quality of the program is extremely high, it can work well in different circumstances. Performing QA operations at each stage of the SDLC at regular intervals helps improve functionality, reliability, performance, and other important application quality attributes. More importantly, companies that depend on web applications don't want to deal with issues such as application downtime, instances where it doesn't meet needs, negatively impacts customers, has serious bugs, or other problems. One thing that service providers should consider when considering QA is that testing should not only be done to identify bugs in the application, but also to assess the competency of the application and the purpose for which it was created.

Testing should be carefully planned and conducted throughout the SDLC to achieve the best results, ultimately helping to keep the cost of bug fixes very low. However, if QA is NOT deployed during the SDLC and introduced at the end of the cycle, the cost of fixing the bugs will be very high and sometimes it can incur prohibitive costs. Software testing not only plays an important role in the SDLC to meet application standards, but also reflects on the reputation of the organization.

One of the main principles for QA in getting to know a software product and studying it is to understand what stage of development QA is at the moment.

Conclusions

A QA engineer is a specialist in various fields and areas of IT, who must improve his skills every day, every hour, every minute. The above points are not exhaustive, because in the field of IT it is impossible to reach perfection in any field, you will have to learn all your life. But these five points will be a good start for the novice tester.