Hello everyone, my name is Alexey Petrov. I work at Mail.Ru Group as Quality Director in the Mail and Portal business unit. Today I will talk about such an interesting and attractive in all respects activities like freelancing in testing. I started testing as such in 2005. I loved to play computer games and tested them in parallel. I was a fan of “Tony Hawk - American Wasteland”, and when the game came to me 1.5 months before the official world release, and I could get through it, I was happy. After the 50th passage, when they gave me a disc with the release, I burned it, honestly. I'm so fed up with it! I can still say in which mission and what quest to complete, all hints and so on.

After that, I worked on web projects with a tester, then a lead tester, a technical support specialist, a project manager, and a development manager. That is, I visited various forms for one simple reason: I wanted to see the testing process from different angles. It often happens that when a tester deals exclusively with testing, the people with whom he contacts are project managers, system analysts, developers, administrators, who seem to him aliens and, in general, are not of this world. For example, I had a case when, after two years of working on one project in the role of lead tester, I left for a time from RosBusinessConsulting, returned a year after 1.5-2 and began to manage the project in which was a tester. I opened the tracker and saw about 500 of a wide variety of defects, including those that he himself put two years ago. As a tester, I would urgently raise these defects in priority and say: “How so? Two years in the project there is a defect, but it has not yet been fixed. ” But, already being a manager, I began to think like a manager. I understood that if there is a defect in the product for two years and no one died, then this defect can be lowered in priority or not corrected at all.

For 7 years I combined my main job with freelancing. This gave a huge boost to my professional growth and quite a substantial increase in income. In the best years, it was possible to earn about 100-120 thousand rubles a month, working remotely.
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Where to start

Where to start if you decide to do remote testing, freelancing? First of all, you need self-confidence, your own strength, an understanding of the fact that you really need it. It often happens that a person lights up with the idea: "I want to try something new for myself, go and do it." He begins to stumble upon some primary, most simple, well-known things and throws this thing. I had to work with such people. For example, I signed up for a project that required testing for up to 16 hours a day. I distributed this work between myself and my two colleagues. Here they were just not sure that they need it, they thought that it was just like that “to cut the dough” and do nothing. After 2-3 weeks, they were forced to tell me: "Sorry, goodbye, we will not do it." And the customer, with whom I had an agreement, was a fairly well-known person in the world of quality assurance, the ancestor of the testing department at Rambler, and just a good person. I did not want to let him down, and I had to cover these 16 hours of testing on my own, while I worked in the office in parallel. You can imagine what my average working day looked like. Therefore, once again: if you really want to do this, then show enough diligence and will.

In my freelance work, I was helped by the experience of using the Internet and interpersonal skills. The latter is a very important feature that you can develop in yourself, including through freelancing in testing. A well-suspended tongue opens the door in almost any direction. If you can correctly present yourself, your product, your business, your idea, then you will be able to conquer absolutely any peaks. If you are somewhat constrained, restrained, do not make contact with other people, then this will create certain problems for you when working in freelance, because communication with the customer and colleagues will be constantly required. Practically no project was in my format, when they give me a task, I do something for a few days and issue a result. Constantly there is some kind of interaction with the customer or his representatives.

It is necessary to prepare a story about yourself, a portfolio, a resume, you can call it quite differently. First of all, it should not require contact with you for clarification. Agree, it will be very strange to look like a resume or portfolio, where it will be written: “He worked on 30 different projects. If you are interested in what, send me an SMS, call or e-mail ”. That is, the story about yourself should be self-sufficient, so that a person can get maximum information. This story should tell good things about you. If you are a pyromaniac, a maniac and, in general, like non-standard and not very good things, then you should not talk about it in your resume.

Your story should interest the client. If you write about yourself in a dry language, if you cannot even sell yourself to yourself, this is a bad story. Consult with someone from colleagues and acquaintances who work in the IT world, as far as you would be interested in the text you presented. It may be worth adding pictures. Suddenly you have a familiar designer, and he will draw you a cool promotional page, and you will use it to capture the attention of a certain audience.

And the most important point. Unfortunately, I very often encounter players in this market who present false or distorted information. Unfortunately, there is a growing cohort of people who think like this: “I will tell a lot of cool and good things about myself, this may not even be true, the main thing is to cling to the customer. I will do the job or not - what's the difference? There are a lot of customers, I can throw him, and there will be nothing for me, anyway, I will find my second, third, fourth, fifth customer. ” My principled position, rather even moral and ethical, is not to deceive people, tell them the truth, everything is as it is. If there is something bad, it's better to keep silent about it than to lie. Then people will contact you again. If you work successfully on a project, after a while one of these developers will say: “Here I am working on a new project, we really need testing. I personally liked interacting with you last time, come on and try on this project. ” It turns the effect of word of mouth. If you are truthful and sincere, this will give rise to loyalty to you from customers.

Personal information

A story about yourself, what can it contain, what needs to be told? First of all experience, if any. It doesn’t matter whether it was a practice at the institute, some kind of order or a request from a colleague, comrade wrote some small program, you tested it, just looked with fresh eyes. If you worked in a company, you should definitely write about it. Describe the projects you have worked on. This often gives an understanding of what the candidate has a set of knowledge in subject areas. Suppose I tested equally dating sites, banking portals, even a site with Japanese adult products. Projects can be very different. When the next customer comes to you, for example, he will see: “Yes, the person worked with SaaS technologies. We also have a SaaS project, it will be very cool to take just such a person. ” Of course, it is worth writing about the skills, if any. Perhaps these are skills in load testing, automated testing, testing usability. There are a lot of directions in testing in order to identify myself as one of them.

Education, if you have something to boast - boast. It is worth pointing out even a hobby, because if you, for example, are semi-professional, amateur or professionally engaged in photography, and you are offered to test a project related to cameras, photo equipment, photographs, then this hobby will be a plus. For example, when I worked at RosBusinessConsulting as the head of the development of the Photo File project, at that time I was particularly active in photography. And knowing the subject area, what is a photo, what kind of technique happens, could offer and implement certain features and ideas within the project. The deepest misconception is that the main goal of testing is to find bugs. Testing is a study of product quality. At the same time, quality means both formal requirements that can be stated by the customer, developer, and informal ones - those requirements that are made by the audience.

In the story about yourself, boldly indicate the character traits, but try to be sincere. If you write that you are punctual, and then you will be regularly late, this will call into question all the other information about you. If you write: “diligence, ingratiality, perseverance”, you need to be sure that you really possess these traits, and do not write them simply because it is so supposed.

Where to place information about yourself

You can put on the markets of distant work, they are quite a large number. If we talk about the most famous, this is Free-lance.ru, Weblancer.net. I even took part in testing Free-lance.ru. It can also be a portfolio site. For me it was a great experience when I set out to make my own website. I had several alternatives: I could make it myself; could ask a friend for free, who would have made him for a long time; and could ask the professional creator of these sites, a web designer, a programmer, no matter what to call it. In the latter case, I would have to pay him constantly for supporting the site. Therefore, for me, freelancing became the impetus for at least at the level of the basics to learn PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and write my own small, simple site, which completely satisfied my needs. In this case, I was in the role of developer and tester. Also, your portfolio can be placed in various social networks.

Customers

In principle, the main customers are software companies. There are big companies like Mail.Ru Group, in which there are huge testing departments. In particular, I have a staff of about 35 people. There are small companies that can not afford to take in the state even one tester. They make small sites on some CMS like Bitrix, Wordpress, Joomla, DLE and so on. For example, the amount of the order is 10 thousand rubles, and they make four sites, a developer’s and a half sits there. Take also a tester with a salary of 20 thousand rubles for them utter luxury. And outsourcing testing is the way out for such companies. Freelancer will not require office space and the payment of some taxes, if you work "in the black." If "in white", then you will have to pay less taxes, depending on the circumstances.

Another group of clients: single developers. There are a variety of cases. Once I spoke with one of the developers, he told me this story. For four years he worked in a fairly large company, and he had one colleague who came late to work, left early, could not come at all, but he never had any complaints from his superiors. Four years later, it turned out that he hired three Indians who wrote the code, and he just came to work, received money, and part of them paid these Indians. I talked to developers who just wanted to slightly improve the quality of their code in order to make it perfect. Developers who directly contact you for testing are very good customers. But this is a rarity, unfortunately, an endangered species. One of my fellow testers came up with a name for them: this is not a programmer, but a programmer. He is a real bro, he wants his code to be of high quality.

There are developers who are suited to testing like this: “I’ve got something wrong here. On, look, understand. Oh, you sent me 30 bug reports. Now, instead of using debag or own viewing, I will correct them and throw you at me again. ” And there are developers who want their code to be of high quality, they come to testers and say: “Dude, I wrote good code here, I checked it myself with unit tests, I gave it to a fellow developer. I want it to be perfect on all sides. I give it to you. Please help me. If there are defects - let me know, I will correct them. "

And the last, probably, class of clients with whom it is possible to work are development customers. For example, someone ordered a web studio or a software development company for a product. They passed it, and the customer is not happy. He seems to him buggy, somehow wrong, incorrect, and, in general, terrible. But the customer is not very competent in software testing issues, and therefore he attracts outsourcing testing as an independent judge.

Search for customers

There is an active and passive search. With an active search, first of all these are offers of remote work. Mainly on various job sites and exchanges for freelancers. Customize your RSS feeds with job updates, view them, respond, write some small welcome letter: “Good afternoon! My name is Vasily Pupkin. I am a very cool tester, I can, then, then. Look here, look here. Welcome! Dial me, I will test you for food at least. "

Offer your services to software companies, web studios. For example, I asked my spouse to type in a web studio, a web studio, and she made me a base of cold clients, 300 web studios. I did small, unobtrusive mailings not with super-mega-copy-paste text, like Good afternoon, and so on. I approached each company individually, at first I looked through realized projects and then offered my services. The main thing is to have a sense of tact. I go to these projects, look for bugs, then write to the company: “Hello, I am a professional tester. For the sake of interest, I went to projects that you recently implemented, and generally looked at your site, and here's a small list of defects for you. If you want to know more, let's get in touch, discuss. ”

I had several non-standard cases. Once I just decided to buy a board game for myself, I went to an online store, and they had an action - find a bug and get a discount of 7%. I found bugs, and if they summed up the discounts, then they still should have stayed with me. But after I wrote them, I did a small audit to them, got two games for free, and everyone was satisfied.

Another option is the combination of consulting and testing. For example, I come to a company and do an audit of the testing process. At the end I add: “By the way, some of your problems can be solved through remote testing. I have 4-5 testers on a remote site, and I can test it myself, that is, I smoothly flow from one to another. This is a completely normal situation, the more so if you conduct a really good audit of the testing processes, you will already be trusted, you will communicate with a potentially loyal client.

You can also promote your own resource. For example, when I wrote my own website, I realized that I needed to promote it somehow. I bought books on SEO and got the experience of promotion in the networks of Yandex and Google. Then it came in handy for me as part of testing. For example, I learned that for search engines it is important that the title and alt differ from each other, otherwise they will not count them.

Passive search for clients also works quite well, especially if you combine it with some active ways. For example, do a newsletter, nobody responds to you during the week, and then it will be sprinkled.

It is very important to understand that IT is one big village, word of mouth works fine here. For Runet, this is more characteristic. When I came to work at Mail.Ru Group, I probably met about 40-50 people with whom I had worked for 9 years in IT: remotely and on staff from large and small companies, developers, project managers , administrators, vice presidents, technical directors, technical support staff. And for this word of mouth to work, be sincere and honest with yourself and with the people with whom you work. Then you will be recommended, time after time you will receive orders, just sitting waiting for customers. 80% of orders I received through word of mouth.

How to negotiate with customers

They are divided into two archetypes: the “cold” client and the “hot” client. Cold first need to explain why you need testing at all. There is a company, a developer, a web-studio, everything was fine with them, and here you come and say: “You really need testing”. They look: "We lived without it for four years, and everything was fine with us." You can make a variety of arguments depending on your communication skills. For example, it is not a secret for anyone that the main competitive advantage in the modern market is quality. People tend to use quality services, purchase quality products. One of the competitive advantages of the same company Apple, which creates the iPhone and other equipment - is that the quality of them is at the forefront. You can resort to loud slogans: “Do you want to be an iPhone in the laundry world? You need software testing, your website should be like Apple products. ”

Hot customer, on the contrary, it is important to explain why you should make this testing. That is, the customer has already realized that testing is cool, this is important, it will make his product competitive and bring it to a new level of quality. He wonders why you should do this testing. You need to tell why you are so cool, why you are right for this product, that you like so much this blue hat and orange background, that you are ready to test it for free, or you are such an expert on blue hats and orange backgrounds, that this task is for you. Of course, I described it in a comic tone.

In order to negotiate, no matter where and in what form they will take place, practice and train to argue your position, prove it with facts, develop this skill, it will be just incredible for you. The simplest method you can try in the company of your acquaintances and friends is dispute. You set a certain thesis, and there are two polar points to this thesis. For example, “Are you for or against the death penalty?”, - ask your potential opponent. He: “I think that the death penalty is cool,” and then you complicate the task, and say: “Well, tell me why you are against the death penalty?”. That is, you put a person in a situation when he is forced, one way or another, to adopt the position of his opponent.

Accounting and agreement

For example, you have agreed that you will conduct manual testing. It comes to discussing the form of accounting. Personally, I most often spent accounting for projects, that is, turnkey testing. They give me a website, I do an audit, saying that "I will test this website with three notes ... three days, suppose, and I want 4,000 rubles for this." A little bit of bargaining, agreed. Maybe hourly pay. You agree that you will receive a certain task pool every day, you will set the approximate time you want to spend, and then in fact indicate that it took three hours to test this feature. At the end of the month you get what you tested, for example, for 45 hours. Suppose your test hour is 300 rubles. The reporting period is over - a month, two weeks, a week, a life, and at the end of this period you lump in the result and get the money. This is a transparent system, it is very often used.

And the last form of accounting - with the help of salary. I worked on some projects, where I was given, for example, four hours a day, for which I was paid a fixed salary, regardless of employment.

Let me remind you that potentially your customer cannot hire a tester in the state, that is, he is not ready to pay 40 thousand rubles for 176 working hours per month, but he is ready to pay, for example, 15 thousand rubles for 38 hours per month. And through the hourly fee, you can often demonstrate to the customer: “See how profitable it is. You will only translate the most critical tasks for me, I will spend a little time on them. You will have three or four such projects, you will create for yourself some kind of work front. ” A specific customer spends a small amount, $ 100-150 a month, and you, having four or five projects, can receive a thousand, two, three thousand dollars a month.

The agreement form can be a classic contract. You sign the papers, come to the customer, make scans, sign, sign a non-disclosure agreement. Perhaps a form of agreement in the form of prepayment. And the last option is on trust, a very risky option. If you work with some regular customer or just with a good friend, you can work on trust. But it is better to fix it with some kind of thesis, at least in an e-mail message that can be raised. I got burned at one time with this, when almost 10 years ago I gathered a team of fans of extreme sports to participate in a street context. I asked one person to draw a small graffiti to send it as an application for participation. If I had fixed it with him, then I am sure that everything would have ended very well. Try to formalize your relations with customers after all; it will keep you safe, because I had a couple of unpleasant moments while working in remote testing. Without this, nowhere, this risk must be prepared. Insure yourself.

Report

As a form of the report can be a test report, or bug tracking. For example, he worked in such conditions, when the customer had a bug tracking system, JIRA, RedMine, FogBugs, Mantis, many different systems. It was deployed at the customer, I was just wound up in it, lined up a minimal process of interaction with the development, time was also noted there. There were cases when I myself deployed bug tracking systems. Again, it was a good experience - to learn a little bit of Ruby and install RedMine, then install JIRA, then Mantis, and all this in order to cooperate with this or that customer. If, for some reason or other, we did not work through the official form of the agreement, and I did not sign the NDA, then they were afraid to let me into their tracker. Then I deployed my own and said: "I will post bugs here and let your developers go."

The first 1.5-2 years in testing, I thought that this is a search for bugs. And I ran into the classic disease of a tester, a beginner, or a middle professional. I have a task to test the site, I said that I would do it 5 days for 10 thousand rubles. I tested it and found three bugs. I think I'm a bad tester. How so? I spent five days, they are about to pay me 10 thousand rubles for it, and I provide three bugs. This is at least strange. And then I began to test to the victorious. But it was important to conduct a research of the product, and display this in the report. And literally from the second or third order, where exactly the testing report was issued as reports, I willy-nilly came to the conclusion that it was necessary to write checklists and task cases for which testing was conducted. Imagine: there is a website, consists of five components, I found three bugs. It remains unknown to the customer whether I tested the two remaining components and did not find any bugs there, or did not test them and therefore did not find any bugs? If you write a check-list of checks, then show the customer what you did.

The tester should be equally interested in both the positive response of the system, that is, when it has worked correctly and negative. Unfortunately, the philosophy of a novice tester often comes down to the fact that first of all he wants to “break” the program. The fact that it works correctly, he seems to be not interested. When I started writing testing reports for external customers, I realized that I just needed to tell about what actions I had done as part of testing, and that if I performed 200 actions, and I found only three defects - ok, my work is done cleanly. But if then it turns out that I allegedly checked some kind of action, and then there was discovered a defect, it turns out that I lied.

It is also recommended to make some charts in the report: “300 test cases were carried out, 28% of them were detected,” figures, graphs. Customers love it, because most often they are project managers, product directors. Developers are interested in the defect quality described, and managers have beautiful graphics.

Another important point: it is always necessary to write unambiguous bug reports. Not at the level “I, means, clicked here, and I have a paragraph there. See screenshot. And it should be - see the screenshot. " When working with remote customers, you should a priori write bug reports so that they do not require additional contact with you. For example, I once had a distributed network of testers: Novokuznetsk, Novosibirsk, Cheboksary, Moscow and the Dominican Republic. And customers in Japan, Europe, USA, Russia, and in time zones could not converge.

It is very bad when the tester writes a bug report and says: “I clicked here, I got out of garbage. Screenshot". The developer is not clear, he sits down to correct this defect at three o'clock in the morning at the time of the tester, and, accordingly, writes a comment to him: "I do not play, write, please." It takes 12 hours, the tester says: “But why is this incomprehensible here? Look, time, time, time ", and he sends it at three o'clock in the morning on time of the developer. And, as a result, due to the ambiguous description, the small defect is corrected in a week.

Form of payment

The form of payment can be very different: cash, electronic money, postal, bank transfer, barter. Choose the most convenient and comfortable way for you with the customer. In general, try to be as flexible as possible when discussing the terms of cooperation. Be a real remote testing supermarket: “Okay, let's be electronic money with bug tracking, on trust, and at the same time we will work on a turnkey basis”, or something else. That is, if you say, “I work only for turnkey cash with a binding agreement with the NDA”, then half of the customers will simply leave you, because they may not have lawyers who can prepare the contract, or you cannot pay in cash . Be flexible, it will help you negotiate, enter into more agreements and contracts with potential customers.

Other nuances

• If a client is from another city or country, then immediately discuss the schedule and order of work, take into account time zones and server time. If a server, for example, is somewhere in the UK, and at 12 o'clock it has to work out some script, and you solemnly report at 12 o'clock Moscow time that it did not work, then keep in mind that London at this moment at 8 o'clock in the morning.
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Remote testing I earned from 200 to 4000 dollars. The maximum income was obtained when I already had a team, we took projects for automation. But it was a variable salary, that is, I could not afford to leave office work. If suddenly you have a tendency to downshifting - welcome to remote testing. It is, in principle, not unreasonable, it is considered one of the easiest entry points to IT. However, the most profound error is the idea that developing in testing is as easy as entering it. You need to be prepared for serious difficulties along the way. In one day, not to become a good tester, it requires great effort.