How to become a tester or what kind of knowledge we are waiting for from Junior

A couple of introductory words

Good day to all, my name is Dima Mists . Now I work at Rambler & Co and I am responsible for testing on Poster projects. In this article, I will dispel several myths about IT and testing in particular. In addition, I will give examples from life as “not knowing anything” to become Junior QA Engineer in a large company.

The beginning of the way

Having worked for almost two years in one “peaceful” state corporation in the position of an “unreal engineer”, I realized that development had stopped. I could sit in one place and almost do nothing. In the end, my knowledge would be completely behind the reality and I would become unclaimed in the market. At that moment I decided to change the place and the essence of my work.

Question number 1 - “What area of ​​work to choose”

My choice was based on a few facts. First, I wanted to work in a fast-growing industry. In this I saw and I see now the opportunity to constantly grow in the profession, developing myself in various directions. Secondly, I wanted to get away from the bureaucracy, strict regulations and mandatory wearing of suits in the hot summer. And last but not least, I wanted to do a really important job, to feel the closeness of the end user, to understand that my work is really needed. I could see all three of these points in the IT industry.

Question number 2 - “Which profession to choose”

For me, it was important to a certain combination of humanities and technical sciences, that is, communications and engineering. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be just a technical specialist and, for example, write the best code in Java. On the other hand, I wanted to understand how everything works from the inside. For these reasons, my choice fell on testing. In addition to the adjacency of the profession described above, testing is quite easy to get into. The entry threshold is really small.

Question number 3 - “Which company to choose”

In fact, all companies can be classified in several ways. Firstly, in relation to the customer-developer. There is a fundamental difference between companies, outsourcers and grocery companies. For the first, the most important is the sale of the product. Yes, there is a company name, customer reviews, but somehow the earnings come from direct sales. For the second, it is important to have a quality and popular product. On this product, you can place expensive advertising and earn a lot of money. Therefore, from the point of view of testing, a strong team will be formed precisely in the grocery company. Secondly, companies should be divided into Russian and imported. Currently, testing remains underdeveloped in Russia. This gives its advantages and leaves it possible to take its place in the sun without strong problems. But, on the other hand, narrows the choice of decent places to work. Fortunately, in the large Internet companies of Runet, “the stage of barbarism has already been passed and the first states have been created”. For me it was important to work in the Russian company. This is something like “strange” patriotism, if you like. Proceeding from all this, my choice fell on large Russian grocery Internet companies. By the way, there are quite a few of them and you can easily find their rating in Forbes ( 2014 , 2015 , 2016 ).

Question number 4 - “How to solve the problem of lack of experience”

The paradox of the overwhelming number of companies is the need for experience, even for initial offers. I haven’t found the answer to the question of how they even imagine such a thing to date. Fortunately, in the mess, everything new is born and many have built businesses on this story. The network is now teeming with various trainings with practice, among which there are really worthwhile ones. With the rest of the knowledge that you need to acquire, like without incident, so let's get everything in order.

Question number 5 - “What kind of knowledge you need to get and how to do it”

• Immersion into the theory of testing. First of all, you need to learn to speak the language of IT and testing in particular. To do this, you need to understand what quality assurance is and the basic concepts of software testing. These materials can be unearthed in almost any book on testing, but I am an ardent opponent of “technical” Talmuds and consider them to be a slow source of information. It is much easier and faster to do it from individual articles:
  
  
  • What is quality assurance?
  • What is testing
  • What types of testing are
  • What levels of testing are there
  • What test artifacts are there and why are they used
  • What is a test design
  • What should the testing process look like in a vacuum
  • What is test automation and its main types
  • What testing metrics are and why they are used
• Exploring Bug Tracking Systems. The key skill of a testing engineer is the search, localization and quality establishment of a defect. The bug does not exist in a vacuum, it is clearly associated with the program section, it is reproduced on the list of configurations (the operating system and its version, the browser and its version), has its priority. Moreover, the work on the correction of the defect is carried out by several different specialists. In order to make the defect management process manageable, special systems are used. There is an illusion of choice here. There is a widespread redmine . But if you are aiming to work in a company of the above class, then you should study Jira . To do this, I recommend to do the following:
  
  
  • Put yourself a trial version of the product and go through these videos.
  • Set yourself up and learn basic gadgets: 1 , 2 , 3
• Study Test Management Systems. Any software is essentially a set of possibilities, that is, one way or another, a finite set. In this case, the logic of each of them is not an ideal model, which means that the number of bugs in the system is always infinite. The question is what we consider a bug and what is not. Here we come to the aid of the requirements from the customer, describing what should be our product. The requirements do not have to be a specification per thousand pages. It can also be a prototype or an ongoing lively discussion, if your product is just a new revision. To translate requirements into a set of tests, there are methods from the theory of testing that you should have already studied above. But tests, as well as defects, do not exist in a vacuum, and several testing specialists can work simultaneously on the same functionality. By analogy, special systems are used to control the process of writing and applying tests. The dashing 90s are gone and work in “ex-heels”, “notepads” and “test links” is no longer a normal phenomenon. Recently, I conducted an audit to find the right system. Basically, they either do nothing, or stand like a spaceship. The golden mean is TestRail . To study it you need to do the following:
  
  
  • Put yourself a trial version and go through these videos.
• Raising the technical background. We are engaged in web and mobile applications, so the reasoning will go in this vein. A true tester is required to understand the “stuffing” of what he is testing. This saves team time, as the tester himself can determine the true cause of the defect and describe it correctly. Yes, and test what you do not know anything at least strange. Plus a deep understanding improves your communication with other technicians. To start this general knowledge is enough:
  
  
  • How the Internet works
  • What is backend and frontend
  • What is http request
  • How to work with the browser console
• Learning programming The eternal question of whether to be able to program a tester has a very simple answer. Need to. This is connected with the very technical background in the first place and the development of the analyticity of your thinking in the second place. At the initial stage, it is enough to have a basic understanding of programming, in the future for quality growth you will need to learn one of the popular languages. For example, Python or Java . At the start it is worth studying the following:
  
  
  • The most basic programming knowledge
  • Main programming languages
  • Key terms in programming
• Overcoming the barrier of lack of experience. There is a strong shortage of personnel in the IT industry, in particular, testers, so they often take on promising candidates with no experience. Indeed, it is easier to teach from scratch than to retrain. In order to become more popular than others, it is worth going through specialized testing courses. They can get structured knowledge and the most important experience of real testing. I recommend to take the course “School of successful testers, v 2.0” from this portal
• Work searches. Then it remains only to make a resume, taking into account the updated knowledge and skills, and learn how to correctly use hh

Development prospects

Work takes a third of our lives. If we drop sleep, then it is generally half of our time. I think the only right thing is to work there and do what I really like. In addition to moral satisfaction, there are material benefits. The level of salaries according to official sources, even at the start, exceeds the average temperature in the hospital. The presence of voluntary medical insurance, discounts on fitness or the presence of a gym inside the company, free tickets to various events and other bonuses are of course present. In addition, the work is estimated by the amount of work done, and not by the time spent on it. IT always has a flexible schedule and “15 minutes late” will not be penalized. Moreover, no one will pay attention to this, because it is really normal. The role of the tester is not the end of your movement, it is only an entry point. After a couple of years of good practice in testing, you can choose any development path in the company.

Why I am confident in your success

As Steve Jobs once said : “You cannot connect the points of your life path, looking forward. They can be connected only by looking back. ” It is this principle that gives me the confidence that absolutely everyone can become a tester and start getting job satisfaction. There are other examples in the last few years that only confirm the availability of this profession. I had a Challenge Accepted. At some point, two people almost at the same time approached me, whom I knew very well. One of them at that time worked in law enforcement, the other was a professional military. The similarity of the situation was on the face. They are great lads and with great perseverance passed approximately the plan described above. This self-study and the search for the job itself took about three to four months from them. Now they are working as testers, they have prospects for development, flexible schedules, and I think a lot of things have changed in their lives.

Post Scriptum

I stress once again. Enter this profession is not difficult. This can everyone. Further development in IT depends only on you.