Me: @Kathy, I am sure you are speaking of experience. I have that experience personally where those skillful pretenders feed off of others. Unfortunately they do not get exposed all the time. Definitely a skill to pretend to be a skillful tester.
On the other hand, there are genuinely skilled testers who think about what is right to test and test it right. It is indeed a small proportion of the whole testing community. In another group I mentioned that skill comes from experience, training and education. There are barely any schools which provide testing education. Very few testers try to update/upgrade their skills and there are experienced testers who do not update their skills at all.
I posted this discussion to many groups and all seem to agree that testing is a skill. The problem is, it is hard to find.
I believe there are software testing training institutes, but I am not sure how effective they are. My concern regarding software testing has been authentic college education of this field.
As everyone here is from testing background and we need to prove to ourselves that Testing is Skill.
First of all , I want to focus on word ‘Skill’ which will help to explain, why testing is skill.
A skill is the learned capacity to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of work, some general skills would include time management, teamwork and leadership, self motivation and others, whereas domain-specific skills would be useful only for a certain job. Skill usually requires certain environmental stimuli and situations to assess the level of skill being shown and used.
If you carefully go through the definition, you see where i want to drive You. Testing is skill if you can –
> Measure product quality in quanative terms. Irrespective of knowing
that Product is defect free or not.
> Draw a visible line in product quality before testing and after.
> Add you domain knowledge as catalsyt which always help to minimize the
unexpected behaviour and improve the trust among stakeholders for testing
and their knowledge.
> involve yourself from scratch in SDLC and your knowedge/experties (Domain)
helps team to design/develop a robust/user friendly system.
To design a skill set for testers depends on the areas where you are working and it is very procedural. Please add your comment based on your respective areas which will help everyone to know and improve.
It is also natural to define objectives in terms of our own knowledge base and skills (because that is what we know). But often systems have different aspects depending on who is looking at it, and so you usually need to use a broader audience.
I think this applies to test teams and plans as well as other topics (such as requirements gathering) to ensure that you have skills in a team that ensure that all aspects of the system can be covered.
I’ve found that this sort of statement is usually said by someone who doesn’t understand testing and considers it an administrative task, which it is not. It’s sad to hear this and is more common than it should be.
Meeta Prakash span> • True. But I would not say “outsiders” only. It becomes generic and dilutes the understanding. In your case, it was a business leader. So we should ideally understand the roles and depth of understanding each of them need to develop for themselves.
Of course they are. Most people can do all three of those things to some degree, but some folks are *much* more “skilled” than others.
So if the folks around your team think that “anyone can test” it seems to me that the value your team is providing is not distinguishable from the value the folks around your team believe a bunch of non-testers could provide. Much like how putting a master chef in a diner, not changing the menu, not changing the supplies on hand, and not changing the expectations around speed of delivery would probably not lead to the clientele getting “better” food than they would from a “short-order cook” — especially since the diner would surely need to raise prices to be able to pay what a mater chef would command.
I recommend changing the question. Ask them what value would expect from a “skilled” tester/team that they don’t get today from this team that clearly is only providing value that they believe they could get from “anybody”.
13. Graham Daley • Testing is definitely a skill, as is development. Developers are generally skilled at finding a number of different ways to make something work. Testers need to be skilled at finding all the different ways of breaking something that seems to work!
14. Poonam Bhatia, ISTQB, CEH V6 & 6σ Yellow Belt • Testing is a skill where tester has to validate that code is behaving as expected and fit to use. It is challanging for testing resource to ensure that they are not influenced by the project development and management community and never get into clarification why we need this much time to plan and test. Indeed skill can only handle last checkpoint before end product can be realized.
Me • @Graham, testers never break anything, it come to them broken. We only identify where the breakage it and report it as a defect. I agree that it is a skill to identify those defects, though. Some people are particularly good at it and we call them skilled testers and that skill comes with experience, training and education.
Software testing is one of those areas where it is hard to justify that one needs training. Just this morning I was talking to a friend who worked at BA when the incident of T5 happened in London. The system was tested before, but it wasn’t tested thoroughly enough to ensure everything will work fine. And we all know that the world stopped for a day at T5 which was a total mess.
I started the linkedin Group ‘Hong Kong & China Software Testing Group’ because software testing is still taking its initial steps in Hong Kong.
@Poonam, True that testers need to use their skills to say that the code is fit for use.Practically, testers do get influenced by management!