8 Ways to be a Good Software Tester

By Marcin Zręda ⋅ April 14, 2009

I don’t know how to be a great tester but my short list derive from my 7 years software testing and quality experience. It relates to both testers and test/quality managers.

1. Read about the Software Testing
Try to be on time, read news, use Google Reader, use Twitter, etc. Even if 90% of knowledge considered redundant, sometimes You can make a good impression by showing Your additional wisdom. Second, You’ll have a new ideas to improve the testing process.

2. Have some experience as a developer
Having experience of programming or programming in parallel to testing is a very good practice ! Allows You to predict some errors before detecting them in the testing process. Often we can identify in which area error may occur and the type of these bugs, knowing only a description of functional changes. If you have a good relationship with the developers we can often give them a hint or find a possible solution on how to solve the problem – building relations !

3. Talk to people from the industry
Meet with people from the industry, at conferences, training, etc.. You’ll see the real trends in testing, or return some interesting ideas.
Common beer often gives more than a hundred e-mails sent or thousands lines at IM.

4. Automate but do not rely on
Automation is nice, but in excess can lead to acceptance of the program, which is correct but completely useless to the user. Test automation will help you obtain confidence that the core application functionality is running, real testing will give you a general sense of good job :)

5. Live in accordance with programmers
It is very important! Try to make quality and programming department a team aimed to produce a good application. Reporting the number of errors per developer is very bad practice. Try to treat the errors in the test phase as another experience for you and for developer. If You see that one developer has some troubles producing error-less code, first talk to him then talk to his manager.

6. Ahead of the facts – take an active part in the project
Try to participate in the design of new functionality, often Your advise will later reduce the number of errors. Discover more about the whole project team,
become a consultant.

7. Learn the critical application functionality
You have to know the critical path of the application, the path that is most often performed by the user, it is the most important business process. Putting special emphasis on that functionality when creating scenarios and testers training, increase the certainty that the application is acceptable and there is no critical errors.

8. Always have Usability in your mind
High software quality does not only means that application is free from errors but above all, ensure us that the usability is also at high level. Use usability testing and usability inspections treat usability as a target. Try to eliminate redundant application paths, do it at early stages of development (point 6), do it still, then you will have higher usability and error will be easier to detect.