Skills required for Software Testing Career

In this section, we would discuss what makes successful testing professional. Key skills for a tester are depicted below.

1. Domain and analytical skills-Ability to break up a complex software system into smaller units and gain understanding of functionality to create test cases. Good testers are able to optimize test coverage and test essential features with optimal test cases. Often this comes with good understanding of business/industry specific application.
2. Process skills-Process/methods and techniques to carry out QA (test, planning, design, execution, and defect management) formally.
3. Technical skills-For example, functional and performance test automation-commercial and open source tools, knowledge of scripting languages such as TSL and Python, querying databases and data warehouse using SQL, Programming skills cam come in handy here. Testers should upgrades technical skills regularly with changing technologies.
4. Communication skills-Testing professionals need good and verbal communication skills to ensure test artefacts created by them (for example, test, strategy test plan, test scenarios, test execution reports) are easy to understand by testing and non-testing professionals.
5. Soft skills-Testers require discreetness, diplomacy and negotiation skills to have developers’ see testers’ work as valuable to produce high quality product outcome.
6. Need for diplomacy and polish in communicating defects to stakeholders (including Developers) to have them accept the valid identified defects.
7. Time management could be another soft skill for testers. During release of code, testers may have to efficiently manage workload and demonstrate and organizational skills.
8. Attitude-Testers should possess an attitude to ‘break’ the product, and an investigative mind to be able to identify defects. Testers should be detailed oriented, learn continuously, and involve in process improvement. ‘Passion’ is the word, for testers to excel in their career. Love what you do?

Business would expect testing to help discover gaps to act upon and to reduce the costs. The new digital world would witness higher adoption of agile, virtualization and cloud to accelerate testing. Right mix of business, process and, technology skills can help testers grow into test consulting and advisory career.

One would note that testing career needs multi-faceted skills. Testing is a career that can better leverage your personality in valid ways, than a usual development career can.

Source : “Software Testing – Effective Methods, Tools and Techniques“ book authored by our director, Mr Pradeep Oak and published by McGraw Hill.