Software Testing is often seen as an easy starting point for a Software Development Career and in some companies it can be. It is also a career of its own merit, requiring study and the development of skills that overlap other roles in Software Development. Building a flexible set of skills will help you regardless of the path you take in in your Software Testing Career. Here are some tips, advice and resources to help.
Considering a Career in Software Testing?
Software Testing offers many technical paths: deep technical testing, performance testing, security testing, automating applications. Also people oriented to work more closely with users and requirements, managing testers or projects. You can also do both.
- Read the post Considering a Software Testing Career
Should you get certified?
Instead of getting certified, learn how to present your CV better
Some employers use a certificate in software testing as a way of filtering out CVs. This is unfortunate. A certificate in Software Testing does not mean the person has skills or experience to test software. Certification can be a very expensive route, particularly if you are starting out because a certificate does not guarantee a job.
I have one certificate. A Foundation Certificate in Software Testing from ISEB. I did not attend any training courses. I sat a public examination for it. And I gained the certificate purely so that I could be allowed to join the examination board. I wanted to try and improve the certification process from the inside. That did not work.
Certification may be useful to you if you find that you are not being considered for work, and if the reason give is because you are not certified. I do not recommend certification for any other reason.
- Certificate has not helped me get work.
- I did not learn anything during the certification process.
- It is possible to self study for the certificate yourself.
- It is possible to take the exam without a course.
- I do not recommend certification.
You can find posts I have written about certification below:
- my involvement with certification
- Possible improvements to certification
- self-study for certification
- certification for hiring
Useful Podcast Episodes
- Episode 14 - How to Recruit Testers
- Episode 13 - How to get a job in testing
- Episode 11 - Programmer or Tester
- Episode 10 - Automate or Die
- Episode 8 - What is Software Testing?
- Episode 6 - The Workarounds special
- Episode 5 - The Rejection Special
- Episode 2 - Provocative Therapy and Quality Coaching
Useful Blog Posts
I have a category of blog posts for Career Advice.
Communities
Some people find it helpful to join communities to discuss questions, or just lur and learn from the general discussions.
Ministry of Test has slack channels and online forums, I find their blog aggregator feed more useful because I subscribe to a lot of blogs and some new ones appear in the aggregator that I don’t normally have.
The Test Tribe have a discord server:
uTest has forums and discussions:
There are a tonne of forums which often seem to have slow posts or questions with one answer:
There are a lot of facebook and linkedin groups but I don’t really use these.
I don’t know how well the Association of Software Testing communicates with its members but I can see they have a slack channel.
https://associationforsoftwaretesting.org/
Eurostar conference has it’s huddle for community discussions.
https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/
It can be useful to hang out in these to see what type of questions people have and the resources they mention.
Practice Makes Perfect
If you want to improve your testing then it is very important to practice.
- How to Practice Your Testing
- How to learn Automation - Why
- How to learn Automation - Try
- How to learn Automation - Focus and Document
Over the years I have created a number of free applications and sites for people to use to practice their testing:
- The Pulper An online application with multiple versions (check the Admin menu), and a REST API.
- Rest API Challenges Learn API Testing by completing the challenges.
- Test Pages Primarily for practicing automating but also useful for exploratory testing.
- The TODO List Simple Todo List application for automating and exploring.
- Buggy Apps Small applications for testing and finding issues.
- Buggy Games Some buggy games for practicing testing.
Explore my list of free applications for testing.
Online Training Courses
To try and make testing accessible to others, I have created some affordable training courses. You can find my full list of training courses here.
My courses are aimed at people who have already learned the basics of testing and want to learn, from experience, how to improve their technical ability, think about testing in more detail and improve their ability to automate applications.
I also have a free training course hosted on Test Automation U for Automating in the Browser with JavaScript
Patreon Content And Mentoring
I have a Patreon site for Software Development Information, this has original content added every week, and access to some exclusive online training courses.
Read on for More details of the Patreon content.
Some courses included in the Patreon site:
