My Job - Software Testing Consultant

samhail

Hopefully this gives another prespective of a possible job career.

Occupation: I am a Software Quality Testing Consultant.
I am a permanent employee in a multi-national pure-play software testing company. A Pure-Play Software Testing company is an independent company that only tests software. Other companies offer both programming and testing.

Qualifications held: I have a BEng in Electronics and Computer Engineering. I also have testing qualifications that i got through the company such as ISEB Foundation and Intermediate.
When i joined the company there was a Graduate course available where they gave me a full range of testing concepts and skills.

Previous Jobs: I did some technical call centre work during college and for a year after college before i went to Australia and when i came back this was my first job.

Daily/weekly/yearly routine: Software Testing can be monotonous.
Before the application under test is given to us from the developers we tend to have fully investigated the software or what changes have been made ourselves. All the reporting and documentations would have been done and we would have our set of tests written up and ready to run against the application. Projects can last from a few weeks up to a few years (I'm in the current client for over a year and a half).
There are different levels of testing and different types each with their own level of complexity.
Functional testing is sitting in front of the application with your set of test cases that have been created from the requirement documents and following them to make sure the application is doing what it should
Load and Performance testing is simulating multiple users (can be up to thousands) logging in at the same time and testing specific sections of the application. Identifying bottle necks in applications and breaking points.
Automation testing is as it sounds, recording the steps through an application so they can be re-run over and over again. This can be helpful in regression testing where a suite of tests can be recorded to simulate the behaviour of the application, so when the new release is available this suite of tests can be run to make sure that nothing has regressed.
Security testing is pushing the security of software or websites to find weaknesses.

Age: 28 Male

General comments:
As i said at the start of my routine section Testing can be a monotonous job in that the same application for a long time and doing the same things over and over again. Patience is a virtue in this job and being detailed and structured is necessary.

Most of the sentiments that Malice_ put in his post is the same for the testing side... so i quoted

Malice_ wrote: »

...
First and foremost I suppose if you are thinking about getting into this area it's vital to have a liking of computers as you're going to spend a lot of time dealing with them .

I went to college from 1997 to 2001 but I can't imagine things have changed too much. In my first year class there were 60 people initially. At my fourth year graduation there were 20. A lot of people seem to choose computers without realising what they are getting themselves in to.

Other people would probably recommend having a good knowledge of maths but I would say that being able to think logically is more important. I believe that you need to be able to take a requirement like "This drop-down list should contain a list of countries" and convert that into a set of steps like:
. Connect to database
. Query the Countries table for the list of countries.
. Save the list of countries somewhere.
. Set the drop-down list to be filled by the saved list of countries.

Something else that I believe is very important is to have other interests besides computers. If you spend 8+ hours a day stuck to a computer monitor at work, it's not the most healthy thing to go home and do the same in the evening.
...

What I like about my job
- As a consultant one would move company and move type of industries regularly (well not in the case of the company i am based in now). I have worked in about 5 different industries in the last 3 years. This is also something that i would consider what i would dislike - since you meet new people regularly and have to say good bye to them.
- With my electronics education background i have a technical frame of mind so helps in identifying issues and working through problems.
- There is a lot of training with my company which is good in the long run.
- There is some opportunity to travel with my company as they are a multi-national company which I'm up for.

What I dislike about my job
- Running of tests can be monotonous and detailed but that's part of the job