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What it takes to become a so-so QA engineer
English from Intermediate, any QA courses, practice in an IT company. Done, you are amazing.
What it takes to become a good QA engineer
To begin with, you should understand if this is yours. I would single out a few basic characteristics of work and character traits to do testing.
Technical erudition
“Technical savvy”, as they sometimes write in vacancies, and a desire to understand technology. You should be interested in how what works, how what works inside. This understanding will serve you well in the future and usually goes hand in hand with the curiosity a good tester needs.
Have you ever installed and configured Linux – for yourself, purely out of interest? Trying to figure out how blockchain works? Did you make your friends a WordPress site? If not, give it a try and watch your reaction. Is it interesting if the difficulties spur on to find a solution, rummage in Google and on the forums? When the end result is not the same, is there a desire to get to the bottom and make everything start working as it should? If your answer is yes, then testing is probably right for you.
So, the first is about thoughtless perfectionism, the second is about always keeping in mind the image of the user, understanding what tasks he will solve, in what conditions, where it will be convenient for him, and where not, what non-standard methods he can use solve their problems, how our application will integrate into the overall ecosystem and routine of the user.
In vacancies, they often write “focus on details, perfectionism.” They are needed, but only if they are properly focused.
Ability to think and write in a structured way
Conduct a thought experiment: Imagine describing how to test a car’s central locking system. You will start to write, for example, “open, close”, but there are different states: “open already open”, “close already closed”, or different points of influence: you can open it with a keychain, key, buttons from the inside. Do you need to test the alarm? And the auto-locking of the doors at speed? In testing, there are a number of techniques and techniques that help to correctly break tests into groups, build the correct hierarchy, check the sufficiency of test scenarios, but even with them, it is important to be able to think structurally.
Ability to work with large amounts of data and learn quickly
In your work, you will most likely need the skill to work with large and poorly structured amounts of information (also known as “specification”, “technical task”, “corporate knowledge base”), quickly understand how a complex (and not always logically written) system works, and quickly get basic knowledge in completely different areas. If your project is about financial portfolio management, you will have to understand finance, if about warehouse management – in logistics, etc. A good way to test yourself is to take and successfully complete some course on coursera.com on an unfamiliar and fundamental subject, preferably at English.
Do you need to be able to do everything at once?
So, to become a good QA engineer, you need to have an active penchant for technology, be able to take the user’s side, structure information and write good documents, and you also need to be a master of negotiations.
It can be argued here that I am clearly not describing the starting position. This is true, but the market is such that starting positions in QA are often required to grow. There is a widespread belief that QA is such an easy way to start working in IT, knowing nothing and not being able to. The QA community rejects this idea and may be outright offended for voicing it (see the first two myths here), but there is a nuance.
In junior positions (intern – June, first year of work), testing is a job that is really likely to be difficult, but does not require a large amount of special skills or knowledge. But further it becomes more difficult, get ready to learn a lot.
Most companies are looking for people who can move to this next level and will try to weed out people who are interested in “just being in IT”. Either they will check the motivation to grow further in the context of QA, or the knowledge required to move to the next position. Therefore, it makes sense to study for growth.