When it comes to QA testing, there are tools and techniques that help professionals do their jobs. There are also fundamental ideas that drive people to become more successful at finding bugs and fixing problems, whether they’re dealing with legacy systems or new mobile platforms.
Here are some of the ideas that are helping emerging career pros get better at handling complex jobs that require rooting out glitches and troubleshooting software and development.
Breaking It Down
A central doctrine among a significant number of successful QA testers is to make big tasks manageable in much the same way that Hershey’s has started breaking down its king-size candy bars to little bite-sized nuggets (but not for the same reasons!) The idea is that testers can easily become overwhelmed with demands to perform comprehensive, broad-level testing on extremely complex systems. In other words, when you wait too long to start combing through code, you can end up having problems mapping out what you’re supposed to be looking at. To counteract this kind of problem, some successful QA testers take a rigid stance on making sure that testing is modular. For example, a tester may demand to do load testing incrementally, as opposed to waiting until the end of a project.
Resist the temptation to do everything at once. Don’t go in and tinker with a codebase to improve performance, add features, etc., all while doing some other kind of routine maintenance. Keep things in manageable pieces.
Getting Organized
With all of these modules being worked on throughout the process, it’s good to have a consistent workflow to help make sure everything gets worked out and that things don’t get overlooked. It’s relatively easy to let a few pieces fall through your hands if there’s no clear and transparent system for website or mobile testing tasks. You can use Trello or some other neat online dashboard, or stick Post-it notes on the chalkboard like in the top new tech-TV series Silicon Valley — the important thing is that you pick an approach and stick with it.
Tracking Every “Touch”
Another supremely important philosophy in QA testing and development is mostly oriented towards collaborative work, but it also makes sense for an individual tester. The idea here is that software testing and programming is a lot like hotel room security.
In the old days, hotels had physical keys. No one could tell who had been in a room, or when. In 99% of cases, this is fine because nobody cares. But if, say, something goes missing from the wall safe, it suddenly becomes a huge problem.
With new technology, hotel managers were able to fix this problem. New smart card keys create meticulous logs of exactly who opened the hotel door, when they came in, how long they stayed, and consequently, when they left. Perhaps the hotel room keys of the future will also show what people do when they’re in the room.
“Tracking every touch” is a good metaphor because again, although nobody may care what happened to code if the product is working well, as soon as there is a bug, there’s a frenzy of inquisitive research.
For an excellent example of how testers suffer without record keeping systems, just take a look at Ellen Ullman’s groundbreaking IT novel “The Bug,” which details the career and life-changing kinds of software bugs that occurred back before the days of agile development and scrum. In Ullman’s book, major problems happened simply because coders went in and changed one another’s work or added onto code modules without proper oversight. The flip side of this is that testers also took a “not my problem” approach or tried to shift responsibility for fixing the bug.
Taking all of the above into consideration can make you a much better QA tester and help advance your career in a field that requires a lot of technical expertise and mental discipline.
