Testing as a Career !!!

"Software Testing is considered to be the tail end of the IT projects and the people involved to do testing is non-technical ones"....this is one of the oldest statement for testing. But over a period, importance of testing has drastically increased and it is embedded into the project life cycle right from the beginning. Testing paradigm has changed and testing has 2 wings, manual & automation.

With the introduction of automation testing and also various types of testing like security, data base, performance and many more types of testing one requires as much technical expertise as developers along with their domain knowledge. Out of all this, automation testing has its own space and emerging as one of the strongest drivers for ROI on testing / quality for organizations.

It will not be exaggerate to say that some companies are maintaining 1:1 ratio of developers & testers to maintain the quality of the software. Eventually testing became one of the key focus areas of technology streams of IT companies and investing a lot on this area. Now testing is a practice rather than a process / stage of a SDLC.

Testing will drive the entire team towards the goal with perfection. Now a day’s trainee who just started their career are showing interest to mold their careers into testing / automation testing. One of the key benefits of testing is, it gives the complete business cycle knowledge and also domain expertise. It will tell you why the software has been implemented and who is the exact target audience and what is the ROI of the particular application / software to the company.

Earlier UAT (User Acceptance Testing) used to happen at the client's place with the business users, who are not professionally trained testers. But this trend is changing, as business users are now getting training on the testing concepts and with the help of testing team are able to do effective UAT. Some companies are going one more step further and getting their UAT done from the third party testing team from different vendors.

However, the opportunities have been increased in testing and particular to automation testing it is even more demanding career now. People are showing more interest towards automation testing, as they will be doing the script development in the automation tool preferred scripting languages which is more or like development work. In automation testing, one has to work like a developer & tester and this combination gives a lot wider scope in terms of learning to the people who chose this stream of area.

Coming to automation, HP tools are the market leaders like QTP, QC in most of the test automation engagements.

If some one is interested to have testing as career, it is always good to learn the manual testing concepts and to learn one of the automation tools (preferably QTP) to have a smooth path for the entry.

QTP is versatile tool and it is very flexible and technology agnostic. To learn QTP, it is better to have a basic understanding of the VB script, some programming techniques, HTML & DOM object concepts. This will keep the tester profile more competent to other testers in the market. There are some online QTP courses which one can do without much effort if he/she has good understanding on QTP. It is good to have the certificate before we attend any interview, as the certificate will talk about you before you give the interview.

Things are changed a bit now ...'Testing is considered to be one of the primary focus for the IT projects and measures like automation testing being introduced into the project life cycle form the beginning to get the delivery done on time / budget with more QUALITY'....