Last updated on February 27th, 2023 at 10:08 am
Software testing has been a crucial part of the software development life cycle. Software testers have to face new challenges every day. With the growing software technologies and complex software infrastructures, it is becoming hard for the testers to be very good at what they do. There are many defect management tools that have made testers’ life much easier but apart from those tools, testers need to have a certain set of skills to overcome all the challenges. In this article, we will discuss the required skill sets required to be a successful software tester in 2020.
1- Creating Ideas
This might seem a bit off what software testing has to do with creating ideas, but it is one of the most important skills required. Testing might seem easy but it is not an easy task. The more you creative ideas about how the product can be used in different ways, the more you will stand out from the rest of the testers. You will be able to deliver a more robust and bug-free software which ultimately gains more customer satisfaction. So a creative mind can generate more ideas and break the problems into parts, making it easy to examine the problems.
2- Understanding Priorities
A software tester needs to understand the importance of time management and prioritization of tasks. As a tester, you need to understand what task should be given more priority and which should be given less priority for testing. You also need to save time by figuring out what tasks should be automated and what should be tested manually. You also need to understand the criticality of a bug, if some bug is causing the application to crash, you need to report it with the highest priority so that it can be fixed as soon as possible. Only when you are a master of understanding the priorities of the task, testing will become very easy for you. This is why all the defect management tools focus too much on setting the priority of the reported bug.
This understanding only comes with experience and a thorough understanding of the product you are working on.
3- Analyzing the Data
Testers need to understand and analyze the data they gather from doing all the testing. They are not just supposed to find bugs and errors, they are supposed to analyze each and every result that they get after testing. If someone says that I cannot reproduce a bug again, that means that they are not good with analyzing the data when they were doing the testing for the first time. If a bug occurs, it will definitely pop up again.
Test automation is all about analyzing the data. Writing test cases for the whole product is very easy, analyzing the data received from all the automation testing is the real job. So a software tester should know how to analyze the data while doing either manual or automation testing.
4- Reporting
All the testing will go to waste if the software tester will not report the bugs in a proper way. Reporting all the bugs in a very clear and precise way is an important job of a software tester. For this, defects management tools are of great help. They can log all the bugs that they found in a day, add details about the bug like a short description, steps to reproduce, priority, etc. They can then assign it to the relevant person so that they should always know that a bug is reported. You can also send a short summary of your day about what functionality you tested and how many bugs you found. So that the team can have a quick report and should know that they have to fix bugs.
5- Communicating in a Positive Way
It is very common in a software development team that a developer and tester might not be on good terms with each other. The reason is a developer’s right functionality and a tester finds flaws in that functionality, when it is reported to the developer in a bad way, the developer might find it offensive. So it is very important for a tester to report and communicate all bugs and issues in a positive way. Try to give your own input on what you think might be the problem and keep your communication in a lighter tone instead of bashing the developer with all the problems.
Conclusion:
These are a few of the skills and qualities a tester should always keep in mind. There are many other skills as well like; understanding of latest web and mobile technologies, cross-browser testing, defect management tools and technologies, understanding the code, which is also very important for a tester to have a good grip on if he/she wants to excel in this. So if you want to be an excellent tester, keep these qualities in mind and you will succeed.
As a Senior Marketing Consultant at Kualitatem, Ray Parker loves to write tech-related news, articles, specifically quality assurance and information security. I have had years of experience writing in different tech niches and among some include, Dzone, SAP, Dataflop and Readwrite etc. Apart from his techie appearance, he enjoys soccer, reading mysteries, and spending long hours working over at the New York office.
