By Janet Fleming
This is a good question....initially you have to find out if you have a certain type of personality to perform software testing. You should be organized, logical and thorough. You'll be writing test cases depending on business and functional requirements - or in other words you should do.
Then you've to implement those tests - often repeatedly. Your main purpose is always to ensure that no software goes out to customer without all the bugs found. It's rarely achievable, but should be your main goal. I always love to believe that your 2nd goal must be to have every developer hate you because you keep finding bugs within their code :)
The answer if software testing is a great career option is dependent upon who's asking the question. I'll answer it as if my audience is surely an engineer.
I'm flip, but sincere - my working experience has proven to me that the principle of software development never happens in real life.
Theoretically, software testing is:
- Validating and recording that software performs the functions it's designed to.
- Making sure and recording it doesn't do anything whatsoever it is not designed to
This presupposes that you have been told how it's supposed and not supposed to do. The folks you're working for don't always make it happen - they could not necessarily trust you not to run away with their secrets.
Because software programs are a business (except when you are doing work for the military) business rules apply a lot more strongly than engineering principles. Software testing is expensive, and so the decisions about objectives and how much to do can be extremely based on ROI considerations.
Within the end-user relationship, the user's perception is just not necessarily directly related to the physical world, and it's also the user's perception of whether your system works that truly rules within the minds of management, whose job is purely to ensure no one is complaining regarding the software.
Therefore, the truly practical explanation of software testing may be summarized as 3 goals:
1° Verify the consumers that use software believes it's doing whatever they want it to complete
2° Verify that this software doesn't do anything immediately detectable that is not desirable for the user.
3° Verify that any undesirable activity has a good enough period that the software look to execute effectively long enough for you to make it to another round of VC financial commitment or sell the business :)
And you? Do you consider Software Testing could be the right career path?
About the writer: Janet Fleming is writing for the easy software testing course blog, her personal and non-commercial in nature hobby website to offer free advice for software testing rookies/pros to enable them to get a new work.
