Key Points for Being a Successful Tester

Today’s world is extremely competitive and to stay in the competition you need to be the best in what you do, you don’t have any other choice. And to be a successful tester is way more challenging than some other regular job. Being related to the Information technology world, you need to realize that abrupt technological changes which happen frequently. More system development life cycles are adopted to outrank the competitors; feedback loops are incorporated at large scale and this fast-paced environment is making things more challenging as the level of expectations from higher-end is increasing every other day.

Being a tester, it is your prime duty to work around the points which your customers want and check if developers are successful enough to deliver the expected task. Before putting in effort and time, it is better to communicate with the entire team and discuss all main points to enhance your clarity. Everyone has their own way of thinking and perceiving things, so while reading system requirement specifications, make sure that all your teammates are on the same page in terms of understanding. Everyone needs to be adaptive so that the message of stakeholders is delivered to each and every member of the team.

Applications and the nature of work are drastically changed over the years, and getting the job done is not that easy anymore. Applications are becoming more complex and demanding, and now a tester is expected to perform testing in the manual as well as automated way. Look out for the test case management software, which suits well with your nature of work and make your job manageable.

The following points will help a tester to ace the job and seamlessly automate the testing process.

Start Small

Starting small and staying relevant and organized is a nice strategy to start with. Though usually, teams have the tendency to automate all tasks simultaneously, testers that identify a small set of tasks of high ROI and working on them in the initial phase will ultimately generate better results.

It works life smoke testing that takes place when code check-in. Running these small tests in a periodic way also makes it easy to identify flaky tests and give more clarity to the entire scenario. This will take you closer to the end result of a stable test suite as you will be able to fix the flaky test suite before adding them back. This organized approach is extremely helpful and integrates well with the manual testing approach.

Identify Time-Consuming Tasks

If the testing process becomes complex, then there is no ending time of the task being done. Complexity increases the testing time in an exponential way. To smoothen up the process, you need to identify time-consuming tasks such as different combinations of test data, regression, and smoke testing, installing builds on test devices, etc.

Investment in Test Case Management Software

New features keep on adding in the application from time to time and to maintain proper records of previous test cases along with the updated ones might become overwhelming at one point. Testers want to work around one platform where they can manage all their work from manual to automated test cases.

You can easily find a test case management software that can assist you with an end-to-end solution. Investing in such tools pays back for sure and helps the team to carry out their work in a much organized and effective way.

Recognize Automation Limitations

It is also important to note that you can not automate the entire process. Some tests need to be carried out manually while some need to be automated else; it would make things difficult in the long run and increase the time of the task evaluation. You will find scenarios that are unstable or hard to automate. If you can identify the manual test cases and understand the limitations of the automated testing, then you are doing the biggest favor to yourself; you will not only save your time and efforts but cost too. While testers are investing their time in exploring the application, they can simultaneously run automated test cases in parallel to save time and get the job done.

Teams are moving towards the agile approach, such as DevOps and continuous testing in recent times, to perform their job effectively. It is critical to perform manual and automated testing where it is due and carry out in an integrated way. Where manual testing allows you to test the functionalities from the end-user perspective, automated testing helps you to perform repeated tasks in a periodic way.