Starting Your QA Career: Essential Skills & Tips for Beginners

There are several ways to perceive a career. Some see it as a means of earning a paycheck, others as a corporate ladder, but a deeper perspective on your career stems from understanding its impact on the real world. When you go beyond seeing your career as just another job and try to make sense of how it fits into the overall world, you unlock a deeper purpose behind your career. Every career has something to do with making others’ lives better. An essential factor that decides the strength of your impact on the real world is quality. Hence, when we narrow it down to the software products, there is no other field than Quality Assurance that is responsible for their quality. So, if you are considering starting a career in QA, you should be clear about the overall purpose it adds up to. This is the career that suits the kind of people who have been quality-conscious in all aspects of their lives. That’s about gaining clarity in the initial purpose. But when it comes to practical matters that involve building a career in QA, there is certain useful information you must gather. This is what we are going to explore in this article.

Deeper Meaning of QA

When a product is being built, there are mostly three perspectives at work. The first one is of the designers who begin with envisioning a product. The second one is of the developers who build the product as per the envisioned design. And the last perspective is of the QA who ensures the product works precisely and produces the expected results.

Think of a bridge under construction. The designer or the architect designs the shape and structure of the bridge on paper. The workers construct the bridge as per the design. But the Quality Assurance personnel ensure that the bridge doesn’t collapse under pressure.

So, what we understand from this is that QA is primarily about responsibility. When a customer uses a software product and finds that the pages are loading correctly, the buttons are working properly, and the content is shown accurately, it shows that there was someone who took enough care to ensure all that works. In a digital world where all activities of modern life are operated through apps and software, QA carries the responsibility of both professional and ethical weight.

Essential Skills for QA

While programmers are dependent heavily on technical knowledge, QA is a combination of both technical and soft skills. A few skills that a QA must possess are:

Awareness of the Development Cycle

A QA must have a clear understanding of all the stages in a software development life cycle (SDLC) or software testing life cycle (STLC). This gives them clarity on where they fit into the whole picture and what to expect before and after their scope of work. It’s like a medical education. Before you specialize in one field, you must attain a basic understanding of the whole body. This helps in making informed decisions in your role.

Fundamentals of Testing

Understand what the different types of testing are being performed on the software, and at what stages they occur. Learn the difference between Unit Testing, System Testing, Integration Testing, User Acceptance Testing, and Exploratory Testing. Each has its own requirements, like the environment they would be running in, the data they need, the specific part that needs to be tested, and the different roles of QA responsible for each stage. You should have a clear understanding of all those parameters for every stage.

Testing Tools

While you may start learning about testing through a manual process, you can get some hands-on experience with testing tools as well. Knowing about manual testing gives you a clear understanding of each stage of testing and its objectives. Once you attain that, applying it to an automation tool would be easier. All you need to learn is how to achieve your goals on the test automation tool by discovering its right features.

Learn Basic Programming

While testing is mostly about imagining all the possible scenarios for validating a product’s strengths, you need some basic programming skills to create those test cases in an executable form. Most of the test automation tools require you to write test scripts in a coding language. Once you create test cases through code, you can rerun them as many times as needed. That’s a big time and effort saver as compared to manual testing.

Attention to Detail

This is one of the most important skills a tester should have. To validate a product from all angles, they must look into every detail of the product, both functional and visual. A typo in the error message, the coherence in the design, the product behaviour in adverse situations, all should be considered to perform a thorough testing. A missing bug can be costly and defies the overall purpose of quality assurance.

Steps for Building a QA Career

While possessing the above skills is necessary before you get started, there are certain steps you need to follow to build a career where those skills can be applied.

1. Practice on Dummy Projects: You cannot simply depend on theoretical knowledge. Getting some hands-on experience on some projects will help you uncover practical tips for testing.
2. Build a portfolio: To showcase your experience to a potential employer, you must have a portfolio of dummy testing projects you have done. This can be attained by testing a few open-source projects.
3. Networking: While job portals are one of the most obvious ways for getting a job, networking goes one step further. Joining a tester’s community would keep you abreast of the latest trends and vacancies for this role.
4. Be open to Learning: QA is a dynamic field. Every day, there is an innovation in either the testing strategy or tools. AI-driven testing takes it further to the next level and always keeps upgrading. You must be ready to keep evolving with all that.

Conclusion

Building a career in QA is not just about learning technical skills or acquiring a means of a paycheck; it brings a total shift in the mindset. Beyond all the necessary skills, knowledge, and methodologies that are essential for testing, you need to cultivate a mindset of a custodian. When a bug is found in the software, the designers and developers would not be blamed for it. It is the QA who is solely responsible for the precise performance of the product. You must enter this field with an understanding that you are not just eliminating bugs in software, but improving the lives of others in the real world by delivering a flawless product.

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