But I have only a little knowledge in testing. In my workplace there is no proper way of testing.
Originally posted by John Meyers:
[QB]
And if you dont know what testing is about how sure are you that you will like testing ?
I didn't say that I like testing. But since I am struggling with programming, I just think about considering a move.
Testing can often be frustrating. You have to come up with many scenarios and it can be very redundant. You might have to learn about tools like rational robo and quick test professional. Are you sure you can handle it if some one comes up to you and says "These 50 test cases have to be executed by today and their results have to be documented.". That would be the equivalent of some one saying "Add another panel to the front end and populate the values from table X into the screen. You have one day" Just a rough analogy
Well, might be true. Its not easy. But to get more business knowledge, is this a good move ?
Well, I am looking for a QA. So for the beginning, I need to move to testing as a first step, am I right ?
John,thank you for the reply. That helped me to think a lot.
Please give me more possibilities, and help me to take a decision.
Thanks,
Joe.
Originally posted by John Meyers:
How about being a business analyst ? That way you dont have to program. You do have to know what each technology is and you have to know quite a lot about the business. You interact with clients and talk about a little bit of architecture here and there. This job would be 70% business and 30% technical, if you ignore other skills like communication etc etc from the over all % (I am not suggesting that soft skills are not important. They are extremely important and I am making the assumption that some one with this title must have that skill).
If you want something more technical how about being a DBA ? If you are good with SQL, procedures, cursors, indexes, locks etc that could be your deal.
What you must look for is to somehow make use of the experiences you have had so far and help them move you forward. You could also become a testing team lead after may be two years into testing (just a speculation). It is also important that you like what you do.
I had a real hard time trying to find out what I liked to do in the beginning, thanks to the environment and pressure that I was under in my initial stages. After exploring a bit ( 3 to 4 months ) I settled for programming and design. If you are confused about what to do, take the confusion and throw it in the back seat. When I was too concerned about what I liked, I was not able to find it. After some exploring, what I liked eventually came to me, perhaps because I was not consciously looking for it.
Originally posted by Michele Martone:
I currently work as a QA manager for an automation team. I value and hire people that can understand and write tests using programming concepts. We use Silktest which has a language that is roughly based upon C. I can't speak about other QA tools, but in Silktest we have common includes which are functions that we can all share. We have coding standards, and we try to create readable test scripts. We have weekly code review meetings to ensure we are creating consistent scripts. So yes, in my team you would have to "program", but it's not as detailed as in our programming team.
Our QA people need to really understand our business also. To me the scenario creation is a fun time because I get to use my business skills, and then figure out how to invoke the scenarios with the QA tools I know.
We also have manual QA testers. If you join a manual test team you will not program. This team runs through a checklist of items that could not be automated for every release. They also must be strong in business, but not strong in technology.
If you go for QA you want to join a company that values QA. If the company values QA you will be paid fairly well if you do automated QA. Not as well for manual QA. If they don't value QA then the team will have no influence and you don't want to work there anyway. So make sure to ask them how much say QA gets in releases, how involved QA is in each production release, and who QA reports to in the company.
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Originally posted by Ali Hussain:
Another option is to consider a more product specific career in IT. For example becoming a specialist in an Application Server. These do not change as often as other Java frameworks and mostly you will be doing configuration work than programming.
Consider Paul's rocket mass heater. |