My Thoughts About QA Testers

I never thought a career like QA Tester even existed until I found a program at NBCC Moncton that offers IT: Quality Assurance Testing Certificate Program.

Due to the onset of COVID back in 2019, I suddenly had the urge to shift my career to IT. My curiosity made me realize that there's a huge array of career opportunities in Information and Technology that are not only limited to people who are good at programming.

My first encounter with bugs and defects...

I recall one of my favorite childhood computer simulation game called- The SIMS by EA's Maxis Studio. During its first release, I remember seeing a lot of errors, glitches, and crashes in the game. I would often ask myself, "Is it supposed to behave like this?" The animation would sometimes get stuck and the game would suddenly close. It never occurred to me that these behaviors could be considered "defects". In fact, I had fun observing them and just assumed that they are part of the game. At the back of my mind, I thought it is already an amazing game and a complex game like this would be impossible to perfect.

Fast forward to today, I still play SIMS. In fact, I have played SIMS1 to SIMS4, and have enjoyed some of their expansion pack! I am amazed at the progress and the development of the game in the span of 10 years. There are tons of added features, functions and shortcut keys. There's an obvious significant improvement to its GUI. The animation improved drastically and the amount of customization and option to share designs online with other players are some of its main highlights. It is fascinating how this game keeps on improving year after year.

Only recently, I grew to realize that my assumptions about game and software development are wrong. I thought that the only people responsible for developing games like these are artists, designers and developers. I am oblivious to the complexity of the Software Development Life Cycle. Now, I fully understand there are other people involved equally important like Project Managers, Business Analysts, QA Managers, and QA Testers.

Of course this concept is not limited to game development. In fact, this applies to any Software Development. Upon my research, I grew to understand how QA Testers provides added layer of confidence to the quality of the Software. By its very definition, “Software testing is a way to assess the quality of the software and to reduce the risk of software failure in operation."

Source: ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level Syllabus, 1.1. What is Testing?

Today I would like to share my thoughts about – Why I like Software Testing.

1. Testing provides satisfaction. By finding and tracking the bugs, and also through suggestions of improvement ideas, testing provides the satisfaction of ensuring software is developed as designed.

2. Testing is complex. There are a lot of features to test in one software alone. It consists of functionality, performance, security, and GUI to name a few. It means that QA Testers are in for continuous learning to accurately assess, validate and verify all these features.

3. Testing is a process. It is vital for QA Testers to understand requirements and prepare proper documents like test plans, appropriate test strategies, test cases, execution of test cases, preparation of test reports, and test summary. A cycle of process must be followed.

4. Testing for quality. The ultimate purpose of a QA tester is not to find bugs but to make the product better in all aspects. Testing is done to provide confidence in the software under test.
   

Although QA Testers are not given much credit for their contribution, I can proudly say that they play a vital role in ensuring the quality in the software, may it be in terms of its functionality, security or stability. This makes them more in demand, now that everything we do involves technology and software!