There are some common myths regarding testing
career. Some of these are:
- Testing is simple and straight forward, just follow the best practices.
- QA and its related activities are mere cost burden on the organization.
- Testing is not creative.
Above mentioned myths confuse people while
choosing “testing” as a profession. But ground reality is quite the opposite. In
fact if we do compare testing with development, testing is more challenging than
anyone can think of it to be.
Testing is simple and straight forward,
just follow the best practices
Testing is not just about verification and
validation. Most testers have hacker minds. Testers intentionally attempt to
make things go wrong to determine if things happen when they shouldn’t or don’t
happen when they should. You should have a thorough understanding of each
individual project that you work on… You should go through different testing
environments as you have to work on multiple software and hardware. You need to
go through exploratory testing for complete understanding of project before you
are going to write test plans, test scenarios, test cases etc.
QA and its related activities are mere
cost burden on the organization
Is it a big deal if you save billion dollars by
just investing some hundred pennies? I don’t think so! But if someone still has
questions in their minds or are confused about why it is so important to have
test engineers within an organization or why software testing is so important,
the following examples might be helpful in clarifying their
misconceptions
- A new U.S government-run credit card complaint handling system was not working correctly according to August 2011 news reports.
Banks were required to respond to complaints
routed to them from the system, but due to system bugs the complaints were not
consistently being routed to companies as expected. Reportedly the system had
not been properly tested.
- News reports in Asia in July of 2011 reported that software bugs in a national computerized testing and grading system resulted in incorrect test results for tens of thousands of high school students. The national education ministry had to reissue grade reports to nearly 2 million students nationwide.
- A smartphone online banking application was reported in July 2010 to have a security bug affecting more than 100,000 customers
- In August of 2008 it was reported that more than 600 U.S. airline flights were significantly delayed due to a software glitch in the U.S. FAA air traffic control system. The problem was claimed to be a ‘packet switch’ that ‘failed due to a database mismatch’, and occurred in the part of the system that handles required flight plans.
- Software system problems at a large health insurance company in August 2008 were the cause of a privacy breach of personal health information for several hundred thousand customers, according to news reports. It was claimed that the problem was due to software that ‘was not comprehensively tested’.
Testing is not
creative
Testers lead the development team to put together
a meaningful plan, understand the business needs, and test the logical, optional
and failure paths.
On the other hand, the word “creative” might have
different meanings for different people In my point of view your job is only as
creative as YOU make it. One taxi driver could say that his job is not creative
because all he does is drive passengers around all day. Another taxi driver
could say that it’s creative because he tries to find the best routes. Another
could say it’s creative because he enjoys meeting the people that he drives.
It’s the same with testing. It is only as creative as you make
it.
Every profession has its own value. It’s only you who can decide whether you want to do this or do that. People can just give you suggestions and can relate some examples or experiences that they have faced within that profession but it’s only YOU that can purely judge your abilities and can make a better decision.
Every profession has its own value. It’s only you who can decide whether you want to do this or do that. People can just give you suggestions and can relate some examples or experiences that they have faced within that profession but it’s only YOU that can purely judge your abilities and can make a better decision.
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your
life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great
work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t
found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart,
you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets
better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t
settle.” (Steve Jobs)
This article was taken from Tech GIG, Keeping in mind that it will useful for the readers who visit this site.
