Thinking to convert your path from developer to tester….this is for you Before discussing about your thought process of changing career path let us discuss from sratch. • Who are developers and Testers . • What are their roles? • How good a developer be as an tester? • Industry Standards/Statistics • Guidelines to be an effective tester from an developer. DEVELOPER: Developers are required to have specific skill sets, particularly in the languages they use to develop software. Complex algorithms,databases,concurrent processes knowledge is required as well as the software needed to manifest the application from scratch. TESTER:Testers are required to be curious,meticulous and thorough. Testers want to push software to limits,find edge cases and try to break your application. They need to be organized. Developer and Tester are not so much different,but they have different path for the same goal,—to improve quality.
• In certain companies, You are recruited as a “Software Engineer” or any such equivalent designations where there is no explicit mention if you will be a developer or tester (meaning you could be into either one or sometimes both!) In this case since there is no discrimination in the designation, even if you are put into testing you are likely to earn same as a developer. • An efficient tester can even draw more salary than the developer of similar experience. It’s all about the passion and interest that would help you to change your career path as well as to climb up the ladder. Software testing is a challenging domain.Testing is a domain that needs you to unlearn to learn better.
Rebeginning your career as a tester has its own benefits. It would for sure lay a solid foundation. If your understanding on manual testing is perfect, then that should be your baseline. GUIDELINES TO CHANGE YOUR CAREER PATH: The concept of testing remains same irrespective to the area you test – Your poor Customer needs a sturdy application. As a tester, if you have analyzed the test outcome and status by preparing an actionable dashboard, you have the skill required.
What you need here is your testing life cycle understanding, the project / product domain understanding. This will help you sail through. It’s worth every penny you take to understand the testing life cycle, methodology, and the process applied.it’s worth to understand all the facets of Testing. • Present in your resume/experience what makes you claim perfect in testing. • Present in your Resume the activities you have accomplished by developing.The Programming Languages/Softwares you had worked/Aquainted. • You not only need strong understanding on business but also on various statistical functions. You will need to crunch the data to provide better insight to the business. Of course, with sheer hard-work, one could sail through seamlessly. • As you keep learning, earning a certification like CSQA /CASQ/CAST/will build your reputation.There are certifications that could help you scale further.For a tester, there are other certifications that could help you perform better. • Understand what your strengths are and how you could contribute to your success. Begin the journey and keep learning. Testing has Manual and Automated Testing.If your understanding on manual testing is perfect, then that should be your baseline.The industry is rapidly moving from Manual testing to Automated testing. There are lots of automated testing tools but for testing manually. For manually testing a software, you need a human being known as tester in testing community. INDUSTRY STANDARDS Software Testing as of Today is Trillion dollar industry. There is huge demand for testing professionals but with less supply. These days quality of the product directly effects the brands reputation. The users will get negative opinion on the brand itself if their app or website performs poorly. So no one is ready to compromise on quality. Organizations are always looking forward to work with energetic testers. According to reports..Software testing is the one among the top 10 in-demand careers of 2015. According to the Industry standards, developer-to-tester ratio of about 3:1. Again, however, this could change dramatically, depending on: the roles and responsibilities, skills of both developers and testers, amount of test automation, who is responsible for writing test automation (could be either developers or testers), and the stability and experience of the team in working together, amongst many other elements.The ratio of developers to testers has been a recurring question for the last several decades. Past ratios where Waterfall was deployed, were up to even 1:1, but in an agile environment,even though the developer-to-tester ratio may be lower on the surface, the testing still has to get done.
QUALITIES NEEDED FOR AN TESTER: • Observation Skill • Analysing Skill • Experience Driven Testing or error Guessing. • Enjoy testing. • Security Testing/Gate-Keeping skill • Curious • Thorough • Promoting software quality development throughout the software life cycle. EFFECTIVE TESTER FROM DEVELOPER: Developers are good Testers. As they know • how the data is handled in code • how the authentication for a particular screen is done • how the UI is maintained in hiding any sensitive information. But yet a security tester is required, as developers do not reveal any potential bugs known to them (This is a common human behavioral). But if a developer turns out to be a Security Tester in later point of time, chances are more bugs could be found. PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: I am a certified Java Developer ,Freelance Mentor who not only code but also do requirements analysis and mentor some of the projects in Various technologies.I have noticed that I’m stronger in this parts of finding faults(bugs)the whole process than in writing code. So I was happy when I had the chance to switch from development to QA. I noticed that I can can analyses problems very well and with my experience as a developer I find many bugs (which probably only testers mght not have been!). Furthermore my Technical/programmatical knowledge helps me to write automated tests like load test,automated GUI tests and so on. To conclude this and came back to the question: 1. With experience as a developer but your strengths in testing you are also more worth for the company as you can generate better output again. Maybe you can also improve QA in general due automated testing and so…. So: Tell the truth and make the advantages of your switch from development to testing clear. CONCLUSION: A tester who knows code is a valuable asset to a software development team – they can automate and depending on the nature of the code can sometimes pinpoint the exact problem and offer suggestions on the fix
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