Is Testing a Profession?

Latest Whitepapers | Resource Centre | January 10, 2012

By Leanne Howard
Account Director, Planit Software Testing

ABSTRACT: Do you consider Testing a profession? This paper explores what attributes make a professional tester, and consider what we can do to help promote this.

The Test Professional
I regularly hear this question and I’ll start by stating I absolutely believe it that testing is a profession, and I do indeed consider myself a professional. Anyone who knows me would realise that I have very high standards for myself and believe that the bar should be set high. At the same time I do, however, acknowledge the fact that there are many testers, junior and senior ranks included, for whom the term “Professional” is a very loose interpretation.

On reflecting over history and thinking about which events helped and or hindered the advancement of the concept of a “testing professional”, the single most detrimental event for the professionalism of testing was Y2K. It seemed that anyone, from any walk of life, could effortlessly jump on the money-spinning event, which seemed to epitomise the flurry of activity to prevent a seemingly likely catastrophe, while earning a lot of money. Most people in those days quite frankly had no idea about how to test. Although a lot of those have since left testing, there are some that still remain, broadly grouped together under the ubiquitous term of User Acceptance testers.

Communication
So, what is a Testing Professional? What attributes, behaviours and skills should they possess?

First and foremost they need to be able to communicate, both verbally and in writing. Most of what a “tester” (I use the term tester generically, regardless of seniority or role, who participate and complete testing related activities) does is to communicate, but more importantly it is how effective they perform that communication.

From the very first engagement they need to talk to stakeholders to “flush out” and understand, frequently poorly written or non-existent requirements. Sitting quietly in a requirements walk-through, may or maybe not be appropriate, depending on the situation, but walking out of that walkthrough without pages of questions for clarification tells me that you’ve just wasted your time and that of your employer. The ability to be able to articulate those questions meaningfully and to the point, back to the relevant stakeholders is a critical success factor for a tester.

The ability to review test input documentation during static testing to provide quality feedback is a very different skill to just “reading it”, which unfortunately is how more testers interpret the concept of a review. The review process is a constant and consistent activity, which continues through planning, test analysis and design; and execution. The skill required to log defects clearly so the problem is clearly identified, understood and more importantly how to clearly reproduce it (if indeed it is a reproducible defect) are critical skills.

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