In Part 1 of this topic I wrote about the experiences that made me realize that Software Testing is not repetitive.  These are my experiences from over 7 years ago when I first started my career in Software Testing.

When I began to realize that skilled Software Testing was not a repetitive job, but one that required and made use of different types of skills & knowledge and was a thinking persons job – I immediately knew I wanted to become a skilled Software Tester.  I didn’t yet exactly know what that entailed, or how I would start my journey on becoming one, but that didn’t matter – I knew where I wanted to go so to speak and now I would work on getting there.

I saw two types of Testers (there are a lot more but for the scope of this post I’ll stick with two); those who wrote and ran the same test cases over and over & those who used different testing skills, knowledge, experience in their testing to find some great bugs and report valuable information.  The latter were the ones other individuals (testers, developers, product owners) would go to for input on how & what to test. They were the ones who would themselves go to ask developers for information, find information using different channels that were available to them.  They didn’t tell other testers what to do, but made themselves available to them as a good source of knowledge.

I was assigned to and chosen to test more “complex” projects – this is what led me to start working on testing different types of applications. By “complex” I mean testing applications for which there were no pre-existing test cases. Applications that nobody within the Testing Team knew much about in terms of functionality and technicality. I would talk to (ask questions) and work with developers and data analysts to determine what the application did, how it would be used and most importantly (and a learning experience for me) how I was going to test it.  I wasn’t just testing the application from the UI, I was now testing different components that made up the application.  I enjoyed being assigned and chosen for these projects.  Not only did I work hard to be the one the test manager chose for these projects but I showed that I wanted to learn and was both willing to and able to do so.

From this point on; about 7-8 months into my Testing career I knew that I wanted to learn more, get better at what I did and not just sit and execute the same tests over and over – a job that a robot would be able to do or even somebody with less knowledge & skill than me could do.