Develop These 6 Skills and Become a Manual Test Engineer

The demand for QA testers is high in the modern world due to the fast development of software or digital products, web platforms, and online games, etc.

The demand for QA testers is high in the modern world due to the fast development of software or digital products, web platforms, and online games. Such developments are fast as well as high in numbers, and to test whether or not they work fine, companies look for QA engineers. Due to this rise in demand and considering that the skills required to be a software quality assurance engineer are not tough, many IT professionals are choosing the path of software QA training to start a career as a manual tester.

Software Testing – A Small Introduction

Software Testing is a method to check a software program to figure out whether or not a software is performing as per expectations. In other words, software testing is done to find the bugs in a piece of code.

Responsibility of a Software Tester

There are two key methods of software testing – Manual testing and Automation testing. In this post, our major focus will be on manual testing training. A software tester has to involve himself in a lot of communications with software developers and other teams to clearly understand the requirements or objectives of software development. After getting a clear picture of requirements, he starts his job to check if the software is functioning correctly. There are various types of testing such as regression, performance, functional, load and so on. For beginners, these terms are new but all of them ultimately fulfill the same objective i.e. to improve the performance of a software.

Skills required to become a Manual Test Engineer

Companies are looking for QA test engineers but they are struggling with their performances due to lack of many required skills. Let’s discuss some important skills that are required to become a manual test engineer.

Thinking Capacity

Testing is not as easy as it seems and also has a key role in the software development cycle. Before taking QA training, a professional must have analytical and logical skills that are essential to get a testing job done. To set up the right test process, a QA tester needs to understand the overall scenario so that he can create a perfect solution. With analytical skills, you can differentiate a big problem into small ones, understand each one of them and their impact.

Attitude to learn and grow

People say you need to carry a good attitude while planning to start manual testing training. You must have an attitude of breaking a robust process into various parts, detailing each part and providing suggestions for all possible improvements. In the world of software engineering, the software development process is very quick and this increasing development has given birth to many new testing techniques. Therefore, a tester must upgrade his knowledge by learning all the latest technologies and testing skills.

Understanding the business model

Behind the development of any software application or product, there is a strict and defined business model associated with it. A tester starts analyzing technical aspects after the software has been developed, but to understand the real-time business situations and mapping it while testing is important for a tester to do his job correctly. Therefore, you must have the skills to understand business models thoroughly. Each system development is based on some user stories and their interactions with the system. When you know how users interact with the system and how it responds, you will be able to check all the software functionalities in the right manner.

Test Case Writing

Test case accuracy depends on how correctly you write a test case. The most common and popular test case writing platform is a spreadsheet, however, many companies are using test management tools too for this purpose. The objective of writing a test case is creating SRS. In addition to it, you need to have strong communication with the development team as well as the business analyst team. This skill is very important for you to start a career as a manual tester because it helps you in doing all positive and negative tests. A positive test means for all valid or correct input; there should be the right output. And, a negative test means for all wrong or invalid inputs, there should be an error.

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Having a good knowledge of the software development life cycle is important for people willing to take software QA training. By utilizing this knowledge, you can get an insight into the overall software development process that will help you address many challenging testing issues. In other words, to perform the testing job efficiently and effectively, one must have a clear and thorough understanding of the software process lifecycle. From requirement gathering to design and development, a tester can get enough information to understand the whole scenario behind the product development and use this data while performing test cases.

Documentation & Cross-Browser Testing Ability

In a row of software testing skills, one most important quality is documentation that helps to create a foundation of testing. Based on all the requirements and time limitations, you must have the ability to make a plan and create proper documentation of it so that the test process can run smoothly with the proper utilization of all the available resources.

Due to numerous browsers and various types of devices, the need for testing professionals to have the ability to conduct all browser compatibility tests is very important. Through this kind of testing, application functionalities are tested on various operating systems as well as browsers.

Conclusion

While all QA test engineers have some basic skills, but all of them are unique in their style and a lot depends on the QA training they have taken. Some most important skills required to become a manual test engineer have been mentioned in this article but there is a lot more to learn. These are some qualities on the basis of which organizations set up selection criteria. One must understand that a tester should have a broader mindset of understanding a situation and resolving the critical issues with creative problem-solving expertise.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are the personal views of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Devdiscourse and Devdiscourse does not claim any responsibility for the same.)