Being a Tester is not an easy task. As a test engineer you are responsible for the quality of the product that your organization makes. A good test engineer is always valued by the organization.

Test engineers should certainly have good technical knowledge, testing skills, interpersonal skills and domain knowledge.

On this page we will explore -

• How to become a better test engineer?
• How to become more effective and efficient in our day to day test activities?
• How to add more value to the organization?

Involve early You should get involved in the project from the inception phase. Even if you are placed in the project which is already in the development phase you should get all the requirement documents, design documents and functional specification. You should also make your self familiar with the tools related to requirement management and UML modeling. Try to read as much as you can from these documents and ask the right questions. This would improve your understanding about the product and build a good rapport with the development team.

Domain Knowledge Test engineers are the closest to the customers in any organization, in terms of what to expect from the product. Being a test engineer you should try to get as much domain knowledge as you can for your product. If you are working on a product for insurance agents, you should have good knowledge of insurance sector and of terminology used in their field. This is certainly a long process, but this can help you in becoming a better tester. You could acquire this domain expertise either by gathering information from the documents and trainings or by closely interacting with the customers through user groups and customer site visits.

Technical Knowledge Being a test engineer does not mean that you do not have to be tech savvy. In fact it is very critical for you to have, at least , a good understanding of operating systems, databases, software modelling and scripting languages . Modelling knowledge will help you in understanding the system, OS and database knowledge will help you in uncovering the subtle defects of these layers and scripting knowledge will help you in writing small utilities for efficient and effective testing.

Tool Usage and Automation As a test engineer you have to do many repetitive tasks. You should try to take as much help as possible from the available tools. You should never think that automation is just for test execution, tasks like status reporting, matrix generation, test data generation, test environment creation all these can be automated. Remember that time saved by automation is well spent on exploring the product and making you a more effective tester.

Learning from Experience It is very critical for you to learn from your projects, continuously. You should always do 'post mortem' of your project to identify weaknesses in your planning, in execution or in any other area. You should analyse the processes followed, the tools used or any other thing that added value to the team or to the project.

People and communication skills This is a must for test engineers. You should always work on your interpersonal and communication skills constantly. Being a test engineer, you will be required to interact with developers, customers and support staff. Your good communication skill will help you a lot. You will also deal with the people issues and deliver the essential bad news such as stop ship defects. All these things demand good interpersonal and communication skills.

Read, Participate and become knowledgeable It is very essential to keep yourself updated with the latest happening in the industry. Share your knowledge as much as you can by participating in conferences, symposiums and publishing on websites. There is so much information on the net for you to consume. Visit regularly to the testing related websites and build your knowledge and network.