If you are thinking about becoming a software tester, you might be wondering how to start a testing career, which path should you follow, and how long can it take to become a senior. Let me tell you something: Software testing is a great career! As a software tester with more than 15 years of experience, I’m always asked about how to start, and what the career looks like.
There is not a single path in this career, people start from different points and move between roles, it’s not the same for a teenager with no previous knowledge or for a software developer who wants to learn test automation. With that being said, there is a path, that gives us an overview of what being a software tester looks like.
How long will it take to you to walk this path, will depend on many factors, but at least you can have a sense.
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How to become a software tester?
If you are asking what you need to do in order to be a software tester, I assume that you know what software testing is about. So the first steps that I would suggest to you are:
Read: There are many blogs, books, newsletters and magazines about software testing that will give you a sense about this world.
Watch: Youtube is a great source of content, there are many people teaching testing basics for free on youtube.
Attend: Software testing conferences are a great place to start, you can learn a lot and connect with people and companies looking to teach you.
Connect: Linkedin is a great place to connect with the right people, Twitter and Facebook groups are also very good to find software testers and groups near you.
How to gain experience as a software tester
If you have already read some materials, watched some youtube tutorials, attended some conferences, and connected to people, you have everything you need to start gaining experience.
The first thing I suggest is to look for companies offering software testing trainee jobs. Consultancy companies are the most likely to offer that type of job to you, and LinkedIn is a great source for those job offers.
Another good starting point is to become a freelancer. Companies like utest allow you to get freelance projects and they also provide you with all the needed training. If you are looking for more offerings in freelancing, fiverr is a great choice, as it has a big bunch of projects and offers.
Software tester career path
Software tester trainee
As a trainee you will learn the basics in a real job environment, the main idea of being a trainee is to get involved in a real project with real people and real customers. As a trainee, you typically work at a software company for a short period of time, where you get paid to learn, and then you move to the next level, once you acquired the basic skills and terminology that you need to be a software tester.
Software Tester Junior
At this point you should be able to execute test cases, most of them already defined, and report the results (pass or fail). You should be able to report bugs and classify and prioritize them.
Software Tester Senior
As a senior software tester, you should be able to design the test cases, create a test plan for a specific project, mentor junior members of the team and take care of the overall quality of the product under testing.
Test Automation Engineer Junior
As a test automation engineer, you are able to write test scripts, fix existing scenarios, execute test suites in all the environments under tests, analyze reports, and report issues.
if you are interested in learning test automation, you can check my article: Is selenium easy to learn?
Test Automation Engineer Senior
A senior test automation engineer is able to create test automation frameworks, define the best coding practices, create interactions between the different components and environments, review source code, and mentor junior team members.
Testing manager
A testing manager is someone able to create and define a test plan, make adjustments to it, and assure that the team is sticking to the defined plan. This person should be able to identify risks and mitigate them, to manage team members, both manual and automation testers. The testing manager is also the person who faces the client to report status and is the nexus between devs, business analysts, and testers.
Testing career: The bottom line
As you can see, the career path is very straightforward and you can be a software tester with or without programming skills, as automation tester and manual testers can be independent.
It’s worth noting that there are other types of testers, such as load and performance testers, accessibility testers, security testers, etc. There are no limits on this career, and there is a spot for everyone.
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