Entries Tagged 'Career in software Testing' ↓

It’s appraisal time! Many companies conduct periodic reviews to give feedback on performance to their employees and to assist employees in developing their career. This appraisal period may be of six months or one year depending on company policies. Performance appraisal is the right time to ask for your promotion as well as salary raise.

Why performance appraisal?

To reward employees for their good work. Appraisal will assist employees to develop in their career and enable them to reach their full potential. Performance appraisal process involves discussion on the previous year employee achievements and identifying area for improvement. This will help employees to develop clear performance objectives for the next review period.

In this article I will concentrate more on “QA performance appraisal”. What are skills and parameters used to judge and rate the QA performance?

This article will help you in following ways:

• If you are a fresher and yet not faced any appraisal, you will get exact idea of what is performance review and how to face it.
• If you are an experienced quality assurance engineer then you will know “How to ask for promotion and salary hike in your performance review”.
• How to effectively summaries your hard work and responsibilities into a good impression in front of management.

In companies having yearly appraisal system, performance appraisal process begins a month before end of each financial year. Performance review forms gets distributed to every eligible employee with instructions on how to fill the form and to whom you need to send these filled forms. After that face-to-face review meetings are scheduled with reviewers.

Following major activities get discussed in review meeting:

• Project you did in previous year
• Employees overall performance
• Comments on performance ratings given by employee and reviewer
• Employee feedback
• Areas for improvements
• Performance planning for the next year.

What are the criteria’s to rate the employee performance?

We are specifically speaking about QA performance appraisal, so here are the main parameters considered while rating software testers/QA persons.

Software testing skills:

1. Ability to find bugs
2. Bug reporting skill
3. Ability to automate work
4. Test cases design ability
5. Testing completeness and coverage

Management skills:

1. Effective role model
2. Team motivation skill
3. Estimation and scheduling ability
4. Ability to anticipate and address issues
5. Mentoring ability
6. Planning and time management skill

Personal skills:

1. Can work independently?
2. Team player
3. Self learning
4. Discipline?
5. Willing to learn?
6. Takes initiative
7. Admit mistakes?
8. Grasping skill

Other skills:

1. Communication (Written and verbal)
2. Documentation skill
3. Interviewing skill (If applicable)
4. Training and presentation skill

Based on these parameters employee can give self rating from 1 to 10 for individual parameter and the overall rating as the average of all these ratings. Reviewer ratings will be there also in front of each skill and also reviewer’s final rating.

Ratings are classified like:
Rating from 1-5: Poor performance
6: Need improvements
7: Meets position requirements
8-9: Exceeds position requirements
10: Exceptional! Exceed all requirements all the time.

In performance appraisal form employee needs to give feedback on his/her work till date. Also feedback on company culture, work process and management style.

Employee feedback section is the best section to ask for promotion or salary hike. Mention your overall and relevant QA experience and your ability to handle more challenging work assignments. This will create solid base for management to decide the promotion and salary raise.

Reviewer will fill the “Employee performance planning for next appraisal” section. In this section he/she will address the improvement areas like technical and non-technical skills. Or other personal improvements. Reviewer needs to mention some specific goals employee need to meet for next appraisal. This will become base objective for next appraisal period.

This is the overall appraisal process. Now key part is how and when to ask for promotion and salary raise?

Here are some key points you need to study before asking for promotion and pay rise:

1) What are your previous year’s top achievements?
You should be ready with list of key projects you did in past year. How was the overall quality of work in this period? Note down some examples, which will illustrate your contribution to company growth.

2) Positive attitude:
Management like employees with positive attitude. Management will think about your leadership qualities before promoting you.

3) Your relationship with your boss and co-workers:
This is a crucial point. Make sure you don’t have any disputes between you and your boss or co-workers. You should be a fair team player.

4) Any major work issue in previous year?
You should be aware of project issues created by you. If these issues are major then think twice before asking for promotion or pay raise. If the issues are minor and you were not directly responsible for those issues then you can have explanation of these issues, if management raised these negative points in your appraisal meeting. Make sure you don’t blame any of your co-workers for any issue.

5) Explain why you deserve promotion:
You need solid work portfolio to explain this. Put forward your contribution to company and how this helped to improve the company.

6) Are you prepared to handle challenges of senior level positions?
Senior level position means more responsibilities. You need to have both technical as well as management skills to handle such positions. Explain how you are a best fit for the new position.

7) Be prepared to present exact amount to be raised in your salary:
If management is ready to promote you then you might get this question: How much pay rise you expect? So do a little study of current market salary range for your new position. Come to some exact figures by doing analysis of your current salary, company’s previous salary hike records and your accomplishments for the appraisal period.

8 ) Know the exact time for getting pay rise:
If you got promotion in last performance appraisal then ask for promotion in current appraisal only if you did some outstanding work. If company is in some financial problems then wait till company get out of this situation. (But don’t wait too much )

Conclusion:

In short be professionals and specific. Ask for promotion and salary rise, otherwise you will get nothing. Prove your hard work and responsibilities. Be prepared for any outcome. It may be positive or negative. You should be calm in your response and don’t forget to thank your boss and handshake at the end of the appraisal meeting.

Hope this article will help you to climb your career ladder efficiently and will add some professionalism in your career.

If you have a good or bad experience in your previous appraisals then don’t forget to share your experience with our readers. Other’s can learn something from your experience. After all this site is for growing in your career by sharing each other’s thoughts!

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This article is the part software testing question and answer series. Here I will answer some reader’s questions asked to me in comments or using contact form. If you have queries on software testing, quality assurance or career in testing then you can ask me these questions in comment section below.

It’s not possible to address each and every question in detail as I observed the questions are on vast topics, for which detail answers will itself require a new article. I will answer such questions in brief here and will also write detail articles separately if required.

So let’s get some questions answered:

Naresh A. asks:

“My past experience was related to “Test Engineer”. Recently I am appointed as Test Lead in a product based company. Currently there is no Pre-established testing process. As a TL am meant to define a standard process for the entire testing flow and I will maintain certain documents for each product.
Can you help me out in establishing a process for testing, and make me know the entire responsibilities of TL and what documents I am supposed to prepare and maintain?”

As a team leader you are responsible for project planning, scheduling, communicating your project status to your manager and most important task of assigning and monitoring the project work. Your main responsibility is to build a team to achieve your project goals. You need to focus on handling the challenges in your project so that your team and project will grow and perform well.

As far as the standard testing process is considered, it’s depends on you – what procedure you want to establish. Yes some people might blame me for this point but I prefer to establish my own processes that work for me. I don’t stick to those old process definitions that are written and managed in some 90′s and most of which might not applicable nowadays.

Test lead is responsible for ensuring project plan changes are incorporated in test plan. You might write a test plan and test strategy (In some cases it might be written by senior test team member or even by project test manager) Ensure the work is going according to this test plan. Identify the risks and try to mitigate them. At the end of project testing life cycle ensure that all test objectives are accomplished and acceptance criteria is met.

More TL responsibilities includes: Test Case Review, Requirements Validation, Monitoring the execution of manual and automated test cases, Prepare test summary report and Communicate test status to seniors and prepare corresponding documents.

To know more on SQA processes read this article “SQA Processes- How to Test complete application“. Hope from this answer you will get good idea of testing processes and TL responsibilities.

Pavan Ankus asks:

“I am appearing for the QA positions in US. I would kindly request you to mail me the suitable challenging situations in manual testing and also since I don’t have domain knowledge in Insurance, finance and other financial domain experience I am finding hard to explain to the interviewer as an experienced person. In this regard I need your suitable answer as to how to face the interviewer?”

In every testing interview you will get this question: “Tell me any challenging situation you faced in your previous projects or Tell me any bug that you feel proud to find it?”

I think answers to these questions depend on your testing career. I know every one of you might have faced many challenging situations where exceptional thinking is required to solve such problems.

I will suggest to pick any such situation from you career and explain it in better way. At least it should sound challenging This will help you to face further questions from interviewer depending on your answer.

The broad challenges in manual testing are: How to ensure complete test coverage? Testing without an automation tool is itself a big challenge. You can also explain non-technical challenges in manual testing like managing the testing work in critical time (Llink to testing under time limit) i.e. completing testing before deadline and even worst case if the deadline itself is not feasible.

Explaining a challenging bug you found in your career can be also a good answer for this question. For example the bug that was difficult to find or reprove or having big impact on customer revenue etc.

Pavan you mentioned that you don’t have knowledge in banking and finance domain then how you expect from yourself to give answer on that? If you don’t have experience in banking and finance domain then do not put this as a skill in your resume just for the sake of matching your profile with employer requirements. If you really want to get into testing of BFSI (Banking, Financial services and Insurance) domain then first study this domain. Know the basic concepts in BFSI domain. See the resources I have listed on BFSI domain on our resource page. Keep in mind you can answer in detail about any question if you have worked on that.

Mitch asks:

“What is the best way to go about getting a pay rise? Is reporting and graphing bugs found compared to other team member a good idea?

Comparing the bug count with other team or team member is very bad idea to ask for pay rise. If you are working for the organization for long time then your employer know your value and importance in organization. There is no need to show how your bug count graph is higher than your counterparts.

So what is the best way to ask for good salary rise?
At the time of your performance appraisal you should be able to convince to your reviewer that how you worked hard for your organization, How you succeeded in managing difficult tasks and how you enhanced your skills to better match your current work profile. If you succeed in this negotiation then you will definitely get good pay rise.

Other factors considered while giving you pay rise:
Your relevant skills, Complexity of application you are working on, problem solving skill, total and relevant experience, education and certifications.
Ask your questions in below comment section.

Read the previous article on testing questions and answer part1.
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The most frequently asked questions to me till date are “What is the future of software testing business?” “Should I consider software testing as my career option?” – Now you don’t need to ask these question to me any more. See the good news below.

Infosys Chief Executive and Managing Director, Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan estimated global software testing business to reach $13 Billion by 2010. Out of these approximately half of the testing work will be outsourced to India – according to Mr. Gopalakrishnan. That’s great news for Indian software testers.

Mr.Gopalakrishnan was speaking in inauguration of International software testing conference in Bangalore organized by STeP-IN. The conference was aimed to discuss on various software testing opportunities and future of Indian test community.

Currently Indian software testing community is the largest in the industry and hence there is tremendous business competition in Indian corporations. This competition finally leads to quality work and this is helping India to satisfy global customers. India is having immense talent and customers are coming to India for superior work quality.

Software testers and analysts are now key part of any product team. Indian IT giants like Infosys is deriving upto 10 per cent of revenue from software testing services and significantly growing each year.

Irrespective of software testing global or Indian business I have always suggested candidates to choose your career according to your interest. One can make a good career in any field if you have interest and goal to pioneer in that field. Without interest not a single career option will work for you.

So tighten the belts – learn new technologies on software testing, continuously update your knowledge and don’t even think about future of software testing market!

What’s that you say?

Today I am going to answer some reader’s questions. Actually I am thinking to start a weekly column on “Software Testing Questions and Answers”. Usually I get dozens of mails daily asking me on some software testing queries. Instead of answering them privately I will put them collectively in posts so that many similar questions of other readers will also get addressed. You can submit your questions in comment sections of posts. Before submitting question I will strongly recommend you to search here on this site if your queries are answered previously.

So I will kick it with some questions in this post.

Shivika asks:
“I have been given the assignment to test a UI based application page. They want me to break the functionality in any way. The first page is Sign up page containing fields like username password, email, url address field and some check box selection options . I have tried all the ways in which I can test the page. Can you also please suggest that what can be possible ways in which we can test the page?”

I will cover some major negative test cases to break the sign up page:

1) See the limit of username field. I mean the data type of this field in DB and the field size. Try adding more characters to this field than the field size limit. See how application respond to this.
2) Repeat above case for number fields. Insert number beyond the field storage capacity. This is typically a boundary test.
3) For username field try adding numbers and special characters in various combinations. (Characters like !@#$%^&*()_+}{“:?><,./;’[]). If not allowed specific message should be displayed to the user.
4) Try above special character combination for all the input fields on your sign up page having some validations. Like Email address field, URL field validations etc.
5) Many applications crash for the input field containing ‘ (single quote) and ” (double quote) examples field like: “Vijay’s web”. Try it in all the input fields one by one.
6) Try adding only numbers to input fields having validation to enter only characters and vice versa.
7) If URL validation is there then see different rules for url validation and add urls not fitting to the rules to observe the system behavior.
Example urls like: vijay.com/?q=vijay’s!@#$%^&*()_+}{“:?><,./;’[]web_page
Also add urls containing http:// and https:// while inserting into url input box.
8 ) If your sign up page is of some steps like step 1 step 2 etc. then try changing parameter values directly into browser address bar. Many times urls are formatted with some parameters to maintain proper user steps. Try altering all those parameters directly without doing anything actually on the sign up page.
9) Do some monkey testing manually or automating (i.e. Insert whatever comes in mind or random typing over keyboard) you will come up with some observations.
10) See if any page is showing JavaScript error either at the browser left bottom corner or enable the browser settings to display popup message to any JavaScript error.

These are all the negative test cases. I assume that you already tested the same sign up page with all valid cases to check application is working fine as per requirements.

If above cases are not breaking the application page then don’t forget to praise the developer

If you have some killer test cases to break such applications that you learned from your experience, you can specify them in comments below.

Jayant asks:
“Normally freshers pass out have a state of their mind as “we are freshers”, recently pass outs from college and expect that the companies to recruit them should consider the knowledge base they have and further should impact them training. In true terms what is meant by fresher for an industry?”

Good question. When I was fresher I was thinking on the similar lines. But think from employer point of view. Employer will think like “Why should we hire candidates having little knowledge base and experience? and need training first before assigning any work? Well, fortunately not all employers think like this and that’s why frehsers are getting the jobs and training on the board. Thanks to the booming IT industry. Demand will continue for freshers having good educational background and appropriate problem solving skill.

Tremendous growth in number of engineering colleges resulted in significant increase in number of graduates passing out each year. And the gap is also increasing between the skill of graduates and the expectations of the companies.

Now I will focus on what industry look specifically in fresh graduates? Typically it will include:

• Problem solving and Analytical skill
• Technical skills
• Communication and interpersonal skill
• Leadership skill
• Extra activities like foreign languages, organization skills etc.

So it will be always better if you try to achieve any experience or skill before trying for any graduate jobs. You are one step ahead than those freshers having no experience at all.

This work experience typically includes:
Internship -
Internship work done in any company during or after the graduation. It may be free or paid internship

Sandwich courses -
In some courses industrial training is included in curriculum itself. It is typically of 6 months to 1 year in most of the universities. You can include this project training in your resume.

Special skill achievements through classes or companies:
Training taken from some institute or companies can be included in your work experience.

Projects:
Projects accomplished for commercial or research purpose. These are the paid or certification projects accomplished for companies during the graduation years.

All above-mentioned work will definitely count as a experience as you get actual idea of company, team work and company working culture. Find out your skill areas and what you can offer to employer before hunting for jobs. Companies always look for all-rounded candidates who can effectively utilize their skill into projects from universities, experience and extra activities.

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In recent days this is the most asked question to me by readers. How to get software testing job? How to come in software testing field? or Can I get job in testing?

All these questions are similar and I want to give also similar answer for this. I have written post on choosing software testing as your career where you can analyze your abilities and know which are the most important skills required for software testing.

Continue reading →

If you are willing to choose software testing as your career then this is a must read!
Nowadays I get many mails asking me about software testing jobs. Should I select software testing as my career? How to switch to software testing from other job experience? Which institute should I join for testing course? And many more …

I will give a common answer to all these questions whether you should choose software testing as your career or not? Let me first explain in brief about software testing. Software testing and quality control are the processes by means of which application quality is improved. Software testing is done in each phase of product life cycle i.e from requirement specifications , design, coding, to the user acceptance.

Many complex software structures require in depth analytical and technical skill to test the applications. Knowledge of programming languages is required for unit testing, scripting skill essential for Automation testing.

Now we will speak about your career in software testing. No one can guide you choosing your career more than you! Its right and you are the only person to decide your career.
Do self-assessment to figure out where you can fit well. Do study of your skills, interests, strengths, weaknesses.

Ask some questions to your self like:
What is your goal in life?
What will increase your satisfaction and skill?
What is your interest?
Which skills you have developed in your life till now?
Which training you did that can be applied to future job?

By answering these questions you will automatically come to decision.

To switch to software testing career What skills you will require? Is the most important question I think.

In my previous post what makes a good test engineer, I mentioned some of the software testing required skills.

1. Communication: Customer communication as well as team communication most important for this job. Written communication as well!

2. Technical skill: As I mentioned earlier for testing technical domain skill in languages is important.

Some of the Testing skills are:
Project life cycle,
Testing concepts,
Knowledge of testing types,
Programming languages familiarity,
Database concepts,
Test plan idea,
Ability to analyze requirements,
Documentation skill,
Testing tools

3. Leadership quality
4. Analytical and judging skill

Don’t worry if you don’t have some of the skills mentioned above. You can always learn the things if you have interest. Non-IT personas can also grow fast by gaining necessary skills.

So finally selecting testing as your career ask one question to yourself:
Are you looking for career in software testing or just a Job?

Best of luck!