Hello, my name is Moses Eniola. I’m a QA Software Tester(Manual Testing) with three years experience in quality assuring different websites and applications manually. I’ve also helped in finding relevant content and visual bugs.
I’m also a year three student of the Department of Linguistics and African Languages, University of Ibadan with three years experience in translation, language annotations, sentence generation (both in English and Yoruba).

Every job has its technicalities and software testing is not excluded. Have you spent the entire day testing software without finding a single bug? or do you feel you have not been productive enough and can do better? Then this article is for you because I will be sharing some important tips I have learned over the years manually testing software.

Before I go deep, let me give a brief explanation of what software testing is for absolute newbies. If you have ever tried using a website or application where you are unable to click a button or it is not displaying properly on your device, then you already know what software testing is.
You see, that difficulty you experienced is what is called a bug and the job of a software tester is to find those bugs before users so the developer could fix them and the users could have the optimum experience.

These tips are based on my testing experience and that of other pro-testers:

#001 No Software/Application Is Bug-Free: Before starting any test, have it at the back of
your mind that the software you are testing isn’t 100% bug-free, it could be 99% and your job is
to find those 0.99 bugs. That way, you will not be discouraged after some minutes into the test
without finding a bug.

#002 Always Read The Instructions: Never ignore the instruction when you are testing. It
gives the direction of what and where to search for. Not properly reading instructions before
testing is like traveling to a place you’ve never been to without a map. You are bound to get lost
and even if you do find some bugs, it might be out of scope i.e not what they are looking for.

#003 Device Matters: Don’t use a single device for your test unless when it is stated
otherwise. There is a tendency for a bug to occur on an android phone and not on a laptop, you
might what to run your test across several devices to not miss out on some device-specific
bugs.

#004 Test Chronologically: Don’t just test randomly, have a plan and break the website or
application you are testing into sections, something like header, links in the header, footer, links
in the footer, body, links in the body, etc. This way it is easier to track your progress and
increase efficiency.

#005 Be Focused: Lack of focus is one thing that is common among manual testers and its
costs a lot. While executing a test absent-mindedly or doing another task while testing, other
testers would probably find the same bug you have found and submit it before you. While you
are grudgingly abandoning that bug to find another, another tester is already on that too.

#006 Pay Attention To Patterns: As you progress as a tester, you would realize there is a
trend in which you find bugs on some types of websites and applications. Pay close attention to
this trend and identify the pattern. These patterns are the first thing you should follow when
testing new websites/applications before doing general testing. That way your work is
streamlined and you are bound to find more bugs in less time.