Prabhukiran Narava is one of our testers who made some time to share with us his professional experience, how he started testing with us and how his experience has been for him so far. We enjoyed his thoughts and we are happy to share them with you all. So, here you go…!
Hello,
Quality Assurance is the term that I have been experiencing for almost 10 years. After my bachelors in engineering, I had no clue on how to shape up my career. I attended a few interviews at a few tech companies and got selected by one. Being a fresh graduate, I was skeptical about my abilities & passion. After months of training at my first company, I realized that I possess some skills using which I can contribute to delivery of software projects and do good to society & to myself :).
Firstly, I started working for a dutch airlines company, where I had to do quality assurance for web services. And for the first time, I heard the word agile. My first feeling was like..ah..lets do it. After a few sprints, I noticed that I had been using skills like analytical ability, critical thinking, and communication. Moreover these are the skills that kept me recognised and delivered what I had promised. I felt very proud. In the back of mind, I decided that Quality Assurance is my way forward.
I worked a few years at this airline, improving all my skills being a QA. Be it in business analysis, test analysis & design..everywhere I saw opportunity for my growth. I have also tried and learnt quite a few automation tools. Also did a few QA certifications to really know what QA is on paper. Later I joined a fintech organization and started seeing a few other sides of QA namely testing in different platforms, clouds. I am very happy to experience and participate in different test types, test levels.
No matter how many years of experience we have, whether we do quality assurance manual or automation, we are always using our inherent & underlying skills in our day-to-day life. Those skills are..
Analytical ability is something that we use everywhere as QA. Be it for test case preparation, test strategy preparation, root cause analysis, defect reporting, causal analysis and last but not least business analysis. I think this is one of the most important abilities of any QA Engineer, which helps him/her to analyze businesses before any one in the market does. As a side note, I feel it’s one of my adrenalin high factors till date.
Critical thinking is another arrow for any QA, which we use in our daily life to assess the situations, application behaviors around him. We always train our QA mind to be fact based, unbiased. In simple words, if we raise a bug, this is the skill that pushes us inherently and makes a judgmental call. And moreover, if a customer or developer questions our bug, we are always positive and open to conversation. So let’s always be reminded of our very own ability, Critical thinking.
Communication skills are another skill, which every one of our QA community possesses. We use it in daily life in understanding businesses, requirements and in discussions with our product owners, business analysts, test leads. Our effective communication is especially visible to everyone in our way of writing test cases, test steps, defect’s steps, expected results and actual results. Presentation skills are also very important skills that every one of us use when presenting our results and maturity products using QA metrics.
First two weeks of freelancing @TesterWork
After experiencing all of this over the past few years, I have now joined Tester work as a freelancer. To be honest, I got to know about TesterWork from a blog I read.
With a skeptical mind, I just went to the website & spent quite some time going through FAQ’s and understanding what it means to be working at Tester Work. Two days later, I decided that I was going to go for it. Onboarding process was smoother, I just needed to register online and do an online assessment. Within days, I got the news that my assessment went well. Later I waited for a few days, and then I got my first invitation to test.
To be frank, I thought I needed to raise a lot of bugs to get recognized quicker. But then I read a few of the experiences in blogs and they made me rethink and go back to basics of applying the above said basic skills and do good for our customers. I went through the test instructions which were quite clear, I just needed to follow them and in case of questions, an email would solve my questions.
Happy to be part of the TesterWork community. Hoping to experience a lot more in the coming days & write more blogs. 🙂 🙂 🙂
