Key takeaways
- Depth in one area beats shallow familiarity with every tool.
- Learning to read systems and ask better questions outlasts any framework.
- Automation is a skill within testing, not a replacement for knowing what to test.
Software Testing is hard.
It involves hard work and dedication in learning the product, but also a huge attention to detail.
A Software Testing Engineer is the link between the Development Team and the Product Manager/Owner and other stakeholders.
The Software Engineer in Test (SDET) should be well aware of the ins and outs of the product, its integrations with other services/products, the strong and weak parts from a high level down to the code base.
Should be well aware of new/existing testing frameworks and testing techniques.
Should be able to:
- organize and write test plans and test cases for various features and functionalities.
- write unit tests, integration tests, UI functional tests.
- load test the APIs or web pages of the application under test.
- continuously improve the webpage speed and performance metrics.
- discover and report security issues on a continuous basis.
- use or create from scratch testing automation frameworks (based on existing frameworks like Cypress or TestCafe).
- challenge developers about potential issues that you discover in their code or in the user interface.
- find and raise issues/bugs in a clear way.
- prioritise and plan along with the product and development team all the stories and task for the next release, quarter etc.
- and many many others.
As you can see, this type of job is all about knowing a lot about your product, your team and your customers.
It’s linking people and discovering issues before reaching your customers.
It’s a challenging type of job, but very rewarding.
Written by Bogdan Vazzolla.
LoadFocus is a cloud testing platform, a load and stress testing tool which provides the infrastructure to run tests with thousands of concurrent users, from multiple cloud locations, in less than a few minutes, keep history of the results, compare different runs to inspect performance improvements or performance degradation. It also supports running JMeter load tests from the cloud and monitoring and audit web and mobile performance.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should I learn first?
Depth in one area rather than shallow familiarity with every tool. Being genuinely good at one thing is more useful, and more hireable, than a list of tools you have opened once.
Which skills last?
Reading systems and asking better questions. Frameworks come and go; understanding how a system can fail and knowing what to ask about it transfers to whatever you use next.
Is automation the whole job?
No. It is a skill within testing, not a replacement for knowing what to test. Automating the wrong checks produces a fast suite that misses everything that matters.
