Fundamental Requirements For an Entry Level QA Engineer

Question

My intention is for this to be a Community Wiki. Being that I have not been granted the power to make this a Community Wiki, I ask that someone who does have the power make it one before it gets closed.

I have read through all the FAQ's and decided I am still going to post my question.

I'm in a dilemma I'm sure most of you were at some point in the beginning of your careers. I understand this is a Q&A site for very specific and technical questions related to SQA and Testing, which is why I hope someone is kind enough to turn this into a Wiki before the powers that be make it go bye-bye.

I'm about to start my Junior year in college this fall and I major in Information Systems. I currently work at a hotel doing administrative work and have been lucky to make contacts in the software industry.

The people I met have encouraged me to get my feet "wet" in QA before attempting to land a developer/programmer role at their company. My college professors have recommended I do the same.

I feel misled.

As I search job sites for QA Engineers, the requirements present a host of technologies you must be familiar with, none of which I have even heard of, on top of 3-5 years of experience. Software Quality Assurance does not seem like an entry-level role at all - it seems it is its own monster.

With that said, I can program intermediately in JavaSE and Oracle's SQL, have experience with PHP, XML, and MySQL for web development, and have very strong HTML and CSS skills, albeit all skills were obtained through school projects.

None of the above are in the list of requirements for a SQA engineer at any level on the job sites I have found. Why have my professors and peers in the software industry recommended I pursue this? It seems clear I am a much better fit for Web Development.

My Question:

If anyone out there did start in SQA, without the familiarity of the plethora of software suites to do debugging, what were the fundamental requirements you did have to have to get the job?

Answer 1

Java Bean,

I think you may want to ask yourself a few questions first:

• do you want to be involved in testing or in programming? In my experience, colleges are usually less than stellar in the QA domain, and tend to assume that testing is "any warm body" and useful to familiarize someone with an application before they start coding with it.
• do you like problem-solving, problem-finding, problem-defining? Which aspects appeal to you most? As a general rule, programmer-mindset is quite different than tester-mindset: programmers focus on solving problems, where testers focus on finding and defining problems (these are rarely the same problems - testers tend to look for the gaps in the solution, and ways to work around any gaps they do find). Another way to conceptualize the difference is that the programmer focus tends to be more "building it right" where the tester focus tend to be more "did we build the right it" (the designer is the one who tries to define which it gets built - and yes, there's a lot of overlap there).

That said, there are generalities I'd consider for entry-level SQA positions:

• Familiarity with software development processes: not necessarily able to code, but having a pretty good idea of how it fits together and how it works. Not all testing needs insight into the application code.
• Ability to communicate and prioritize - QA people will need to create bug reports and convince others that the problems they report need to be fixed. They'll also need to evaluate the severity of any problems they run into.
• Fast learner - no matter what level or domain of software QA someone starts at, there's a large learning curve (where I work, we call it a learning cliff. With overhang).

Any kind of programming skill is a bonus because it allows for automating some tests (be wary - if you don't like this but are good at it you could easily get trapped there - one of the rarest skillsets in the SQA domain is the mix of good automation and good test design)

That said, I'd look at why your college people are suggesting starting with QA. It seems a bit odd to me, not least because my experience is that a developer who's in QA until a "real" programming position comes along is bad for both the developer and the QA group.