Strategy and resources for training Quality Assurance engineers

Question

I'm working with a start-up on providing training material for their staff. Their QA staff consists of individuals who have CS degrees but no/little software development experience, or QA training for that matter.

What tools/resources do you recommend? I did some quick research online and found this book to be highly recommended: Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach (Although I found it a bit dated, the most recent edition is 2001!).

I took a look at some online courses like this udemy one but found the structure too rigid and not really conducive for a team training.

Suggestions?

Answer 1

If the QA team has a little or no experience, I would suggest the following plan/materials :

Basics

• Objective : Make sure that all the individuals have the minimum knowledge of QA basics and share the same terminology.

• Materials : Nothing better than the standard ISTQB syllabus | My favorite ISTQB detailed course

Process

• Objective : Define the QA macro strategy,process,test plans (examples) and the QA metrics. Example : Everyone must know what to do (write tests,execute tests...) and when to do (are all commits reviewed ? Do we have enough software maturity ?...)
• Materials : This will give you an overview | terms to looks for : Agile QA best practices, Test Strategies for Large and Small Development Projects, Also check QA-matters.com

Tools

• Objective : A practical workshop with the everyday tools that will be used by the QA team.
• Materials : Assuming the company will use Open Source or cheap tools : TestLink,Bitbucket,jenkins,trello,Selenium or Appium for test automation...

Answer 2

First, it's good to have some vocabulary:

• The ISTQB Guide can help you with that. I recommend reading the Chapter 1.
• If you are not familiar with the agile approach, a fast reading for the is also the ISTQB Agile Guide. But for a deep dive, the Agile Testing book is excellent.

Now, about testing engineering, I recommend the following blog posts and videos:

Test Engineering:

• What Exploratory Testing Is Not | Part 1 of 5 (Worth read all five)
• A Tester’s Commitments
• Exploratory Testing 3.0
• General Functionality and Stability Test Procedure (Paper from 2000, where James Bach (follow this guy on Twitter) shows his process for testing the Windows OS using exploratory testing)
• Understanding exploratory testing
• Testing oracles - HICCUPPS
• A Test is a Performance
• Testing != test execution
• Open Lecture by James Bach on Software Testing
• James Bach on testing in an agile software development team.

Regarding Automation, you will discover that Selenium is the most used tool at the moment. Given you have a strong background in programming and the fact that tutorials are technology dependent, I'll link more general resources.

• How To Create a Test Automation Framework Architecture With Selenium
• Page Object Pattern, Martin Fowler
• BDD/Cucumber
  • http://martinfowler.com/bliki/GivenWhenThen.html
  • https://cucumber.io/docs/reference
  • https://lostechies.com/joeybeninghove/2010/06/01/cucumber/

Here you can find a small automation suite (using Cucumber and other small libraries to implement the Page Object Factory) that I wrote for a Edx-like education platform. It can give you a taste of all the pieces of an automation suite. https://github.com/JoaoGFarias/OpenRedu/tree/cucumber_integration/features

Along with the preparation, practice makes the tester. If you are not able to practice in your company, the LibreOffice has a great QA community (both manual and auto).

Answer 3

For manual testing training you can refer the following site.

Software Testing Training: End to End Training on a Live Project

End to end real time software project testing is explained very properly considering as beginner. They are also having other testing resources on their site. Hope it will help.

Answer 4

For agile environments I strongly recommend Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory.

https://agiletester.ca/

I personally also recommend against the ISTQB as over the past 20 years I have found it to be generally out of date and not very helpful in the qa and qe jobs that I have had. It has been updated for agile but still focuses more on theory than practice.

With agile the practice is of most value and changes constantly. Most of the true challenges are with people and organizations, not quality theory, and Janet and Lisa make those challenges one of the central focuses of their book.