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I'm having almost 7 years of experience as a developer and would like to know if I can move to testing without having any experience in it except for Unit testing of course.

My reasons for moving to testing are as follows:

  1. I was stuck in a project for 4 years, which had technologies like COBOL, SQL, Unix. I work in an MNC and it was really difficult to shift to anything else.

  2. I worked in digital technologies like apigee, wso2, drupal7 for 2 years, but couldn't learn anything properly.

  3. I'm trying to learn new technologies like React.js, so that I can make a move to UI development, but I feel I don't have much interest in coding.

As I'm planning to move to Canada, I had to leave my job hence taking this opportunity to do something, which will interest me and help me in future. So, thought of taking up Software Testing.

I want to know:

  1. If I will be able to make a move to Software Testing.
  2. If I will be able to get a job in Canada without having any experience in testing.
  3. If yes, then how should I go about preparing myself for the interviews so, that I can crack it and get a job for sure.
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I can only speak for myself, but I entered the QA field after 32 years as a software developer.

I'd been looking for work as a developer having been with the same company for 25 of those years (and another five with technically the same company as I inherited the code when the owners retired).

The drawback of only having three employers in 32 years was that I was stagnant in learning new technologies, but I was very good and am still very good in software development concepts: design, coding, testing, debugging, just with older technology (i.e. VB 6.0)

When my current employer hired me, since I had no practical experience in other languages like Java or C# (I had self-taught myself those and other technologies but did not use them day-to-day) because of my strong background in software development and my history of employer loyalty, they thought (correctly) that I'd be a strong asset to their QA team in test automation.

Because test automation only requires minimal programming skills, in general, I took to it very quickly and was writing strong testing frameworks in no time. I enjoy the challenge immensely and I'm glad I made the move. There's not as much pressure, in my opinion, to writing automation code as there is to developing complete applications.

Emphasize your programming experience and indicate that you'd be a good candidate for automation. It doesn't take too long to learn Java, Selenium, Cucumber, Maven, etc. if you have any programming experience at all.

Good luck.

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  • Thank you @Bill for your reply. I want to know if you did any certification (like ISTQB) to get a job. Is it really necessary to get certified?
    – rashk12
    Commented Jul 3, 2018 at 17:51
  • It is not necessary but it can't hurt. I only know of one person who works here who is ISTQB certified and he became certified while working here. The only certification of any merit that I have is an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) and it's in Windows 2000 Professional of all things. I have hundreds of other paper certifications, mostly from BrainBench (not even sure if they still exist) but they were mostly for fun. I used to be a "Certaholic" but again, it was more for fun and education, no real career value.
    – Bill Hileman
    Commented Jul 3, 2018 at 17:56
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I have seen developers turned into testers and testers turned into developers.

  • I do not think there is any hurdle that will stop you from becoming a QA. As the mindset and skillset of being a dev and a QA overlap quite a bit.

It will help you (well, depends on how you look at it) if you acquire certificate such as ISTQB foundation or even ISTQB advanced technical test analyst or ISTQB advanced test automation engineer certificates.

  • You need to be careful though; to some people, showing them you have ISTQB is somewhat degrading as they do not consider having a certificate is the same as being able to do the job. So when you present your ISTQB certificates, please keep it in mind.
  • What I do when looking for a job: I put my certificates on my CV but I do not bring it up in any interview unless I am asked to.
  • To me personally, ISTQB certificates do help, but only in the sense of teaching me various terminologies and various good practices.
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