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We have a set of 3 base products with different domains of ERP, RMS and OMS. I have worked in all the products in my organization and the am getting bored of the testing cycle. Whenever we are testing a new release of the product, some minor changes will be new and the rest of the functions are the same so I am getting bored of testing the same things repeatedly.

Is continuing to do this helpful for my career growth? How can I find testing more enjoyable?

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It depends. If you're doing the same testing, over and over again, some people will get bored with that. Others like that sort of stability, but are likely to see little career growth, because they aren't increasing their value to the product/company.

I think you need to look at things in a different way, though. Your job isn't to test the ERP, RMS, and OMS products. Your job is to improve the testing of the ERP, RMS, and OMS products. If you're doing manual testing, and every time, you run the same set of manual tests, that's going to be boring. If, however, you work on automating the manual tests, that's interesting. Then after all the manual tests are no longer manual, then you look at defect reports from the field, and come up with strategies to detect those sorts of defects in the future. That may require writing new test tools, or adding in new process steps, or a host of other things.

It's the difference between quality control and quality assurance. Quality Control is just looking for defects. Quality Assurance is making sure that the process that's being followed will find defects.

Also, as the QA person, you should know the product as a whole better than anyone else. The developers develop the product, they don't use it. They'll know their part of the product really well, and be completely ignorant of everything else. You should be known as the person who can review designs and the like holistically, can work with clients on implementing the product, and so on.

Personally, when I find myself doing something over and over again, I try to automate it. Because doing things over and over again is what computers are good at; humans aren't. When I find things that annoy me, or I think are really ridiculous in terms of the amount of effort involved, I try to improve them, or sometimes, completely replace them. Want to be seen as valuable, which is what you need to progress your career? If there's something that two senior programmers spend 20% of their time on, and you can reduce that to 1% of their time, that's valuable. If there are classes of defects that aren't being found, and you devise a way to find them, that's valuable. If you're doing the same thing over and over and over again, then you're no more valuable than anyone else who can do the same thing over and over and over again.

You may need to make a case to your boss that you need time to work on automation, or you may need to do that in your "free time" initially. (I definitely don't advocate doing that as a regular thing, and I realize many people don't have the luxury of doing work outside of work hours.) But in any sane company, once you've demonstrated that you're more valuable to them writing tools, or new tests, or a host of other things that QA consists of, that's not going to be boring, because by it's nature, it's always changing.

If your workplace doesn't support that sort of a transition/view, then yes, that's a problem, and I'd suggest looking elsewhere.

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  • I agree with your comments, I also started doing the automation. As you said while developing the automated it is very interesting. Apr 26, 2019 at 3:55

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