Can anyone suggest me some good tools to learn in free time? [closed]

Question

I have been into testing since like three years now. Had been into Manual app testing, Game testing and Embedded testing as well. I have already been using POSTMAN, JMeter, Blazemetr, LoadRunner, Selenium, Appium and QC for testing in my workplace.

Nowadays, as our company hired several new QAs, the time spent in our project individually decreased, and now having much free time with no project in hand.

So, I was thinking to learn a new good tool which can help me in future, or currently. I know Python language and so can script in any tool with that.

Any suggestions are most welcome. Thanks!

Answer 1

Naming specific tools will not age very well as an aswer, also learning tools you might not use could be waste.

I would study concepts and fundamentals, afterwards maybe find a popular tool to practise it. To find concepts to study you could look at topics presented at recent conferences. For example Agile Testing Days or Test Bash.

Some concepts that I might study as a Software Engineer in Test:

• Delivery Pipelines (CI/CD): Bootstrapping test environments, deploying application, running tests against it, static code analysis and other automated quality checks
• Mutation testing: Finding area's that lack good test automation coverage
• Test-first Development: BDD and TDD
• Testing AI: How do AI's work, AI ethics and how can we test them so we increase trustworthiness.
• Testing in Production: A/B testing and observebility of applications.
• Web development: Understanding basic HTML, CSS and JS will greatly help you test web-application.

Answer 2

A full stack QA engineer should be skilled in testing Web apps, APIs, performance, Databases, and Mobile.

The common skills that are in-demand are:

Selenium(Java or C#): For web app

API Testing: Postman

Performance: Jmeter

DBtesting : DBUnit , Database Benchmark

Mobile: Testcomplete, Appium

These are not listed out from blue, but from the job descriptions that are available in LinkedIn for 3+ year experienced QA roles, especially in the Europe and US regions.

Security testing is not yet considered in the full stack QA role, but it won't be long for adapting that too.

Other key skills or knowledge that are in demand as part of QA are:

Knowledge on CI/CD: Jenkins, Azure DevOps, AWS and Octopus

Source code management: Git

Architectural style: Microservices

Virtualization: Containers (Docker) and Kubernetes,

Test Approaches: TDD, KDD (RobotFramework) and BDD (cucumber or specflow)

Test Methodologies: Agile (Scrum and Kanban) and DevOps, DevSecOps also is emerging

Domain specific knowledge

For Datacenter and industrial network Jobs:

1. Networking concepts , python

Does it over-load the person and affect the quality?

I am not sure about it, because it is a personal choice, some engineers like to specialize and others like to expand their knowledge on many domains and don't prefer sticking to one tool.

Cons?

Tools change, and only hiring people who are skilled in the specific tools might result in missing out talented resources. Best practice would be to interview for competency (behavioral based interview) and train them as per organizational needs.

Answer 3

Apart from what has been already said in other answers here, I wouldn't underestimate soft skills. They are more important than for, say, Developers, but in the end we all need to talk to each other and work together. From experience, it's much easier to work with Developers who are sociable and easy to talk to, many bugs were prevented just because of our conversations. I suppose the same goes for Testers.

The same could be said about human languages, not everybody is a native English speaker, and when I look at average English skills in my country, they are pretty much non-existent. Without a good command of at least English (sometimes German as well), you won't be hired at some places (they already might have an international environment).