I would like to sign up my whole QA department up for some SQA training in testing. Not sure of any good places/organizations to look at for providing the training though. Any one do any training and have good experiences from it?
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If you are looking for training ideas, you might check sqa.stackexchange.com/search?q=training– user246Commented Nov 28, 2012 at 16:46
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I did look at these and none of them help. I'm not looking for a certification and I would like to stay away from online courses where you just talk back and forth on a "forum". Looking for more classroom/video/seminar training.– Jarvis FrostCommented Nov 28, 2012 at 16:55
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2What sort of skills do you think they need ? General testing, soft skills, communication, automation ?– Phil KirkhamCommented Nov 28, 2012 at 16:55
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1Are you looking for training all over the world or something closer? Where are you from? Are you looking for training or groups of interest? For instance, in my city there's a number of groups that meet every two weeks, discussing developer/testing problems and solutions or organizing practice meetings, where you learn by practicing development/testing with others: CodeKata, CodeRetreat, etc. On some conferences there are also meetings like TestKata where you may learn testing through practicing it with others.– dzieciouCommented Nov 28, 2012 at 17:36
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Just looking for general best practice training. Something for an inexperienced team. Looking for something like onsite or hopefully local at least. Groups would be ok like you mentioned, dzieciou, but we would like something more formally structured.– Jarvis FrostCommented Nov 28, 2012 at 19:13
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2 Answers
I'm currently enrolled in the BBST Foundations class through the Association of Software Testing. It's a great course on the basics of software testing - oracles, heuristics, impossiblity of complete testing, etc. It's an online class that uses the free materials from Cem Kaner's research published here. It is an online class but it uses a lot of group work and is quite intense but I'd definitely recommend it.
A few people from your company could complete the class and then try to train the others in your organization. Even better would be to send a couple people through the class, then have them take the Instructor class so they could better train anyone in your organization.
If you are looking for classroom training I'd check out testing conferences like StarEast, StarWest which are put on by Software Quality Engineering (they also put on other conferences). I went to StarWest in 2011, took the Rapid Software Testing course with Michael Bolton and that kickstarted my learning experience. I've since followed it up with the Rapid Testing Intensive onsite and will be taking the online version in January.
You've got a lot of options, my suggestion would be to look around, try some of the training yourself or with one of your testers and then get more people involved. You can create resources within your organization for helping each other.
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Classroom training at testing conferences looks really interesting, but StarEast and StarWest seems to be only US events. Are there similar events in Europe?– dzieciouCommented Dec 2, 2012 at 13:55
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There are similar events. I haven't done much research into events in Europe but I remember seeing this: ministryoftesting.com/training-events Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 2:51
Michael Bolton and James Bach offer on-site training. I've taken Michael's 1-day Critical Thinking for Software Testers course and found it immensely helpful, and I have 10 years' experience in the software testing field.
Michael Bolton and James Bach do not offer a certificate at the end of the course. They believe that a piece of paper that says you know something isn't nearly as valuable as a demonstration to your boss and peers that you know what you are doing. If you'd like a great description of why certification hinders the industry and your career, search for "James Bach testing certification". He writes about it numerous times on his blog.
Their courses are not cheap, but the benefit your team will gain will be well worth it. I highly recommend them, and they travel all over the world to teach. You can find a description of the Rapid Software Testing course on Michael's website, here:
http://www.developsense.com/courses/RapidSoftwareTesting.pdf
or on James' website, here:
