Designing Digital Future

Starting a career in Testing

With everything that’s been happening in the past year and a half, I’ve been thinking that I’ve been really lucky about my job. I bet many people don’t know that you can be a professional tester. I’m using the term “professional” because everybody’s a tester in real life: when you eat chocolate: you are testing that it has that sweet taste and they didn’t fool you by selling you dark chocolate and so on…

I think a lot of people have interesting stories to share, but there’s always little time to sit down, listen, talk. So I wanted to take the opportunity to see how some of my colleagues started in this business and hopefully give you some inspiring thoughts or just a break from the day to day life. 

So let’s hear it from them while I take a break.

 

Borja

Final destination: Nice villa in the Swiss Alps?

I was offered a job in testing at a point when I didn’t know much about this field. The company I worked for was very helpful with providing training and making sure that I am taking the right path. I’ve met a lot of interesting people/challenges along the way. After 20 years of testing, I could probably do it for 20 more and then retire in a nice villa somewhere in the Swiss Alps (not bad, eh?)

 

Gianmarco

Achieving the best quality for clients makes me very proud.

As any university graduate, I was looking for a job with a “good” salary. It just so happened that I ended up being hired as a tester. While familiarizing myself with the project, I found a critical issue that prevented the application from being delivered to the client. That sense of proudness is what still drives me today to test.

 

Hendrik

Sometimes different paths lead to the same destination.

My story is rather uncommon. While working for a banking company on the support team, I learned about the testing tools and after some time that team was restructured. I was fascinated by what I learned. So I got a job in testing with another company, only to find out that I will be working on a project for the same banking company that I initially worked for. Life has a funny way of doing things.

 

Markus

Started with Testing and ended up building my own company.

In the early 2000, testing was one of the least evolved parts of the software development lifecycle. It was quite challenging for a software developer to write, run and maintain the tests. Building a testing infrastructure was a huge thing back then when software engineers were not really interested in testing. It became clear very quickly that testing had huge potential and so the idea of building a company emerged (hence: Greenliff).

 

Neha

A career as a Tester offers a lot of opportunities for advancement.

My journey in this business started as a Software Developer (how uncommon, right?). I wanted to have more time for my family so I decided to switch jobs, that’s how I started working in Testing. I like how with time and practice we become better testers and can aspire for better positions.

 

Thanks for the stories guys!

My story is also a bit strange, I got into testing with one company only to find out that they didn’t really need a tester, so I started testing only from the 2nd testing job. This was a weird thing for me to experience, but that was a long time ago. Since then, I learned, made mistakes and learned some more. Now, I still make mistakes but they are outweighed by the results and as long as everybody’s happy..let’s not change anything.

 

As Neha says: “When it comes to the career path of a software tester, the sky's the limit!”

 

I’m interested in learning about your experiences on Facebook/Linkedin/Twitter. Stay safe and keep in touch!

 

Image sources: 

Photo by Aswathy N on Unsplash
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Photo by La-Rel Easter on Unsplash
Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash