“Communication (noun): the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs.”
On my professional path as a software tester, I started to catch myself thinking how vital are communication skills in this job. That it is exactly what leads us to successfully completed projects.
Junior tester
This step is the simplest. I just cooperate with QA team and get tasks from PM. I am trying to catch all possible bugs and write proper bug reports. My thoughts are far away from QA process and how I can improve them indeed. There is only me, developers and my own tickets.
Pros:
- Your professional career is a blank page, so you are brave and have tremendous motivation at the start.
- You remember software testing theory so far and your mentor’s parting words.
Cons:
- You are not experienced enough to tell what is a bug and what is not.
- You believe that PM and developer know more than you.
- You are slightly concerned about your efficiency and effectiveness.
What’s worth of special attention?
Firstly, take it easy… You are doing well! You have already become a tester so you should start to think like a tester. “Am I working fast? Or too slow?” – let it go. You have a scope of tasks, obviously deadlines too. Therefore, think and take action to this end.
Middle tester
My communication with developers has definitely increased, I start to give them more info about the product and try to make their life easier. And developers start to ask me questions how it should work because they exactly know that I will help them. I become a layer between stakeholders’ desires and developers’ requirements, someone who is in charge of successful implantation of those desires.
A penny for your thoughts! Or what Middle tester is thinking about?
What may lie ahead? What have I already done/known? What have I already reached? What have I already… stop! Stop thinking in Present Perfect tense! You should look forward or carry out an analysis of TMG:
- Take stock of your acquired knowledge.
- Make a plan of your further development path.
- Get right on immediately execution of your plan.
Please keep in mind that only you know what would be better for you.
Senior tester
Now I have meetings one-to-one with PM about improving QA process and how best it could be shown for stakeholders. I help PM to improve interaction between stakeholders – software development tools (e.g. JIRA) – developers. I become BA for developers on my projects. Entire universe can not stop your thirst for knowledge. You have a lot of QA blogs in a bookmarks. You are permanently in a searching of new tools and trends in Quality Assurance. Maybe, you have already written own book. But for all that, you know for sure that you will get a lot of new challenges and achievements!
In conclusion, the main point is that you should try to increase your value in your team/project. You will be surprised how much you could do just using your communication skills.
This guest blog post was written by Oleksii Ihnatiuk.