What is it to be a Tester ?

Hi Folks,
This is my first technical blog and the first post on my blog. Now before I go further I would like to give an Introduction about myself. I am Sainarayan, working as Test Engineer at Wipro Technologies in  Gurgaon. I am an alumni from Indian Institute of Information Technology-Allahabad. I have around 7 months of  work experience and like many others, I am new to testing.  Like many even I was also skeptical when I became a tester, but now I really enjoy this domain and I am pretty passionate about it and I would like to share my thoughts, views and expereince in software testing and allied areas particularly with college students in order to remove the myths about this domain and to show them how interesting this career can be.

So with my small introduction, I will now tell you about this field. Software Testing as a  career has a lot of advantages. They are as follows :-

1) It is a highly analytical job. I would say it is even more analytical than a developers job because while testing a module you would have umpteen number of paths to follow with a huge amount of test data. You cant follow all the paths, but you would have to find as many bugs as possible.

2) A Tester does not have to debug the defects. It is the developers job and tester has to keep finding bugs. So in short you dont get stuck with a problem for days and the work goes smooth.


3) A tester can work across various industrial domains. eg:- A tester working on a software project on a banking domain can easily shift to a project on a telecom domain with very little preperation. In short it is a very flexible job across various industies 

4)Tester gets to know the workflow of the entire software system, unlike in case of developers where the developers know only the workflow of the module on which they are working, the in port and out port of that module. 


5) A tester does not need to learn new technologies and programming languages that frequently as compared to that of a developer. Testing does involve scripting  but that is only in the automation testing which I will discuss later . However the tester needs to be acquainted with the quality standards in the industry 

6) A tester gets paid as much as a developer or even more than a developer
 
7) Software Testers have control on the release of a Software. If a tester does not approve of a release of a software, it does not get released into the market. However if a bug is found in the software after its release, " The Tester is responsible " 

8) Testers get to  interact more with clients and explain the softwares to them particularly through Alpha, Beta Testing and User Acceptance Testing. So those who would like to interact with clients can think about it as a career. 

One thing I like about testing is that it converges towards Quality Control, Quality Assurance etc. . Achieveing a quality product is more challenging that to propose a software with a good idea, for a software which has a poor quality can be disastrous and can even destruction to life and property. 



I hope you have got an idea as to what it is to be a tester and how the Software Testing field. More on my next topic. 

Till then Cheers from Sai