Confused software Tester

Author: Peng Xiaoyi (from: Internet weekly) http://www.csai.cn
As a software tester at Microsoft, a housewife tells the story of science and art in software development. The woman was in her forties and graduated from high school. She learned from her daughter at a very basic computer level. How incredible it is to have a family of women who have never been in college as testers! However, she has a unique mind, many strange ideas, and can quickly find some problems. Microsoft eventually decided to hire her, and she became a good tester.

In the it circle, the tester may be a special group. Among them, there are not many computer majors, and there are many people who have graduated from other majors, such as architecture, Chinese, and marketing majors. On the other hand, compared with the technical staff who do research and development, project management, software implementation, and even pre-sales and after-sales technical support, the testing work is always technically low, therefore, there is always a gap between the tester's salary level and other R & D personnel with the same qualifications, even foreign software companies that are focusing on testing. The test is to repeat some operations every day to find bugs (errors ). Indeed, even those who love this profession very much admit that it is boring.

H has been a professional test engineer for more than a year and is still conducting a relatively low-level test. Sometimes the Code required for testing is written, but the entire project test case has not yet been designed. At present, H is testing a software of Microsoft, and the workflow is very rigorous and clear, which naturally means boring repetition. The boring work is not overwhelmed by H's passion. discovering a bug brings a great sense of accomplishment, especially when it comes to the idea that millions of people will use the software without the bug every day to achieve their goal accurately.

The future is very clear in H's mind and has some taste of "on demand" career selection. There have been media reports about the recent demand for Software Testing engineers in the workplace, despite the weak overall demand in the IT industry. In Beijing and Shanghai, the demand for testers accounted for nearly 1/3 of total recruitment. H believes that it is more advantageous to grow from a tester to a software project manager. For example, Microsoft's development method was originally "test-driven". During the test, it found that there were still small pieces of paint not painted in the corner of the wall. Then, the development should be based on this idea. The testing experience makes people better consider problems from the user's perspective and gain a deeper understanding of possible problems in the program development process. This is a necessary condition for a good project manager. Although it may be possible to repeatedly test and write test documents for a small control all day, such repetition is considered an important accumulation by H. H. I like the sentence in Xu Xiaoping's new book "riding a donkey and looking for a horse": "repeating the hamburger is McDonald's; repeating the coffee is Starbucks; repeating the TOEFL teaching is Yu Minhong; repeating the work well, it is alive Lei Feng."

However, optimism is not universal. L is tired of working in another software company. This is a subsidiary of a well-known software company in China. There are only two testers in the company. Not long ago, the company just split the test into a separate department. Although a test management process was established, there was no code test or test tool. Test cases are not fully standardized, and many tests are performed randomly. Such a testing department is more like an auxiliary and service department, and the tester's income is lower than that of developers. In such a work environment, I think it is boring to live, and the most painful thing is that I cannot exercise or make progress.

L The attitude of the company to the test is representative in China. The independence of the test department is just the latest. More companies are still at the testing stage. But if developers can find bugs themselves, who else will make such errors during development? In developed countries in the software industry, software testing engineers are no inferior to programmers. Some companies have even performed program development on testers. The emphasis on testing is more reflected in the staffing. Taking the three most important personnel in the Microsoft Windows 2000 product team as an example, there are about 250 project managers and about 1700 developers, the number of testers is about 3200.

Most Testers in the domestic software industry are as confused as l. Selecting to leave does not solve the problem. The maturity of the entire test process will mean an improvement in the tester's position.