How To Become A Software Tester – Top 9 Skills Required

How to become a software tester?

If you are considering software testing as a career path, then this article will help you in beginning your first steps in this career and gaining the necessary skills to land your first job as a Software QA Engineer. In this article, we will provide you with 10 technical skills, and for each one, we will provide the level of importance of this skill for beginners [Must have – Should have – Could have] and the level of complexity or difficulty of this skill [Easy – Normal – Hard].

Top 9 technical skills required:

1) Requirement Analysis & Test Scenario Writing [Must Have – Easy]

Writing test scenarios is a very vital skill for you as a software tester. Let’s see an example: If you are testing a mobile application that requires registration using a phone number, in this case, we should test this requirement using multiple test scenarios like:

• Log in using a valid phone number
• Log in using an invalid format phone number
• Log in while using a wrong OTP

And so on.

2) Test Case writing [Must have – Easy]

Writing test cases is very similar to writing test scenarios but the main difference is that in the test case writing, we provide more information about the scenario that we are testing. For example, for this scenario “Login using a valid phone number”, we can write a test case that looks like this – Title: Verify login using a valid phone number. Test steps:

1. Open the application
2. Click on login to go to the login page
3. Enter a valid phone number
4. Enter the OTP that is provided to your phone number

Expected result: Login is successful and the user is redirected to the home page

3) Defect reporting [Must have – Easy]

When you execute your test scenarios or your test cases, you will find defects in the software which will require documenting them so that the developer is able to solve them. The defect report is similar to the test case, but it provides information about what actually happened when we tested the software. A defect report for the login page might look like this:Title: Login using a valid OTP doesn’t allow the user to log in to the system. Steps to reproduce:

1. Open the Application
2. Click on Login to go to the Login page
3. Enter a valid phone number “+2012345692”
4. Click on Login
5. Enter the OTP that is provided to your phone number

Expected result: Login is successful and the user is redirected to the home page. Actual result: The OTP is not accepted and an error message is shown to the user. Environment: iPhone 12 with iOS 14.2. You should also provide a screenshot with the defect that identifies the defective item.

4) Agile Testing basics [Should have – Easy]

Some software development teams apply agile methodologies like scrum to manage their teams. In this case, requirements are written in the form of user stories and the project is divided into small iterations that are called sprints. If you are a tester who is working in an agile team, you should understand the fundamentals of Agile and you should also be able to use an Agile tool like “Jira”.

5) API Testing [Should have – Normal]

Any mobile or web application must include some sort of API testing using an API Testing tool like the postman. But in some projects, API testing is the responsibility of the developer, in some other projects, it is mainly the responsibility of the software tester. In this case, you must have good knowledge about APIs and how to test them using an API Testing tool like Postman.

6) SQL Basics [Should have – Normal]

If you are dealing with a database, you should be able to understand the basic SQL queries in order to be able to test the database and ensure that data is entered correctly inside it.

7) Performance Testing [Should have – Normal]

Imagine that you have an application that will be used by 1000 concurrent users, the last thing that you want to happen is that the application has poor performance when those users access the system simultaneously. This is why you should mimic those 1000 users using a performance testing tool, the most popular performance testing tool is JMeter.

8) Test Automation [Could have – Hard]

Test automation is a very important skill for software testers. It is considered a challenging skill because it will require learning a programming language and using it to build test automation scripts. Not all junior testers are able to write test automation scripts, this is why we included this skill in the [Could have] section, but if you are certain about choosing software testing as a career, this will make this skill a must for you. There are many test automation tools and frameworks that are available in the market, but you can begin your test automation journey using Selenium web driver with java. A very good source of learning test automation is Test Automation University.

9) Security Testing Awareness [Could have – Hard]

Security testing is not a must-to-have skill for software testers because security testing is mainly the responsibility of security experts. But if you as a software tester have some awareness about security vulnerabilities and how to find them, this will increase your chances of finding a job as a software tester. One of the best ways to gain good security awareness is to learn the OWASP top 10 web application security risks.

In the following articles we will talk about those skills in more depth, so stay tuned for our next article.