What does a Test Engineer or QA person do actually? It's not as popular as software developers or coders. I myself never heard of this job description before deciding what courses to take during my college years. It's only until several months before I saw openings in J*bStreet when doing my job-hunting. Even when I decided to take up the job with the Company M, I'm still not clear about the job. At that time, like most of the graduates, the aim is 'to get some experience first'.
[Yeah, we can talk a lot about the importance of pursuing your dreams, make sure the job fits yourself, dream job, satisfaction, yada yada yada. Yeah right, tell that to employers nowadays. Fresh graduates look for experience, not satisfaction.]
But, as my days went on at the Company M, it's not such a bad decision after all. I got to know a different world, that actually revolves around software development, but not the development itself. Testing has never occurs to my mind as a career. Ask the students nowadays, how many of them actually know what does a tester do? Or actually even heard of it? I myself having hard time explaining to others.
[Come to think of it, I'll tell them, "I find other people's fault for a living...Heheh...]
Software development life cycle, or in its short form, SDLC, simply put, are stages to develop software, first, by designing the software, then you specify requirements about it, then you write it, and at the end, you test it before it got released to the customers.
Those were the days when not that many companies really consider the last stage of the life cycle as important - testing. Developers do the testing themselves, or even worse, no testing at all. No quality check, na da.
It could be because of several reasons actually. The major one is that the lack of fund to get a dedicated resources to test. It's not just the human, it also includes the testing tools, and the times needed. Why, just be satisfied with some tests that developers already run.
It could also be that the testing stages are deemed not to be worthy of it. I got to know about a company, a big one, that don't really do proper quality check on their products, their excuse being that the product market's lifetime is very short. By the time the consumers realized that their products have certain defects, at that time an average consumer may already buy the next version of that product. So, the management calculated the ROI, that it's not worth it to spend capital on testing, rather just wait for the customers to buy the updated version. No wonder the software in their products suck!
After I did my time in Company M, and moved on, I started seeing a bigger picture. Testing is not just applicable to the software or hardware actually. It's actually exist in different working worlds. It could have different names, with different job description, but in the end, they converge to similar concepts. Tester, Validation Engineer, Quality Assurance, Quality Control, it even goes on to Audits, MQA, S*RIM, J*KIM, and so on.
If we really think about it, there are always some sorts of checking going around in our daily life. As you type on your laptop, who qualify it that it will not explode in front of you? As you drive to your work today, who make sure that the car passes certain ratings that it is safe to be use? As you eat at your favorite mamak stall, which department certify that the ingredients are halal (if you're Muslim) or the hygiene level is A or B?
There are always parties that will watch for errors, look for faults, and hunt for bugs.
[Yeah, we can talk a lot about the importance of pursuing your dreams, make sure the job fits yourself, dream job, satisfaction, yada yada yada. Yeah right, tell that to employers nowadays. Fresh graduates look for experience, not satisfaction.]
But, as my days went on at the Company M, it's not such a bad decision after all. I got to know a different world, that actually revolves around software development, but not the development itself. Testing has never occurs to my mind as a career. Ask the students nowadays, how many of them actually know what does a tester do? Or actually even heard of it? I myself having hard time explaining to others.
[Come to think of it, I'll tell them, "I find other people's fault for a living...Heheh...]
Software development life cycle, or in its short form, SDLC, simply put, are stages to develop software, first, by designing the software, then you specify requirements about it, then you write it, and at the end, you test it before it got released to the customers.
Those were the days when not that many companies really consider the last stage of the life cycle as important - testing. Developers do the testing themselves, or even worse, no testing at all. No quality check, na da.
It could be because of several reasons actually. The major one is that the lack of fund to get a dedicated resources to test. It's not just the human, it also includes the testing tools, and the times needed. Why, just be satisfied with some tests that developers already run.
It could also be that the testing stages are deemed not to be worthy of it. I got to know about a company, a big one, that don't really do proper quality check on their products, their excuse being that the product market's lifetime is very short. By the time the consumers realized that their products have certain defects, at that time an average consumer may already buy the next version of that product. So, the management calculated the ROI, that it's not worth it to spend capital on testing, rather just wait for the customers to buy the updated version. No wonder the software in their products suck!
After I did my time in Company M, and moved on, I started seeing a bigger picture. Testing is not just applicable to the software or hardware actually. It's actually exist in different working worlds. It could have different names, with different job description, but in the end, they converge to similar concepts. Tester, Validation Engineer, Quality Assurance, Quality Control, it even goes on to Audits, MQA, S*RIM, J*KIM, and so on.
If we really think about it, there are always some sorts of checking going around in our daily life. As you type on your laptop, who qualify it that it will not explode in front of you? As you drive to your work today, who make sure that the car passes certain ratings that it is safe to be use? As you eat at your favorite mamak stall, which department certify that the ingredients are halal (if you're Muslim) or the hygiene level is A or B?
There are always parties that will watch for errors, look for faults, and hunt for bugs.
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