The Road From Senior Tester to Mature Tester

Don’t know about you, but when I was at the beginning of my career (as software tester), every time I got the question from recruiters “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”, I could hardly find a proper answer to that. Because it’s hard to predict. You would like to give an answer as realistic as you can, but the lack of experience doesn’t help you much. And what would an answer like the following would sound like?

“I want to be a senior tester!”

As my career progressed, I learned that to be a senior tester you have to develop your soft and technical skills, but a bit much more than just marking some check boxes in a company’s internal personal development plan. On the other side, being a senior tester doesn’t mean that you know them all, on the contrary, you know that you are not perfect and you are OK with that.

The discussion about seniority in engineering and more precise, in software testing can be very vast and there are plenty of lists all over the Internet summarising all the things that a senior tester should have on his or her job description. That’s why I’m not going to reinvent the wheel.

On one thing I would like to sit more and discuss — it is called maturity.

What is a mature software tester?

I think I found some key aspects — out of many — in defining the road of a senior tester to a mature one.

1. Taking credits for a good idea is not the ultimate goal.

2. Communication — with developers, with other testers, with stakeholders, with designers, with business analysts, with project managers. When this gets improved, you know you’re on the good way. Be proactive and don’t be afraid to raise concerns and risks.

3. Realising how much you don’t know — and have the power to accept it and the self drive to improve yourself.

4. Accept and assume the responsibility given — and not throwing someone else under the bus when things are not going as planned or as desired.

5. Helping yourself not expecting the others to do it — as I was writing in some of my previous posts, you have the responsibility of your professional growth.

6. Share the knowledge, collaborate and lift the skills of those around you — be open to pair testing, for example, and help others with suggestions. This can also involve a lot of patience and didactic skills from you.

7. Empathy — in this domain, empathy is very useful. As testers, we have to understand the users of the application we are testing and emphasise with their needs.

8. Giving feedback. Constructive feedback — we are all tempted sometimes to blame some buggy code written, or some incomplete user acceptance criteria, but the art behind this is to learn to point these kind of things in a constructive manner.

9. Accept that not everything is bubbles and butterflies — and instead of complaining how messy your job is, focus more on finding solutions to make it work.

10. Show flexibility and openness — after many years spent working as testers we tend to have our own routines. And when someone else comes and gets ourselves out of our comfort zone, proposing some other big new ideas, we tend to stay focused only on the things we know best and refuse other input. There should be no “mine vs. your opinion”.

11. Have the bigger picture — usually, a tester’s role is somehow in the middle of the product-development axis and having insight in both domains can help a lot in understanding how testing should be conducted.

12. There is no “I” in “Team” — have the capacity to help yourself and also help the others to act as a team, not as pure individuals.

Take away!

I don’t have the perfect recipe to follow to become a mature tester. But what I do think is that maturity comes with age and experience.

One last thing…

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