Software Testing is a process of finding out whether the application meets its specified business requirements or not. It is a process to find out bugs in the software. It aims at providing quality products without any bugs or defects. For some, the QA profession is a good profession to pursue while some don’t like taking Software Testing as a career. Many professionals show despair in testing for various reasons.
To become a software tester it demands a lot of skills such as strong technical skills, good communication both written and verbal, strongly analytical, and logical skills. To become a software tester, the person should wear a good attitude all the time; he/she should be passionate about taking software testing as a profession.
Reasons why people don’t like software testing:
1. Managing testing process: Test Manager has to do lots of work to do testing of the application. Understanding the application, change requests, new features developed, what is to be tested, what s out of the scope of testing, strict deadlines, how much time is required, allocation of timelines to all the testing team members, reviewing the tasks of the team members poses a big challenge for the test manager. Since testing is the last line of action in the development cycle it is generally given less time than it should be given thus creating lots of challenges and hard times.
2. Providing negative feedback: It is the testers’ job to break the code built by the developer and prove the developer to be wrong, thus giving negative feedback about the built software. Testing demands breaking a newly built code and find out faults in it. The developers would also not like hearing negative about their development skills and the person testing it would also not like delivering negative feedback about the team.
3. Testers are considered below the developers: The developers are always considered one step ahead of testers. The wages of a developer are generally higher than the testers of the same experience level. Thus no person would like to be a part of a low community and hence they don’t like to pursue testing.
4. Strict Time Deadlines and Pressure: All the software applications are built under strict time deadlines and time pressures. While the development and other stuff are completed at a fast pace, the testing process takes time. Many organizations believe that the testing is a slow process and it causes stagnancy in the project. Organizations say that due to the slow testing process they are not able to meet its set milestones. Thus no person wants to be a team that doesn’t let the project meet its milestone.
5. Conflicts at work: The testers and the rest of the project team are always at conflict. The entire team wants to achieve the target of delivering the project successfully while the role of a tester is to find out the points where the project fails. The tester would stop the project wherever he finds a failure or a defect. Thus there arises a conflict between the entire team gaols and his goals.
6. More Responsibility: It is not the developer’s task but the tester’s task to find out if the code is working. The tester has to check the correctness of the code if it giving outright results. It is the tester’s responsibility to make sure that it is doing the checking correctly.
7. Testers are always questioned: Any project has 4 different flags to categorize the tasks, that is Open, In Development, Developed, Tested. The status of the tasks in one out of these 4 tasks. The project team always questions the testers to find out what they are working on because nowhere there is any mention of the work that testers are working on. The testers work on the tasks which are developed by the development team. Suppose the development team has completed 20 tasks and marked those tasks as Developed. The testing team would start testing those developed tasks but it will not mention anywhere which tasks are being tested which always remain in question.
8. The skillset of different testing teams in not known: In any organization, there are different testing teams working on different products. All these products are linked in some way or the other. Different projects would demand different subject expertise. If the skill set of all the testers is known it can be very productive as different teams can help other teams if there is an issue of their expertise.
9. Testers lose patience: The testing teams are called to change their priorities, work on changing and updating test environments. It causes loss of concentration, and redo of work. It requires a lot of patience to execute tests on changing environments and find defects. The unsteady environments cause defects that may or may not be related to the tests which are worked upon.
10. Boredom among testers: Repetitive testing, running regression packs again and again. Executing the same test cases can lead to boredom among the software testers. They start losing interest in testing activities.
11. Pay Scale is Low: The testing as a profession for a medium experienced person is not as high as a programmer of same level experience. So people don’t prefer pursuing a career that does not fulfill the salary needs.
Reasons why many people like software testing:
Further to this discussion, let us now see why software testing should like his/her profession. There are many reasons why a tester would prefer taking this as a career. The below points are equally competitive to the above points of not liking testing.
1. Software Testing is improving the quality of a product: The motive of software testing is to improve the quality of the software developed. Finding maximum bugs is not the ultimate reason for performing software testing but continuously improving its quality is the motive. Thus a tester is contributing towards the improvement of the product of the organization.
2. Software tester helps in finding wrongs in other person work: The people who bear the attitude of finding mistakes of other people and keep on pointing them would excel in this profession. This point is critically dependent on one’s attitude. It should be kept in mind that finding wrongs in other work should not be intentionally or due to personal problems. Professionalism should always be maintained.
3. Software Testing is a satisfactory job: Being a software tester you are trying to improve the quality of the product thereby contributing to the betterment of the organization. Thus it would lead to satisfaction among the software tester as they would be a part of the progress of the project and also the organization.
4. Software Testing helps in understanding the client: A good software tester is one who is able to fulfill the needs of the customer. She/he should be able to understand exactly what the customers want to achieve from the application. A software tester would be able to put himself in place of the customer and look at the product from a customer point of view. In a software testing profession, it is how meaningful, useful test cases are testers making. Updating the test cases according to the changing requirements, maintaining proper documentation, traceability matrix.
5. Software Testing follows a process: The software testing is in itself a process starting from the analysis of requirements, analysis of design documents, making the test plan, and test strategy. Preparation of test cases, execution of the test cases, regression, and re-testing, logging defects is a complete process of software testing. Following testing as a process help in making it more productive.
6. Software Testing is full of challenges: Software Testing demands understanding products from different points of view. Understanding the product as per client expectations and testing the application according to the expectations of the client. It is a big challenge to test the product from different aspects, different views points.
7. Complex nature of software testing: Software Testing is a complex profession. Understanding the application from numerous ways like User Interface, functionality, performance, and compatibility is a huge mess. In addition to this new handheld devices are now coming to picture. Mobile Testing, I Pad Testing, different OS Testing altogether make software testing more complex. Checking responsiveness and usability on different devices poses a big challenge for software testing.
Conclusion
The above simple question “Why many people don’t like software testing?” is an eye-opener for people who pursue and also for people who do not pursue software testing as a career. Reading the above points can help the person to understand the software testing from a different point of view better. It also helps the professional who wants to pursue Software testing as a career that would be waiting for him in the near future as he progresses in this career.
If you are already in the QA profession whether automation or manual, make yourself aware that you are one of the most important parts of the company. With your role, the company is getting better and improving day by day.
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