Turnover in Testing

The Turnover in testing is a hard topic to talk about, but depending of the nature and the economic situation of the company, country and in some cases of the tester.

It is quite interesting to define what is the case and perfect work enviroment where the testers can say "Im not in sell and Im comfortable here". But the real thing is that some dollars can move mountains and offer more value to the testers and more if the offer has more challenges and learnings for the people.

Some companies are now worry in this issue, because they invest a lot of time, money and blod to let the testers understand the business flow, the technical issues, and the processes, and when finally this is done, the tester finds a better job position outside the company and everything is a waste of time, and falls apart.

The best way to retain the key testers at your company is following the next bullets:

• Offer them a Testing Carreer inside your company.
• Offer Formal Training, Certifications can last 5 years.
• Move testers to different responsabilities without put in risk the projects.
• Let them feel like executives.

The Profile of a Tester

The Tester commonly is called in Mexico "The people who doesnt know programming languages" in other words the guys that do not like develop software because they do not know how to do it.

But the truth of it, is that there are lots of testers that generate good code of programming and their skills are profitable. I could say that in QA we have good automated testers that generate code with out the use and help of any record play back.
Nowdays is quite complicated to find a good tester in the market doing nothing, every tester is busy and have a good project or Job. That pursued me to construct my own "QA incubator", in order to generate skilled people and become them Tester, but I would say "Sofware Test Professional" (STP).

The basis to become a good STP are:

• o Analysis skills, able to understand any kind of business industry
• o Programming skills, able to automate test cases.
• o Non-functional testing skills, able to exercise the system beyond to its borders.
• o Database skills, able to verify the transactions in the backend.
• o Good communication skills, able to connect the tongue with the brain.
• o Able to mentor everybody.

Test Case Design Techniques

Nowdays, people work in a hurry, and neverminds if the test case design is generated with care an optimal way of constructing it, depending of how much professional you are is the time that you invest before constructing test cases. But the problem is when the product goes a live !, and the problems came up and then its time to think about and question yourself "what did I do wrong ?".

We need to make sure we are covering all the possible ways that our users are suppose to use the system or product, and this can be carried out by "Software Test Design Techniques". Depending of what kind of scenario we are facing is the challenge to decide what technique is the best to choose for generating the proper test cases.

I recommend to focus on techniques for:

• White Box
  
• Black Box


• Gray Box

Exist several tehniques for every specific purpose of each box, you can mix them, and find a new solution, but the success will depend on the right selection of the techniques for the right purpose.

QAST Approach

QAST ® is a QA Software Testing Methodology used to execute New/Improvementes/Maintenance/Agile Software Testing projects developed and created by Fernando Carrillo in 2002. This methodology was implemented in different companies in Mexico and now is getting place in US Market and Europe market.

QAST is composed by 7 phases at least, and depending of the type of project are less or more stages, this approach is tied to QASPIRAL ®, a Software Testing tool as well created by Fernando Carrillo. This tool helps you to adminstrate and manage testing projects on real time and therefore reduces the lead time, and keep under control the SLAs (Service Level Agreements).

Agile Testing- Context-Driven Approach

Recently, I bought the book "Lesson Learned in Software Testing" (One of the most important QA books I have read), and I found an interesting topic at almost the end of the book, "The Context-Driven Approach to Software Testing". It takes some information about the Seven Principles of the Context-Driven, and some illustrations and examples of them. Really it is quite interesting how authors of this book takes you another dimension of thoughts about QA Software Testing. if you have any time I advocate to read this book. This book has 293 lessons partitioned into 11 chapters.