Skills required for a test engineer

Today, I like to talk about the skills need for a test engineer.

1. Inference


This is the most important skill you need for being a test engineer. This make software testing more like Art than Science. It requires creativity, intuition, experience, analytical reasoning and extra. What can you infer from requirements or spec? I would say that spec is explicit requirements for the project. However there are always implicit requirements for the given project. For a simple example, "how would you test a soda pop vending machine?" Beside putting money and getting the right soda pop, there are a lot of things you need to consider. Like, how to check the temperature of the soda pop, how to make sure to notify office when power is out on vending machine, how to notify office when soda pop is out, how to make vending machine energy saving, on and on and on.


2. Prioritization

This the second most important skill you need. After you come up with all the possible test cases for the given project, you should be able to put each test case into priority bucket. Risk analysis would be a good tool for you. Based on the risk (what and how big is the impact of this test case failing), you can categorize all the test cases in to priority bucket. As we all know, we have limited time and budget, we need to make conscious decision not to test based on the risk.


3. Troubleshooting

This is another core skill for test engineer. Test engineer should be very good at finding root cause of the problem. Can you eliminate the noise related to the problem? Can you find out the pattern from certain condition? Time is clicking. When you have production issue, how good your troubleshooting skill is directly affecting company's loss

4. Simple and robust coding skill

Now days, software is very complex and large scale. We need to use program to test program. There are a lot of testing tools that helps testing. But fundamentally, there is no other test team that test your testing application. You need to beware of the fact when you write automation code. Besides unit testing, you need to be able to write simple and robust code. Less if statements in your code, less switch statements, avoiding nested if statements. These are all helping you not to make automation bugs.

5. Big picture in mind

If you are a test engineer, you should have better understanding of the system than developer. Developers are normally focused on what they are developing. You need to have end to end mind, system overall operation. Help developer understand how the feature they're developing fits with existing application.


6. Multi-tasking or rapid switching one task to another

Multi-tasking/switching one task to another is another skill you need. People notify testers for so many different problems they're having. Lab environment, live production issue, project testing,and etc. You normally handle several projects at a time and you should be ready for handling production issue, support issue and etc. This can be very frustrating if you are not used to it.