Stretch now like never before -The must-have skills for next-generation testers

98 Testing Experience – 21/2013

Testing as a business is no longer the same in the rapidly changing market. It has transformed into a job with complementary niche skills where there was previously only a generic and easily available resource pool. Having said this, testing as a profession demands many more skill-sets than a decade ago. Hence, the changing business climate and ever increasing demand require this business to have sophisticated technical competencies accompanied by improved behavioral skills in order to meet the ever increasing expectations of the market.

In the agile environment, testers are expected to have a working know-ledge of various technologies and should possess good programming knowledge in order to understand the way software is built, how it works, and to predict the errors that could be caused by the limitations of the technology or by human error. In addition to that, testers are expected to have previous experience in the technologies which they are about to test and gone are the days where testers had enough time to write a test plan, test the design, and understand the product functions. And testers are expected to be ‘on their toes’ like never before in order to stay competent in the agile business.

In an agile environment, there is an increasing responsibility on the software testers to deliver a bug-free quality product within the stipu-lated time. This is because, in this environment, it is possible that there is either less or no unit testing on some projects, which results in the filtering out of few technical defects. This threat of not doing sufficient unit testing also requires increased attention from the agile testers in terms of the quality of the software tested.

The following are the 10 vital factors which I foresee as influential for 2013 and going forward.

1. Know your visionThink from the customer’s perspective on the overall testing vision and objective. In the agile environment, it is very important to under-stand the customer’s objective for the quality requirement and their expectation from the testing department. Be proactive in identifying this vision and clearly communicate these to the testers, because they should be equipped to implement these during the engagement. This could be very challenging at times, because the customer’s vision is also likely to undergo certain changes due to the dynamic market/time pressure. However, understanding every element of the requirement in the user stories, having an informal chat on the floor with business analysts and product sponsors, and raising queries to understand the expectation at each and every stage of the product would help to build a robust test design.

2. Play localLearn to speak with customers in their own language and break down the language and cultural barriers. We all agree that testing is one of

the jobs which is outsourced to developing countries. Having technical expertise without language skills is still not enough. If you want to un-derstand the customer better, bridge the gap, and serve them as well as possible, then you need to speak the customer’s language. Developing language skills which a customer speaks would be a game changer for the testing industry in the future. This would help in many ways, right from finding defects as early as when user stories are created through to when the acceptance test is performed. This would reduce a lot of effort during and before the implementation of the software in the production environment.

3. Learn to play with a robotIncorporating test automation is inevitable today if you want to stay in the competition. If you are a tester with only manual testing experi-ence, then this is the time to put your energy into learning automation concepts and start learning to work with at least one automation tool. Also, identifying all possible areas in a project which can be subjected to automated testing would help deliver a faster time to market, serve customers better, and enhance the overall competencies as well. Having an automation regression set would help to implement the risk-based testing more effectively and faster. Do not be surprised if you do not hear the words ‘manual testing’ in the testing arena a decade from now

4. Chase the developerEquip yourself with programming skills and become familiar with the technology and the way it works. Understand the programming lan-guage faster with the developer’s help and this is required for your test assignment. Also try to learn all the limitations of the languages. This will be one of the vital requirements for testers in coming years. Testers should have programming skills and should be able to read and interpret

By Thiruvenkateswaran Ramachandran

Stretch now like never beforeThe must-have skills for next-generation testers

Testing Experience – 21/2013 99

what is happening in the code. So you can very well conclude that you will never again hear the term ‘Black box testing’.

5. Be flexible like never beforeTraditional approaches developed by the previous generation of testers aligned them more to processes, procedures, and methodologies which are helpful to healthier project execution. However, this strict and rigid process has been broken in many ways by Agile testing processes and many testing professionals are adapting to be flexible in their working ways. However, this is just a start. The industry is evolving around diverse changes, such as adapting to working in different environments and with emerging technologies, being less process and more people driven, and having a productive results-oriented structure. These changes are crucial because the current environment offers no readily available off-the-shelf-solutions for varied testing engagements.

6. Be innovativeCultivate Innovation along with your industry best practices. Both the economy and technology are creating new challenges for IT delivery. There is a desperate need to satisfy customers to the maximum by both parties looking after the costs. Of course, this can be kept within achievable limits by constantly investing on small to large innovation. Many successful IT giants today follow the ‘reinvesting in innovation’ strategy to keep their businesses up and running. Especially in IT inno-vation, testing is the one vital area you want to focus on. This could be one of the key deciding factors in winning your bid.

7. Importance of custom test solutionsKnowing each agile project has its own factors that contribute to success. So don’t spend your time in creating a generic process model or related knowledge management tools. Instead, share your lessons learned and best practices across projects through informal meetings and let the project teams find the opportunity to implement them and make it be-neficial. The importance of creating custom-built test solutions is best suited to individual projects in order to reap the greatest benefits from it. Although we vow to eliminate the effort involved in documentation, it is wise to write down the individual project process in a repository to avoid resource dependency.

8. Learn to utilize social mediaLearn to use social media/mobile-led delivery updates. This would help us to stay connected with the customer and to ensure availability of services at all times. If you have an internal organizational forum or medium, then utilize it to the maximum to leverage the power of instant know-ledge sharing and provide updates to your project management team/customers which can be easily verified and relied on. It is also essential to state your entire test reporting in terms of product size rather than giving test case counts or percentages of pass/fail.

9. Test consultancy skillsTransform from testing services to test consulting (advice more on cost savings than on technical testing approaches). Leverage your company resources and learn to share the lessons learned and best practices from time to time with your customer and act in an advisory role to help solve problems and save costs/time wherever possible. Also take risks

by implementing new test models/tools that could save time and costs for customers. These test consulting methods will help build long-term customer relationships, especially in a multi-vendor environment, and will help build trust.

10. Be a game changerFinding defects and raising a flag are not the only the expectations of today’s testers. Testers are expected to go beyond testing and help custo-mers achieve their goals on time. Testers are expected to be a connecting element between most of the IT stakeholders, where their checking skills with different product owners coupled with their aptitude in identifying critical defects clearly stand them in good stead. And testers are also ex-pected to set targets for the development team on day-to-day activities during the daily standup meetings. These have the objective of enabling the team to understand and urging the co-team members to focus on priority tasks to avoid any delays in the SDLC later.

ConclusionThough many more skills are required in today’s world, I believe the aforementioned ideas are the must-haves for testers. While the above ideas remain a starting point, a constant focus on improving the tester’s skills in synchronizing with the industry’s demands and the advances in technology is vital. With no further reservations, I would like to reiterate that test-driven IT development is inevitable in the coming days. ◼

Thiruvenkateswaran Ramachandran is a creative soft-ware testing professional who has strong passion for and belief in software testing and test innovation. He is certified and well experienced in the implementation of international testing standards (such as TMap Next, ISTQB, CSTE, etc.). His expertise is spread across SAP test consulting, building SAP test architectures, test automation, test delivery management, technical test

advisory, and setting up ‘test centers of excellence’ for large scale testing engagements.Thiru has been associated with Cognizant since 2008. As a SAP Test Archi-tect, he has executed many banking financial projects in a multi-vendor environment by leading a multi-cultural test team including Cognizant and SAP AG associates for one of the largest SAP IS banking implementations in Europe. Apart from delivery management, his test consulting experiences across the USA, South America and the Netherlands helped the new business development and process improvement initiatives for the Cognizant testing practice significantly. He is an active member of the international testing community and has participated in various testing conferences in India and across Europe, as well as presenting white papers within Cognizant and TCS.Before joining Cognizant, Thiru spent 4 years at Tata Consultancy services where he specialized in software test engineering and executing testing projects across the telecoms, insurance, and investment banking sectors. His expertise is in very niche areas such as mobile testing, IVR testing, SAP testing, regulatory testing, and automation testing. He has delivered many projects in TMap, Pro ASAP, Agile, TDD, and traditional methodologies both from offshore and on the client’s site.

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