30 Days of Ecommerce Testing Bonus Day: Skills Gaps

If you’re a keen bean and want to participate in the bonus day, I look forward to seeing your replies :slight_smile:

Research job specs for ecommerce testers, identify 3 skills gaps from the criteria that you’d like to develop and create yourself some learning goals to achieve them.

This challenge reminded me of a Super Testing Bros podcast recently:

What learning goals do you have from this challenge?

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I was on my way to goals based on this workshop as well and even started to map them out but then got distracted by more urgent matters.

Now I looked at the job ads for testers at the big e-commerce companies and to be honest I’m a little disappointed, it’s the same generic requirements of experience with either UI automation or mobile specifically, good analytical and communication skills. All nice but not really e-commerce specific.

So for the challenge-related areas that I would like to focus on:

  1. Security testing. I know bits and pieces about the policy side of security but not really how to test for it apart from a few basics and the bits are pretty random anyway.
  2. (REST) API testing. This was a topic that came up strongly when I listened to the podcast and I worked and work with SOAP APIs but I feel I should catch up with the methods and tools for REST as well.
  3. User experience, perhaps more from the design guidelines point of view. I’ve never even been close to the luxury of actual usability testing and having a real UI designer in the team was also years ago but usability and broader UX used to be a small hobby of mine. What I read about it back then informed a number of productive discussions I had with the developers and improvement suggestions.
    This was back when mobile wasn’t even a thing though, not to mention topics like conversational, voice or xR interfaces. Expectations and models have changed since but it would be useful to get up to date with research instead of random anecdata again.

I’m not really ready to commit to SMART specifications today but I want to get them done within the next two weeks and start the first timebox around mid-June. One month per topic I guess.

If some of you who participated here would like to join up for one of these topics and has some time free in the summer, feel free to give me a poke here or on Twitter (@magda0s). Turns out group work is conducive to learning :smiley:

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The skill gaps which i would like to achieve are as follows:

  1. Security Testing
  2. Performance Testing

In general i never gave a thought that analytics would be useful for testing. So the third point would be analytics and data

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The 30 Days challenge was great fun and helped to highlight some topics and skills I’d like to develop and strengthen.

  1. Security Testing - I’ll get back onto my OWASP Top 10 goal I set with the Super Testing Bros, then look into further goal setting for Security Testing skills and techniques. It would be awesome to be able to do what Pen testers can do.

  2. Generic Automation in test skills - I’ve come from a non-technical background and no que habla code. I’d really like to learn programming fundamentals, then go on to learn how to write scripts in Python so I can use Selenium et al to automate some tests.

  3. Performance Testing - I’d love to know how to perform load and stress tests.

Writing was fun and I hope to keep up the tempo and continue learning.
Stoked to have found an industry that values learning so much and isn’t afraid to spread the knowledge around

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Building an automation framework that also captures screenshot.

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