Hi Steve,
This comment is not about ISTQB. And forgive me for pointing out the obvious: The Club serves exactly the needs you identify. There is a lot support from peers, with follow up. There is advice for how not to fail and what you need to focus on, from people who have been there and done that. There are blogs, links and side conversations, along with some chatter and repetition. I see it as a wonderful resource, and I’m glad it’s here.
When I originally wanted to get into testing, all the jobs I looked at requested it. In the end, I told my employers that they should have a tester, and it should be me. I read the ISTQB book, but didn’t sit the exam (I couldn’t afford it and my employers wouldn’t pay for it). Moved to my current employers, who, within a month or so had sent me on the QACAT course. I don’t look for ISTQB when looking at CVs. As I said in my previous post, experience and enthusiasm are more important to me, as well as how they’ll fit in with the company and colleagues.
For me, I did the ISTQB like 12 years ago when I first started working in IT (got course materials for free but paid for the exam myself). I was a non-IT graduate making the switch to IT. So for me the course gave valuable book knowledge, it gave me a toolkit and a way of approaching things.
However, that was kind of it! Why? In my job experiential knowledge very quickly overtook the theoretical knowledge. Basically folks would say “this is what we do … do it this way” and what they said was in line with what the course taught.
I didn’t really question that or look back on the theory for many years and after I’d worked in many different jobs. …Until in one job I did created a set of questions on testing theory to act like an objective way of assessing candidates along with the more subjective interview questions. I found I just couldn’t easily resolve the question “what if we get a seemingly great candidate who scores low or a candidate who scores high but the CV or interview doesn’t bear that out?”
So I’m now challenging myself to find a course to do (I don’t really care too much about how advanced or not it is). I just want to get back into testing theory via a route that will force me to focus on an end goal (ie achieving the certificate…whereas just reading a book wouldn’t motivate me the same way). I want to learn anything new, to shake up my mental apple cart in some way via new knowledge. But the key thing is I want to do this in a course format … I know that possibly a much better way of doing the same kind of thing is via tester meetups and the likes, which I already do. I guess I am in essence testing the value of the testing course I find… Cool … goes with my profession.
I think based on all the posts in this thread that I’ll look at BBST. The ISTQB seems dry and abstract (hasn’t changed since I did it then!) and other courses just aren’t available where I live. Will post again with further thoughts some time in future. Till then I think for me a key point from my career in testing is to test oneself from time to time, whether that be a course, some meetups or changing jobs. Even if you learn little new, you still gain something.
#lovelearning
Those flash cards in earlier post (https://quizlet.com/309008691/istqb-foundation-level-glossary-2018-flash-cards/) are very helpful for my buddy who is thinking about doing the ISTQB course. Thanks so much!
This is an interesting conversation. I always say that on the job experience is better than a certification, however, if someone asks me what to do to get them up to speed, then I use the ISTQB. I’ve found the content a great stepping stone onto other things. The way we did it was to teach it within our team, rather than go on an expensive course.
It gives you a good baseline and common terminology. I would only recommend an ISTQB certification to someone that is very Green in his role as a tester. Would not consider someone a better tester if he has one and did not feel like I was a better tester when I completed the exam and passed
Hi,
Yes, it is worth it if you are an expert in software testing. because in today’s scenario, software tester has multiple career options.
I wrote about this back in 2015 - http://simon-prior.uk/2015/06/26/testing-certifications-are-they-worth-the-paper-they-are-written-on/
I stand by what I said then, for someone completely fresh to testing, it’s a foot in the door, but it only becomes useful if you effectively use it as a list of topics to go and research more deeply yourself and start applying. If you just learn to pass the exam, you won’t benefit from having it
I did the Advanced Test Manager qualification a couple of years back and found it an incredibly useful 5 day course and have used lots of it since.
I’m not vehemently against the certifications, but it shouldn’t be treated as a badge of honour. It’s the first step to more learning…
From a learner’s perspective, my goal is to (1) learn the main concepts and (2) practice them so that I can prepare myself to solve realistic problems. I suspect that most certifications (testing ones or others) don’t enable you to do both 1 & 2, or they don’t do it well enough.
So, if a certification only does only 1 well, then I’ll use its books to do 1 and try to do 2 myself. But, I won’t waste my time and money on taking the exam. Without 2, I am going to end up forgetting the concepts and having a worthless certificate which only appeases an employer.
I would consider getting a cert if it did both 1 & 2 well, or if it prepares one for some highly regulated industry like medicine, banking, aviation etc.
PS -
As an aside, I think that some certs (regardless of field) might be useful and could be made mandatory. But making certs mandatory without much analysis and debate can have a huge downside. They can prevent some good people from entering the field and can also be used for anti-competition. A hypothetical example is if currently employed testers wanted to make it nearly impossible for new people to enter the testing profession, then they could set the bar too high. They could do this by, say requiring newcomers to pass a VERY difficult test on data structures and algorithms, that are not really related to the job and that even most good developers find hard. (This is contrived example, but I am sure people can figure out crafty tricks if they need to.)
There are examples from other fields where people have used degrees/certs to prevent people from doing jobs/tasks of a job that might not actually require degrees. Here is one on dentists not allowing non-dentists to do teeth whitening - Boards Behaving Badly - Institute for Justice
Interesting that this topic’s still running. A junior tester joined my team a while back with absolutely no test experience (but a strong support background), they’ve proved really adept at testing and studied online for and sat the ISTQB foundation a couple of months ago. They were unsuccessful but the test centre were unable to indicate which questions they failed so they didn’t know where they fell down. Previously I’ve worked through the course notes (when a colleague attended a course) and tried a few sample tests but, with 30 years of dev and test behind me I looked at the multi-choice questions and for a lot came to the conclusion that although I could see which answer they wanted, in practice another answer would be more approrpriate. Useful for learning terminology but not much more than that imo. I’ve interviewed testers with a bucket full of qualifications who failed a fairly simple test and others with virtually now experience who flew through the test simply because they had an aptitude for testing and could easily understand where the high risk areas in the test would be.