Welcome to Day 14 of 30 Days of Career Growth! Today’s task is all about sharing and seeking support and advice from our amazing community. Navigating the complexities of your career can present challenges, and we believe in the power of collective wisdom to overcome them.
Day 14 Task
Identify a career-related challenge: Take a moment to reflect on your current professional journey and pinpoint a challenge or obstacle you are currently facing. It could be anything related to your job, career progression, skill development, work-life balance, or even personal growth in the context of your career.
Craft your post: Share your challenge with the community by creating a post on the designated platform or forum. Clearly describe the challenge you’re facing, providing relevant context and details to help others understand your situation better. Be honest, open, and specific about the issue you’re encountering.
Ask for advice: Once you’ve outlined your challenge, make a clear request for advice or suggestions from fellow participants. Ask for their insights, personal experiences, or any strategies they may have utilized to overcome similar hurdles. Encourage community members to share their thoughts, recommendations, and any resources they find helpful.
By sharing your challenge and engaging with others, you are creating a network of support and learning. Let’s come together to overcome obstacles and achieve our career growth aspirations!
Why complete this task?
Increased Self-Awareness: When sharing your career-related challenge with the community, you must articulate and describe the issue clearly. This process of articulation fosters self-awareness as you delve into the details of your challenge, examine its impact on your career, and understand your own emotions and reactions.
Identifying Patterns and Limiting Beliefs: Engaging in self-reflection during this task allows you to identify any recurring patterns or limiting beliefs that may be holding you back. By analyzing your challenges and seeking advice, you can uncover underlying beliefs or behaviours that might be impeding your progress.
Community Support: By sharing your career-related challenge, you tap into a supportive community that is eager to offer guidance and insights. You’ll receive advice, suggestions, and perspectives from individuals who may have faced similar challenges or possess relevant expertise. You may gain new perspectives, uncover fresh ideas, and feel empowered as you navigate your career challenges
Test Environment Constraints Challenges - I work in a company with limited resources for test environments. This constraint often hampers my ability to replicate real-world scenarios. I’d love advice on alternative approaches, virtualisation techniques, or strategies to optimize test environments despite resource limitations. Time and Deadline Pressures Challenges - I often face tight project timelines and deadlines. Balancing thorough testing with time constraints is a challenge I encounter frequently. I’m seeking advice on effective time management techniques, prioritisation strategies, and ways to optimize testing without compromising quality. Communication and Collaboration Challenges - I know the importance of effective communication and collaboration in ensuring successful testing outcomes. However, I have issues when it comes to aligning goals, managing expectations, and maintaining clear communication with other team members. I need help and advice with fostering effective collaboration, overcoming communication barriers, and establishing strong working relationships with developers, product managers, and stakeholders. Test Automation Implementation Challenge s - I am an experienced software tester eager to embrace test automation to enhance my efficiency and effectiveness. However, I don’t know where to start, how to select the right automation tools, identify suitable test cases for automation, or manage test data. I am seeking advice on good practices for test automation implementation, frameworks, and strategies to ensure successful adoption at my workplace. Managing Regression Testing Challenges - I am responsible for managing regression testing at my workplace. As new features are introduced and the software evolves, I face challenges in ensuring comprehensive regression testing within tight timelines and limited resources. I’d like advice on efficient regression testing strategies, test case selection, and prioritisation techniques to maintain product quality while managing constraints. Lone Tester Challenges - I’m the lone tester in our team, and I face the challenges of an overwhelming workload, limited resources, and a lack of peer collaboration, compromising the depth and comprehensiveness of my testing efforts. Furthermore, the absence of career growth opportunities and validation of my testing efforts impact my confidence. I’d like advice on managing workload effectively, optimising test coverage with limited resources, finding ways to collaborate and gather diverse perspectives, and unlocking career growth opportunities in my role as a lone tester.
My biggest career challenge is adding automation to my skillset in a way that future employers will respect. I’ve taken classes and completed some internal projects, but I have no idea how folks are using automation in large, existing codebases. My company doesn’t typically use automation, so I was given free rein to experiment with Cypress, but no guidance from a senior SDET.
I’d love to hear ideas on gaining more technical applied knowledge in this area.
As another lone tester, I completely sympathize. For years I was the only tester in the company. Now I’m the only tester in my group.
The thing I find hardest and most challenging is that despite more than 15 years experience, I have no way to judge my skill-set because there’s nobody more senior around to judge myself against.
That and the absence of any kind of career advancement that works for me.
I’m happy as a tester. I wouldn’t mind a technical lead advancement, but I have exactly zero desire or interest in management in any form. The thought is enough to give me the horrors. Of course, the fact that I’ve been in more or less the same place for the last 10 years, as a solo tester, and done my best to advance in my skills despite not really having much in the way of guidance may or may not count against me. (Yeah, imposter syndrome is a thing. So is lack of self confidence and extreme introversion. All personal challenges rather than career challenges, but they certainly impact the career).
Maybe we lone testers should have our own sub-group or tag? We do seem to get challenges that other testers don’t.
I can relate to everything mentioned in Lone Tester: I enjoy the role but not the responsibilities that come along with it.It is frustrating sometimes.
A little bit on the communication challenges part too and i would say meeting expectations is very subjective for me.
@zali Do you work with any developers and other stakeholders that think automated tests (beyond whatever devs are already doing; eg unit tests) would be of value?
Reasons I ask this include:
If ‘the team’ rather than one person (you!) wants these tests, then managers who decide what gets done will pay more attention
Automation in testing needs technical / software development experience to get it off the ground! Giving you “free-reign” will most probably not work if you are very new to it all.
Even if you make progress solo, it’s likely going to be a greater success for the product you’re testing if the automation venture is shared with your team
One of my biggest wins was getting enough developer(s) time from our PO on a number of sprints to get a Postman tests pipeline together, and similarly with Selenium UI tests. Meanwhile I did as much soak-up-like-a-sponge learning as I could - gradually the support time I generally needed from the dev team decreased
Having followed and completed a training and upskilling program in QA testing, my challenge is to get familiarized in QA area, especially in automation testing. I found myself more familiar in manual testing due to my previous working experience many years ago.
As far as automation testing i have just an academic knowledge in Selenium by using Python, Cypress by using JavaScript and Postman. Comparing Python and JavaScript, i have more experience in JavaScript as my previous job as a front-end developer. In addition i have used a lot the WordPress CMS as a front-end developer also. So, what am i doing know is to draw test cases and making manual and automation testing by using WordPress CMS since i am familiar with this.
So, having written my challenge and my experience in this forum, i’m asking your adice form anyone who has more experience in the area of testing. I’m open in any advice you have.
I feel the same way! Allowing me to set up testing with 0 experience probably doesn’t help the project nor does it increase my aptitude/experience level. Who’s to say anything I implement is good/useful/worthwhile?
My team is in a weird position. They like the idea of automation, but we’re not allowed to invest in it from a business standpoint. We’re contractors and our tests tend to be only what’s needed to fulfill our contracts. Businesses don’t see the value in paying for QA and developer hours to create an automated test suite for a product we’re washing our hands of when it hits production. We’ve never had a Quality failure/disaster, so why change from what we’re doing (from their point of view).
I’m hoping that if I can show some progress in the number of hours I’ve been allotted, Maybe the business appetite will increase?
I’m currently a new manager managing a team of 2 other testers. Myself and the two testers are responsible for testing for 30 developers work.
Recently upper management has mentioned they want to see automation in place, but at the current ratio of 10 developers to 1 tester we barley have any bandwidth except for testing the new projects/features and retesting existing bugs manually.
It seems obvious to me that we will need more testers to accomplish any sort of automation framework and be able to maintain it, but I’m having a difficult time convincing the upper management, who does not have any experience in software, that we need more people to accomplish this.
If you were a manager that needed more people on your team to accomplish the goals that were asked of your team, what data or visualizations did you show in your pitch for new hires? How do you articulate the importance of testing and a healthy ratio of testers to developers to a non-technical person?
My biggest career challenge is that I would like to learn code to become a more valued member of the Quality team and increase my positive visibility within my organization. However, I don’t know where to start with my learning of these methods. I’m sure that there are some background skills that I have overlooked, and am also unsure of the best resources to utilize to achieve this goal. I need help and advice on what the best path to learning code would be.
Youtube? If so, what channels/courses?
Textbooks? If so, which ones are you fond of, or believe will help someone with a limited CS background?
Others? I’m all ears!
Regarding test automation, I would mention that the initial investment (even time investment) for automation is much higher than for manual testing. There are many charts like this one. Then I would mention that you are at your limits, so there are no free resources for this initial investment.
I would also like to know what their goals are with test automation and what they want to achieve with it. How will they know they have achieved their goals? What metrics are they trying to drive?
The challenge I am facing at my current workplace is that the dev is not used to working with QA collaboratively. In fact, I am the first QA that got hired at my current company. It’s very hard to work with them collaboratively and at times they skip the testing process and directly deploy to the server and then many bugs arise and then I have to test the cr in the test server. I don’t know how to resolve this conflict as the TL and dev head from the tech team are not cooperative at all and this stresses me out.
30 Days of Career Growth! Today’s task is all about sharing and seeking support and advice from our amazing community. Navigating the complexities of your career can present challenges, and we believe in the power of collective wisdom to overcome them.
