It’s Tuesday again, meaning we have a new article out.
This time it’s an article from @swathika.visagn who is sharing her thoughts on how to break your routine and upskill as a tester:
In the spirit of the article, I thought I would ask:
What’s one new testing skill you’re hoping to learn or improve on right now? How will you go about developing it?
I’d love to hear what everyone is working on.
At the moment I have a bit of a buzz around Postman. I’ve been using it for a while but felt that not really getting the full value or potential from the product, around the tests that you can add to the requests for example.
@testerfromliverpool have you tried the Postman badges?
Not yet. I shall take a look
Two things. Firstly, I am learning to code new testing framework in NodeJS’s Jest - best practice is to stay as close as possible to production code so devs can jump in and help at any time.
Secondly, the thing I am trying to improve on is to observe how are we doing things as a team, not just QA, and write those processes down. Most times we do just fine without them but when shit hits the fan and change requests from clients start rolling in en masse, we need to be ready with how exactly are we going to respond and what exactly are steps to do such change in order to not get lost in chaos having multiple releases with little to no documentation.
I kind of tried to do or improve on most of the stuff that’s mentioned in this article:
I vary it with going into other departments and seeing how things tie together or trying to find risks or needs on their side(sales, marketing, content, distribution, support, application management, database, etc…), other internal systems, external systems, other teams interfaces, gathering various documentation from around the company, reviewing business goals and figures to tie it to product risks and issues or potential deep testing/focus areas…and so on.
This comes with the risk of becoming overqualified and hard to find a job due to an extensive amount of testing expertise at various levels.
Good stuff !!! Very nice practices
What if your routine is to upskill? 
I like to browse a bit through google trying to find new innovative things, browse through forums to find peoples problems and trying them out and trying to find a solution or workaround.
Communities like MoT and others are great for upskilling. People will always come with new things and if a person says Tool A is bad, where another person might come in and say “Hey but tool A released a new version and this is now available”
In order of upskilling test techniques, I like to do bug bounty on online platforms and just try out new test techniques and think “what do I normally don’t do in this situation” or "Normally I’m gonna click on button X now but I’m going to do Y’ see what happens and learn from it.