Some folks in the community have ambitions to move on from a testing/quality role.
For those that have done it, how did you move your role beyond testing and quality engineering?
Where did your career go? How has your life and skill as a tester helped with your latest career adventures?
Well, I haven’t, not literally I have “tester” in my title still. But this is something that’s been on my mind for the past few years, especially after I started listening to the AB Testing podcast, by the co-authors of the Modern Testing Principles. In the long run, I really like the idea of focusing more on improving quality, rather than spending most of my time doing testing.
But I think that even those of us who aren’t quality coaches or in QA managerial positions (to have an influence on the processes and authority to implement changes) can still move in this direction. We can always start small by suggesting improvements to the features that we are testing, instead of just ticking check-boxes, reporting bugs, and coming up with test cases or scenarios.
Having testing experience can help in this regard, as it allows us to apply our systems thinking and really approach things with a critical mind. After some time (for me at least) I start looking for common pain points and thinking about how to resolve them. And for all processes relating to quality, it’s important to keep analyzing them, suggesting improvements, and being open to experimenting often. Other than that being okay with the fact that a lot of our experiments can fail on the surface, but, even a failed experiment can provide us with a lot of applicable and useful info!