I recently asked quality engineers some questions and one of the things that came out was a theme of mixing hard and soft skills. So when working on automation or CI/CD pipelines they were also using influencing, advocacy and communications skills too. This makes so much sense when seeing it written down but I’d love to know more. As always replys much appreciated.
How do you combine soft and hard skills in testing?
Can you share some examples?
Hard skills are specific, measurable abilities and knowledge that are often job-specific and can be learned through training, education, or experience.
It’s worth noting that a lot of things that get passed off as “soft skills” might actually be hard skills for our testing roles.
Communication, about issues and bugs for example, can be measured by return rate on communication or how much re-explaining we have to do.
Advocacy could be something measured by the impacts we make to a culture or ways of working.
Active listening might be a hard skill for us as it’s the way we engage with people to learn about quality.
Perhaps, for me anyway, I address my combining of them by thinking of them all as the key skills I need in a holistic quality engineering and coaching role
