Looking for Resources and Practice Platforms to Improve My Manual QA Skills

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Hi everyone,

I’m looking to improve my skills in Manual QA and would love to get advice from the community. My goal is to strengthen both my theoretical understanding and hands-on testing abilities.

  • What resources or learning materials would you recommend for developing strong manual testing skills?

  • Are there any online courses or certification programs worth taking?

  • Do you know platforms where I can practice testing on real or demo applications?

  • I’m especially interested in improving test case writing, test planning, exploratory testing, and bug reporting.

I appreciate any suggestions or guidance you can share.
Thank you in advance!

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I would, set up a VM, and then find a source of reasonably safe to install apps, and install them and use them one at a time and write test plans for them. Most of all have fun creating bug reports that you can never send. All these things will teach you how software works, how it installs, how it un-installs, how it upgrades and builds familiarity and confidence. There are loads of people who want games testing done, that’s another manual testing avenue to go down.

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My first recommendation is to look for open source projects. This will allow you to have access to the code, build builds, and also write bug reports and other forms of communication. It also means that you can pick the kind of software you’re interested in working with.

The only course I’ve had experience with that I can for sure recommend is RST, and I know the fundamentals are good, the teaching is experiential and done well, and the theory behind it is forged by some of the best and hardest-working minds in software testing. I’ve heard good reports from the AST, BBST side from people whose reports I’d put stock into.

If you’re interested in test planning, high-exploratory testing (lower formality, lower scripting) and bug reporting I’d also look into session-based test management and use some of those ideas in lieu of test cases so that you spend more time testing and less time writing down what you think you might intend to do. That’ll help you to practice the skills of testing and exploration more openly and fully. I’d also consider testing with absolutely no notes/cases/sessions whatsoever, if only for the experience of exploration without interruption to build the way you think. Try running with artefacts like the HTSM to guide how you may explore software and open yourself to new possibilities. A lot of testing self-limits to checking a few facts about the functionality, but quality of software is much more than that in ways that matter, and the HTSM can be one way to assist (but not dictate!) how software could also be explored.

Best of luck!

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I’m not sure how up to date it is but technical testing 101 was the one I used to recommend to testers wanting to up their hands on skills a bit.

There are also a number of test sites where you can practice finding bugs, a google search should bring them up.

If you are in the web area, picking up devtools usage and understanding will help a lot for deeper testing, there is a lot there but even just the basics can help step up your game.

Local builds, this one might seem a bit out of place but I believe this is where the industry is going particularly on mobile app testing, you just get access to a lot of testing tools that can improve your manual testing. This will also get you familiar with IDE’s.

AI tools - here is a quick example on how I used it this week. I am investigating how well agents can actually find bugs, like you I started with buggy demo sites. However you can also do this sort of thing, here is a list of common UI bugs, build me a web page that subtly contains those bugs. I did this because I needed the source code and wanted to test how well agents find bugs just on code compared to those agents running the browser. The point here is that with AI you can potentially quickly build small tools that help you experiment with in your testing, you could likely build the demo application that you need to practice your testing on.

Maybe also a few fundamentals around testing models testing to confirm or verify and testing to learn or discover.