Hello. For persons who are new and still fairly new to software testing, what was your initial perception of this career before starting?
How has that perception changed as you got more into the field?
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Honestly, my initial impressions were not good, which is not a big surprise if you are in a place where testing is not appreciated at all and blamed for everything. I didnât think it was a serious role for a while and I spent some time learning to become a developer.
Over time I changed my mind, I moved to a bigger company where âQAâ was done in a very serious way and software testers were highly technical people, writing automation code, using databases, testing APIs, etc. Another thing that helped a lot is getting more involved in the testing community, I learned about exciting new approaches and testing philosophies.
Another thing I like about testing is the fact that itâs such a broad field with tons of different routes you can take. Even if you end up not liking being a tester the roles expose you to so many aspects of the software industry that it can make you better prepared for many other roles.
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Great question.
I chose testing over a long career in IT support. Previously supporting an old bespoke system, I was involved with the entire delivery life-cycle, including the testing.
Testing was always looked at as a âphaseâ that could be sacrificed if needed - and it was always biting us in the bum. I knew the business was (⊠and probably still is) doing it wrong, but I couldnât change how the business operated unfortunately.
So when I moved into testing properly as a career, it was really refreshing to see new approaches and open minded thinking when it came to ensuring the quality of products. My pre-conceptions of the industry were off, as I completely underestimated how âup-and-comingâ testing, or now rather âensuring qualityâ actually is now.
Testing is a super far-reaching industry in software development, which just gives you this endless stream of learning opportunities.
To be honest I didnât have an initial impression as I wasnât working in tech when I heard about it as a role. My initial interaction with testing came from reading âThe Art of Software Testingâ by Glenford J Myers and it gave me a great impression of what an interesting role it was. Once I started in my first role I havenât really looked back, even in the bad places it was people and not testing that was the problem.
Great questions though, I hope you get lots of interesting answers.
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This is an amazing question, @carltonjcarib. Thank you for asking it here.
Before starting my career in testing I was working in a customer service team in a now-defunct Building Society (read, bank).
We were told there was a new fancy piece of software coming soon (Fiserv on IBM DB2 AS400 for those who want a trip down memory lane) and âWould anyone like to do user acceptance testing (UAT) before we roll it out across the entire company?â
I knew I wanted to get some sort of job in IT and it sounded interesting. Prior to that, I was always annoying my team lead and senior management with questions about why we couldnât do this and why we couldnât do that. 
I had zero perception about what testing was at the time. Zilch. I guess I thought it was something to âhelp make sure it works well for my teamâ.
So I did three weeks of UAT and I absolutely loved it! I was offered a permanent job to move into the software testing team. 
At that time it was all about test scripts which I had no perception of beforehand other than some basic scripts Iâd been given to run through during UAT. So I thought testing was about a) following testing steps b) raising bugs.
As I got deeper into testing and moved jobs I realised it was way more than that and became very interested in exploring with the goal of discovering useful things that threaten the value of the thing being tested. I opened my eyes and ears to the possibilities of structured and disciplined exploratory testing.
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For me it was the complete opposite of @mirza
I never expected the amount of backlash you can get for raising a bug, how testers are not valued, need to be careful how we talk about our findings, ⊠It does depend on the company/team, but Iâve heard similar issues from other testers in the community.
I also wasnât really aware of non-functional testing before I became a tester. Itâs now a big part of my job.
Initially, I used to work as a PMO developer for one of the testing accounts with my first organization. When I used to see the testing team there, I was not very positive about the work that software testing might be having.
One reason for that was that I used to mostly see them creating tests in Excel and that was the only first impression that I had on them. I used to think that the work of a tester is not creative. Itâs kind of repetitive - filing documents and maybe running those.
But later on, when I came into the software testing profession, I realized that it is a lot more fun, it is a lot more creative you can do a lot with software testing . Today, I think it resonates with who I am as a person and I really love this.
My initial perception for software testing is the job that hammered around and see what wrong in software + Itâs a escape pod for people who graduated from IT,CS related fields but donât want to do coding stuff.
Turn out, The first perception was change when I got chance that work with team that care about quality as well and I kinda make understand a bit of advocate quality, collaborate more across the role and erase the picture that QA as a gatekeeper.
The second perception still not change that much.
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