Portfolios in our field

Greetings all!

Recently one person asked me something about it and it make me this about it a bit…

How would Testers or QA Engineers portfolio looked like?
Do you guys have a portfolio?
Have anyone ever asked you to send them your portfolio?

I understand how Automation Engineer could have github as portfolio same as programmers, but what about QA Engineer or Manual Software tester?

One of my guesses would be to show how one has written Test Cases for some Web App or some Bug report to see which format person uses (can be used for checking language knowledge as well)
Writing some articles or blog posts on this topic can be another thing but that is more a theory knowledge instead of practical knowledge.

But what about QA?

Any experience is welcome…
Cheers!

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Really interesting topic. I’d say for most testers I know, there’s no portfolio other than a CV(/resume) - however I can see some sense in illustrating complex testing problems with a documented approach, the output of exploratory sessions for example, gherkin etc… you could also document some of the conversations which happen around requirements, design and planning in order to demonstrate the kind of value the tester adds, even if that’s ordinarily explicitly “undocumented”.

I guess the problem I perceive in this is that testing is so inherently contextual, I don’t see a lot of employers devoting the time to understanding the business problem in order to then assess the testing output. The other thing is, testing is not undertaken in a vacuum - it is vital that testers are having conversations, asking questions, challenging assumptions. What can be documented is only half (maybe less) of the actual job, so that’s challenging too - but that’s not to say that other half isn’t also vital.

Overall I actually really like the idea, but I’d say that unfortunately in my vicinity, approaches and attitudes vary so much from company to company that it’s unlikely you’d meet someone who could meaningfully assess a portfolio in order to derive the value the idea implies. If your style of testing matches their understanding of it, or their aspiration for their team, great, but if it doesn’t? Sorry, not interested. The same is true of CVs of course… it’s a continuing frustration that we lack a way to meaningfully assess people’s ability to test well outside of actually sitting them in a team, which can be quite an expensive way of doing it.

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I don’t, however I have been asked for an example test plan. I couldn’t really hand another customers test plan over, although most plans I’ve worked on have been evolved by the team so not purely my work and in theory covered by NDA’s.

Outside of that I’m not really sure what I could put up unless I did some acceptance criteria/automation/plans for a example project to show people but I’m not sure how beneficial that would be as the projects I’ve been working on are so vastly different at the moment.

From the interviews that I’ve attended recently no one has really raised this, mostly they quiz you on your experience on certain tech or how you would approach something and possibly throw in a technical test.

Would a dev portfolio really convince you to hire someone? I would have thought a similar format to the interview above would be the norm, perhaps with some pairing added in to see how they work through things and how they work with others.

As for getting your name out there I know several testers that post articles on LinkedIn, whether it be to promote the company their working for, the technology their using or themselves. That certainly couldn’t hurt and would probably increase the number of people contacting you for recruitment if it was inline with what they were after.

@wildtests How are you so fast?

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Hi all,

it does sound similar to this thread - my reply is in this thread

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I have a portfolio - but it dates from the time I was trying to promote myself as a professional photographer. It worked so well, I came back into testing. :slight_smile:

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Mine originally started as a wannabe front-end developer (I wanted to be a dev, and changed my mind after falling in love with testing) portfolio, but lately, I’ve changed it - to make it more aligned with what I actually do, and that is being a tester. Here it is:

It was a bit of a challenge to come up with content for the portfolio, as a tester, but, I like a few articles I wrote and I plan to add more, also to link meetups I’ve held and any future public speaches.