Testing Skills in a Data Analyst Role?

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I’ve seen a couple of people lately exploring the thoughts of moving more into data analysis or moving completely from testing to a data analysis role. The most common question I see asked is:

What skills do you think are transferrable from testing to data analysis?

I know in my previous testing roles, there was a lot of data to process and analyse but that was largely due to the industries I worked in. When I see this question asked, I often think about how I had to use oracles to ensure that data from our new product compared reasonably well to others on the market and complied with regulatory guidelines.

I also think about the programming languages I used, R and Matlab, and how Python was flagged as something the team needed to learn due to it’s power and visualisations (similar to R).

What about you, what skills do you think are transferrable from testing to data analysis?

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Hello @heather_reid!

I just moved from a Test Engineering role to a Data Analyst role (I still enjoy reading through the threads at MoT Club).

I believe the transferable skills are curiosity, ability to learn, and collaboration. In my new role, I will be looking for trends or oddities in data which are interesting to our business team. I think this is similar to reviewing application behavior and looking for defects.
For some tasks, I may set up visualizations that are dependent on data warehouses. The visualization may need daily updating. This feels a little like writing automation, and some tools provide for a drag-and-drop definition of workflows which can execute on a schedule.

Ask me again after I’ve been more immersed in the role, I might have additional thoughts.

Joe

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