The benefit of experienced Tester

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what are the skills or action that you would expected from experienced tester (10< years of experience)
that are less common for new tester (0-1 years) ? why experienced tester expected to do better job for specific testing task compare to new tester (with the same resource and testing environment ).

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The experience is a starter - often you do see patterns in testing and the same mistakes over and over so the experienced tester may be able to find issues (or if being involved earlier then prevent).

The other key thing I would hope to see in more experienced tester is factoring in priorities and considering the project deadlines better, something perhaps someone straight out the gate may not have an appreciation for

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Some really crude generalisations from my time in testing:

Experienced tester: A proven track record that, they’re good enough at this to make a career of it (this can mean nothing but it’s better than not having it). Great heuristics to jump into any team and/or system and “get working”, which comes with (lots of) preconceptions and ideas which will need to be unlearned to some extent. A key factor is their ability to recognise their own prejudices and strategies to counteract them (rather than “Oh yeah, I know this, I understood this context once before in 2005 so won’t need to think about it now”) - taking steps to acknowledge ignorance and ask questions rather than feel their role as an “experienced tester” means questions are now beneath them.

Novice tester: Open eyes and ears, open mind, but some gaps in knowledge or skillset which will require patience and support. Again their ability to recognise what they don’t know and ask questions is absolutely essential. One challenge is an unproven potential for becoming a great tester - maybe they’ll do this for a year or two and move on into a different role, maybe they’ll just lack one of the crucial skills needed to become a fantastic tester, miss a ton of bugs and end your company :sweat_smile:

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Hi rotema8,

An experience tester:

  • Has a knowledge of past failures (history repeats itself)
  • Knows how to be more efficient and find higher priority defects first
  • Knows have to file a better defect report
  • Has a better skillset (knows how to use devtools, log aggregators, etc.) to find useful information
  • Sees the big picture and avoids going down a rabbit hole
  • Can balance testing enough with the available time and amount of things to test
  • Able to know the business and understand what is important to the business
  • Knows how to work around defects to continue testing the application
  • Understands when two tests are equivalent and picks the easiest test rather than executing both

Darrell

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