What do testers do on a daily basis?

🗄️ Archive
1

I’ve seen many variations on this question this week. I was even asked by a recruiter (in a “how can I learn about testing” way). Awesome!

In one answer I said:
“A software testers day can vary day to day. It depends on what level they are at, how big their team is (if they have a team), what type of product they are testing. They could do a mix of a number of things on the What Do Software Testers Do? list.”

The lovely recruiter I was speaking to (genuinely lovely, I swear there are gems out there!) asked me:
“would you have time at some stage to ELI5 what a tester does day to day? It’s the one area of tech I’m weakest in - I have real trouble visualising what ye actually DO”

I find this is the type of question where an answer will start with “It depends”.

But let’s try this, in your situation, what would you say you do on a daily basis? How would you help people understand your role?

2 Likes
2

My daily breakdown -
Title: Lead QA Engineer
Workstyle: Agile-light
QA team size: Just me
Engineering size: 7 engineers split between front end and back end
Company products: Mobile App, Web App

When i get in in the morning I lead the standup and ask about any open pull requests for code waiting to be on QA and attempt to get those PR’s reviewed and on QA. I speak about any P0 bugs I have found on production and setup a hotfix list that needs to take priority over the sprints development plans.

I then pull down the latest development app build and test any new tickets that concern the app, ensuring new functionality is working as expected and old functionality have no regressions.

I check my testing queue for any webapp work that needs to be verified and verify it.

If i do not have any mobile or webapp work to complete I move onto UI automation and requirements documentation for any upcoming work.

I am also a release manager for my company, so I check the current code base and attempt to understand if there are any risks to our release timeline, any special requirements for the release of the code (what order services have to be released, database work that is post or pre-release, and any migrations that may need to be done to ensure new code will work as expected. I check the app versioning to ensure that all apps are on the same version and that when released they will work seamlessly.

About half my day is facilitating conversations between bizdev, design, and the founders of the company and attempting to understand what each person is expecting from a release and to help get the release into a place where all stakeholders expectations are met. If this is not possible I relay that to the stakeholder that this will affect new timelines for implementations and data analysis to say why and how.

I host test swarming projects where i get a memeber from each team to help me test new features for half an hour. The point of the testing is not to give me feedback on how they wish the apps worked, but what their user experience is with it to relate that to design and to fix any assumptions we may have had during the design phase of the projects.

I create release notes for our product, and I help the company think about the customer and create documentation that can be used internally and externally for features.

I do smoke tests and regression tests, documentation and implementation, and I attempt to increase the velocity of the engineers work by suggestion tooling, systems, and communication practices that expedite our work.

Note:

Testing code usually follows a functional test of the code, to ensure I’m meeting the tickets requirements, then exploratory testing to see if I can get into state that may break the app, load testing to ensure new features or services can handle our user base, combinatorial testing to ensure that our software integration with its internal repos and external API’s are working well, and finally discussions with the backend team to ensrue that if any contracts between the front end and backend have changes or if any changes have happened with our endpoints to undertstand the touchpoints that may be affected.

2 Likes
3

I’m normally in quite early so I check my emails/sprint board to see if anything has been deployed or ready to test.

I normally have a discussion with my team before I leave to see if any of their work is nearing completion, so I have a good idea of whether there will be any work for me to take on. I generally just like talking to people and getting the best understanding of how their work is progressing as possible, it often gives me clues into areas to focus my testing on.

I take a look at our production logs/email alerts and identify whether there are any issues which need immediate attention. I also investigate any client bugs which were reported overnight (our customer base is in the US).

I’ll also take a look at our backlogs and ensure I understand as much as possible about them - I’ll also set up any automated test templates in preparation for the code being available to test. We also have regular refinement/planning sessions which I would prepare for.

If there is no sprint work (often the case), then I’ll do some of the following:

  • Improve my coding (C#) knowledge on Pluralsight.
  • Increase or re-factor test coverage for any APIs/JMeter performance test suites.
  • Do some reading on performance testing - usually JMeter documentation, BlazeMeter or looking at some performance testers on Twitter.
  • Do some research on any new and relevant technologies (currently ElasticSearch, Kafka, Flink) and identify how we’re going to test these technologies to ensure they meet our requirements.

That’s how my days have looked over the past few weeks.

3 Likes
4

I spotted this thread the other day - https://twitter.com/hogfish/status/1043014836081156096

1 Like
5

The job of a software tester in a QA Database Testing Project on a daily basis include the following:-

  1. Understanding the testing requirements
  2. Planning the tests by defining the strategy
  3. Designing the test cases & preparing the test data
  4. Creating Test Suite.
  5. Executing the test and submitting the status as pass /fail.
  6. Bug Reporting & Coordinating with different departments to fix the bugs
  7. Retest the software post fixing.
  8. In the end, submit the testing report, giving a green signal to the software.
  9. Also, attend stand up meetings where in he informs the team about the following:-
    • What tasks he is currently working on
    • Updates regarding ongoing tasks
    • Blockers (if he is facing any)