Based on my experience, we have to cover the following:
Can you please suggest anything missed above?
New in what sense? to a company, as the first job, to the IT world, to critical/lateral/systems thinking, to a business domain, to a specific product type or context, or others.
What’s the mission and goal of the training?
Who’s giving the training and why/how are they qualified to do it?
Will they work in a specific Testing role? or are they only informed about some aspects to support(e.g. business analyst, tech support, devs…)
What’s their previous experience/expertise, what are the company goals, what are they interested in?
I’d guess the context would vary greatly and to have a good base understanding testing as a social science is quite important.
It took me about 5-7 years until I started to feel that I might not be new anymore. But some days now I still feel new. There are so many things I don’t know.
And many in this profession are still New as they might never learn the basics of testing(I’ve seen dozens of 8-20 years of experience not having a clue how to start approaching testing in a slightly different context)
Oh good. Its not just me.
I feel like you covered a good list of topics, of course depending on what kind of testing you will be doing you might have to dig deeper on some topics vs others!
For someone is completely new to testing then I think the first thing to cover is learning a testing mindset. And how to evaluate requirements to identify holes and vulnerabilities before the development starts (this usually requires an understanding of the software so you know current expected behaviour)
I’d also point out that, that is a substantial list, you could do courses that cover everything on there and not actually learn anything useful simply because you’re not going to be using it straight away.
You’d be better off identifying what you’re going to be testing or learn to be an expert in testing one area or type of application, it shows that you’re curious and thorough. If you learn how to test mobile apps inside out, you can then use that to move to databases.
If you’re looking to break into testing, then I’d suggest understanding a testing mindset and what the different types of tests are and how to write test scenarios (maybe looking into behaviour driven development/Cucumber). I’d also potentially have a look at OWASP (or at least know what it is). I’ve never come across a product that shouldn’t be evaluated from a security stand point, so knowing what it is can be helpful in interviews. It would probably also be helpful to learn at least one language.
is there no room for young testing masters that have no programming interest? There were quite a few of us back in the 90´s. All did not have to do automation. To be a good troubleshooter does not entail being an effective programmer.
I think you will find that job prospects are very limited for QA with no ability or interest in automation. I think you would have to aim your career at product management or design perhaps.
Actually I’ve returned to a manual testing career after a few decades in managerial positions(doing whats funny my last working years is the plan). Automation was around even in the beginning of the 90´s albeit mostly on CLI’s, regexp fiddeling around with outputs and different simulators. I’ve done a bit of Selenium testing later years but the organisation I work for sees no business case in big time automation of everything.
I’m the guy that knows all systems and know how to find the faults when new functionality is added, and have a knowledge of the brains of our users. And as that I’m seen as valuable…
Hi @kayu,
That’s a handy list.
Perhaps could also dive into a number of topics tagged with curriculum-junior-tester.
https://club.ministryoftesting.com/tag/curriculum-junior-tester
We’re in the process of finalising a curriculum for people who are new to testing which will eventually lead to us building a new certification: Ministry of Testing’s Foundation Certificate in Software Testing (MoT-FCST).