The article highlights invaluable traits such as communication, empathy, and attention to detail—all of which are essential in radiotherapy and software quality and testing roles. Carrageis’ experiences underscore the importance of these transferable skills in fostering collaboration, ensuring thorough testing, and delivering high-quality outcomes.
What previous career or life experiences helped shape your approach to software testing? Perhaps you’ve found that the soft skills you developed in a different field have helped you excel. Sharing these insights can help others recognise the value of their experiences and how they can be used in quality assurance and testing roles.
I was quite good at math and physics at school, and I studied more math and some IT at university (mechanics and mathematics, information technology), despite the fact I was bad, lazy, and kinda dumb as a student, I believe I learned some things, at least it helped me to develop logical thinking and engineering mindset, and ability to learn and implement some solutions even if you understand nothing - I think this was the ground for further developing of appropriate for QA and testing skills and mindset
For me, it was sales. I worked sales for 10 years. I did not enjoy it but I learned a lot from it.
I learned to be more open and collaborative. How to talk and explain technical issues to non-technical/enthusiast people. It really helped my people skills and allowed me to be more approachable and gave me confidence to stand my ground when I saw major issues. Honestly, as much as I disliked my last places and sales in general. It really helped me develop who I am today and how I approach issues.
I used to be “How can I solve this?” but now my thought process is “who do I need to bring in on this?” which has lead to crowd sourcing solutions and catching more issues as other people have different perspectives and expertise and just really helped bring about community effort around quality.
I worked in a hummus factory when I was in college. Little did I know that this would be my introduction to automation. There were so many things that could go wrong on the assembly line when packaging hummus.
The hopper runs out of hummus
The hopper isn’t squirting out the correct amount
The date stamp is close to the line and breaks the container
The date stamp is wet and the timestamp is not visible
The plastic seal is too close to the container and is burning it
Some of the containers are empty
Melted containers are having a traffic jam somewhere on the line
The lid dispenser is jammed and containers are not getting lids
Special stickers on the lids are causing the lids to stick together
This is just off the top of my head. The conveyer belt can get stuck for any reason, at any point of the process, at any time without warning. When this happens, you need to shut down the machine and troubleshoot.
What did I learn ?
Automate what you can and it will save time
Be ready to stop everything and get the the root cause at any time
If the line stops (or your app crashes) downtime is very expensive
Create some guardrails and put them in place (aka tests)
Become familiar with the common bottlenecks and how to deal with them
Processes should be designed to allow for continued improvement
In my experience, being a Super User of an Airline application helped me get into testing job at the Development company. Knowing the application inside and out, having used it every day for 7 years, gave me the expert knowledge needed to test the application in every way.
I knew how the users were taught to use the system, and how to get around the “bugs”.
I knew what shortcuts the users would take.
I also branched out into User Training, because of the expert knowledge I had.
Amazing, you show that your past experience influence a lot your current career. Keep going, sales and customer department are the hardest but at the same time, gives you knowledge and expertise to communicate really well with others stakeholders and improve your testing skills. Thanks for sharing
