So as the new DojoBoss I am on a mission to understand the skillsets that an individual can learn to succeed in Software Testing. Whether your an explorer, a test case runner, an automator, a coach, a lead, a manager, etc. I want to understand what topics and skills are needed to help those people.
I hope to use this information to make the Dojo even bigger and better, so I’d love to hear from you all about what do you think a tester needs to learn? What tools? What topics? For example in my own career I have learnt things such as:
Exploratory testing
Communication
Note-taking
Working in agile teams
Programming in JS, Java and Ruby
Bug reporting
What do you think others should learn, what have YOU learnt in the past that is useful?
Accessibility Principles (including inclusive language)
Accessibility Testing Techniques
Thought Techniques for test case creation
Pairing Techniques
Basic Security, Performance and other ‘none functional’ areas
Coaching Testers
Risk Identification Techniques
Learning Methods (to help the learner tailor to their style)
Reporting Techniques
Generating and Using Test Data
Database Interrogation Techniques (SQL use etc.)
Testability / Observability
Heuristics and Mnemonics creation and use
Methodology overviews (Agile, Specification by Example, Xtreme Programming, X Driven Development(s), Waterfall <I suppose!>)
More software development standards
Clean Coding Principles
Design Patterns
Docker for Testing
Infrastructure as Code
Using Metrics for self reflection and trend analysis
Change Management
Quality Assistance - specifically looking at how in a real-world sense we achieve synergistic effect by bringing together developer and QA skillsets
Concrete steps QA can take to persuade an organization to put quality (more) to the centre of what it does and how it works
Agile testing - as with the above, real-world examples where the theory of agile testing has become the reality, how the organization gets/got there and the additional benefit(s) versus more traditional ‘chuck it over the wall’ approaches
Cloud-based testing - specifically what QA should do differently versus traditional web-based testing (e.g. testing in a microservice architecture versus just a web, app with monolithic service(s), and database)
