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The Best QA Testing Certifications To Boost Your Career Growth

by admin | Oct 7, 2021 | Software Testing, Blog, Latest Post | 0 comments

Since software testing is an integral part of the software development lifecycle, the need for talented QAs is constantly on the rise. There are also many out there who aspire to become a software tester by setting them apart from the overwhelming competition that has a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Certifications are a great way to accomplish just that, but there is a catch as not all certifications will be worth the effort and resources. So in this blog, we will be taking a look at the best QA testing certifications that will help a QA either kickstart their career or move higher in their career.

ISTQB – Foundation Level

The International Software Testing Qualifications Board is one of the most renowned and globally acclaimed QA testing certifications in the industry. The primary reason we are starting with this certification is that it can help you get a perfect start to your software testing career. It will help you understand all the fundamentals of software testing that are needed to fit into the various software testing roles such as test automation engineer, mobile-app tester, user-acceptance tester, and so on. The syllabi that they follow are constantly improved to keep up with the growing business needs. But the primary advantage that their syllabi have is that they are open to the public and you can go through their material before deciding to attend the exam that will cost you $229.

The foundation level certification isn’t the only one offered by ISTQB and we will be exploring the rest as we progress.

CAST – Certified Associate In Software Testing

CAST is yet another apt choice for the ones looking to start their software testing career. It is a foundation-level QA testing certification like the ISTQB certification we saw earlier and it will help you learn the important principles and best practices you would need to know. Let’s take a look at the prerequisites for this certification,

• Have a 3 or 4-year degree from an accredited college-level institution.
• If you have a 2-year degree at the same level, then a year of experience in testing will make you eligible.
• You could do the certification without a relevant degree if you have at least 3 years of experience in testing.

So it is evident here that you have the option to get this high-value QA testing certification just with your degree. So like ISTQB, it is a great option for freshers, and also a viable option for people with experience to certify themselves. CAST would cost you $100 to attempt and you should make sure that you attend the examination within 1 year of payment and get 70% to clear it.

CSTE — Certified Software Test Engineer

Now that we have seen two entry-level QA testing certifications to get started with, let’s move on to the next level. CSTE is more of a professional-level certification that helps you establish your competence and achieve better visibility in your team. So you will be able to present yourself as someone who can take up some additional responsibility and take a step forward in their career. The prerequisites also change accordingly,

• Must have a 4-year degree from an accredited college-level institution and 2 years of experience in testing.
  So if you have a 3-year degree, you will need 3 years of experience in testing.
• Similarly, if you have a 2-year degree, then you will need 4 years of experience in testing.
• If you don’t have an appropriate degree, then you could compensate for that with 6 years of experience in testing.

Similar to CAST, you would have to score 70% to pass the test and it would cost you around $350 to $420.

CTM — Certified Test Manager

If CSTE was the first step towards a management role, CTM is the one that helps you get better at it. As the name suggests, this QA testing certification is targeted towards improving your management skills. It is a great option if you are currently in a leadership role as it can help you better your skills. You will be learning about various skills like how to manage test processes & test projects, how to measure a test process so that you can work on improving it, risk management, and so much more. Since it is management-level certification, you would also require experience in any leadership role.

The prerequisite is that you should have 3 years of experience in testing that includes 1 year of experience in a leadership role that is relevant to software testing. This has to be met with by the time the CTM will be granted. You would require a lot of supporting documents for this one. So make sure to check over the complete procedure on their website. Make sure you familiarise yourself with the Test Management Body of Knowledge book as it is the key to this certification.

CSSBB — Six Sigma Black Belt Certification

Another option to sharpen up your management skills is the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) certified CSSBB. Like ISTQB, there are other belts available as well, but the black belt certification helps you understand the team dynamics and assign roles & responsibilities accordingly. You will be able to use the Six Sigma principles to optimize the DMAIC (Design, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) model. In addition to that, you will also be equipped with the basics of lean management and how to identify non-value elements. The prerequisites are,

• You would require a minimum of 3 years of experience in one or more areas of the CSSBB Body of Knowledge.
• You would require a minimum of 1 or 2 completed projects with signed affidavits.

The exam would cost you $538 and would be an open-book test. If you are an ASQ member, then you would get a discount of $100 in the cost.

ISTQB – Advanced & Expert Level

The Advanced level of ISTQB is on par with the CTM certification that we saw earlier and the expert level is the one with the highest recognition. So starting with the foundation level certification, you should work yourself up the ladder and complete the advanced level first and then follow it up with the expert level. The expert level is the epitome of all these QA testing certifications as in addition to the in-depth concepts you will be learning about, you will also be handling practical exercises and discussions for almost half of the entire time. The prerequisites would also be very high for this certification.

• One must have at least 5 years of practical testing experience in testing.
• In that 5 years, at least 2 years should be industry experience in the specific topic that you are looking to become an expert in.

Conclusion

As one of the top software testing companies in Chennai, we always concentrate on getting our employees certified with ISTQB. We are currently a Silver-level partner with ISTQB and on a path to become a Platinum-level partner in the near future. We are aware of how valuable these ISTQB certifications are, and that is why we have started and ended the list with them. So we hope you have found this list of our top QA testing certifications to be useful. Make sure to pick the courses best for you and also remember that even though certifications are important, it is the knowledge you build that matters. So pour your heart and soul into it and be on a path of continuous learning.

Want to Achieve Continuous Delivery? These are the Key Capabilities To Focus on

by admin | Oct 5, 2021 | Software Testing, Blog, Latest Post | 0 comments

Achieving Continuous Delivery is no child’s play as your team should be equipped with certain technical capabilities because deploying the code into production on demand throughout the software delivery cycle is not easy in any way. It is also important to acknowledge that it’s not just the technical practices that will help you achieve Continuous Delivery. It has to be coupled along with good management practices as well. So as a first step, we will be focusing on the key technical capabilities that drive Continuous Delivery in this blog.

Version Control

Keeping the application code in version control alone will not help you achieve Continuous Delivery as you would have to do all the deployments manually when both the system and application configurations stay out of version control. Since manual tasks stall continuous delivery (CD), you have to automate the delivery pipeline to achieve CD.

Test Automation

Automated unit & acceptance tests should be kicked off as soon as developers commit the code in version control. The simple underlying logic here is that if the developers are provided with faster feedback, they will be able to work on the changes and fix the issues instantaneously. This advantage alone doesn’t make test automation a vital component in the Continuous Delivery pipeline. It is also very reliable in ensuring that only high-quality software gets delivered to the end-users.

But that doesn’t mean you can just use flaky test automation scripts as they would only produce false positives and negatives and not add any value to the Continuous Delivery pipeline. So if you want your software to be more reliable and resilient, writing and adding robust automation scripts to the pipeline is the best way to go about it. If at all you find any of the scripts to be unstable, you can move them to a quarantine suite and run them independently until it becomes stable

Test Data Management (TDM)

As mentioned earlier, manual works delay continuous delivery. But at the same time, if your automated test scripts have to be manually fed with test data at frequent intervals, it will cause delays in the delivery. This is a clear sign that your automated test suites are not fulfilling their purpose. You can overcome this roadblock by creating a test data management (TDM) tool to which you can upload all the adequate data required for automated script execution. So, your scripts will call the TDM API to get the required data instead of getting it from an Excel or a YAML file.

In addition to that, once the TDM tool reaches its threshold, it should be able to pull and allocate more data automatically from the system DB. As an automation testing services company, we have a TDM for automation testing alone. We feed the data to it once every month and as a result, the automation test scripts no longer have to wait for the test data to be fed since the adequate data has already been allocated.

Trunk-Based Development

A long-lived branch leads your team towards reworking and merging issues that can’t be fixed immediately. So developers should make sure to create a feature branch, commit the changes within 24 hours into the trunk, and kill the feature branch. If a commit makes a build unstable, everyone on the team should jump in to resolve the issue and not push any changes into the trunk until the merge is fixed.

When a developer pushes the changes from a short-lived branch, your team will resolve the merge issues quickly as the push will be considered a small batch. Trunk-based development is a key enabler for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. So, if the developers commit the changes into the trunk multiple times a day, and fix the merge issues then & there, then the trunk will be release-able.

Information Security

The information security process should not be carried out after releasing the software. Rather, it should be incorporated from the very beginning. Since fixing security-related issues is a time-consuming effort, integrating information security-related practices into the daily work plan of your teams will be instrumental in achieving Continuous Delivery.

Conclusion

Technical and Management practices are crucial for enabling Continuous Delivery. As a software testing company, we use these technical practices with our development team that works on developing automation testing tools. Following such practices alone is not a game-changer. Your team needs to learn and improve the process continuously. Continuous Improvement is pivotal in building a solid development pipeline for Continuous Delivery.

Automation Testing vs Manual Testing : How to Strike the Perfect Balance?

by Anika Chakraborty | Oct 4, 2021 | Software Testing, Blog, Latest Post | 0 comments

Some still believe that the need for manual testing can be completely eliminated by automating all the test cases. However, in reality, you simply can’t eradicate manual testing as it plays an extremely important role in covering some edge cases from the user’s perspective. Since it is apparent that there is a need for both automation and manual testing, it is up to us to choose between the two and strike a perfect balance. So let’s pit Automation Testing vs Manual Testing and explore how it is possible to balance them both in the software delivery life cycle.

Stable Automated Tests

Stable test automation scripts help your team provide quick feedback at regular intervals. Automated tests boost your team’s confidence levels and help certify if the build is release-able or not. If you have a good talent pool to create robust automated scripts, then your testers can concentrate on other problem-solving activities (Exploratory & Usability Testing) which add value to the software.

Quarantined Automation Test Suites

Flaky automated tests kill the productivity of QA testers with their false positives and negatives. But you can’t just ignore the unstable automated test scripts as your team would have invested a lot of time & effort in developing the scripts. The workaround here is to quarantine the unstable automated test scripts instead of executing both the stable and unstable scripts in the delivery pipeline. So stabilizing & moving the quarantined test scripts to the delivery pipeline is also a problem-solving activity. As a leading automation testing company, we strongly recommend avoiding flaky automation test scripts from the very beginning. You can make that possible by following the best practices to create robust automated test scripts.

Tips to stabilize the unstable scripts

• Trouble-shoot and fix the script failures immediately instead of delaying them.
• Train the team to easily identify the web elements and mobile elements.
• Avoid boilerplate codes.
• Implement design patterns to minimize script maintenance.
• Execute the scripts as much as possible to understand the repetitive failures.
• Run batch by batch instead of running everything in one test suite.
• Make the automated test report visible to everyone in the team.
• If your team is not able to understand the test results, then you need to make the reports more readable.

Exploratory Testing

Test automation frees testers from repetitive scripted testing. Scripted automated testing does enable fast feedback loops, but your team will be able to unearth new product features & bugs, and identity additional test scenarios when performing exploratory testing.

Benefits of Exploratory Testing (ET)

• Scripted testing provides confidence, but ET helps your team to understand whether the new features make sense from the end user’s standpoint.
• ET is usually performed by testers who have good product knowledge. Every feedback from ET is also an input for your automated test suites.
• Some test cases cannot be automated. So you can allocate those test cases in ET sessions.
• ET helps you to create additional tests which are not covered in automated test suites.

Usability Testing

Usability testing is an experiment to identify and rectify usability issues that exist in the product. Let’s say a functional tester is testing the product check-out scenario of an e-commerce app. Here, the tester has good knowledge about the product and knows where the important buttons (Add to Cart & Proceed to Checkout) are placed on the app. However, in real-time, if the end-users struggle to find these buttons, they will definitely have second thoughts about using your app again. So it is clearly evident that functional UI tests can’t help you identify usability issues.

Usability Testing Steps

1. Prepare the research questions and test objectives

2. Identity participants who represent the end-users

3. Setup an actual work environment

4. Interview the participants about the app experience

5. Prepare test reports with recommendations

Conclusion

We hope you’re able to understand that using any one of the two types of testing will only lead to the creation of surface-level solutions. For robust solutions, you should use both manual and automation testing to test the features which are released continuously in the delivery pipeline. So compare Automation Testing vs Manual Testing and use the one that is more apt for the requirement. Testers should be performing exploratory testing continuously against the latest builds that come out of Continuous Integration. Whereas, scripted testing should be taken care of by automation.