Monthly Archives: January 2021

Common search engine questions about testing #8: “Can I learn software testing on my own?”

This is the eighth of a ten-part blog series in which I will answer some of the most common questions asked about software testing, according to search engine autocomplete results (thanks to Answer The Public).

In this post, I answer the question “Can I learn software testing on my own?” (and the related questions, “Can I learn software testing online?” and “Can anybody learn software testing?”).

The skills needed to be an excellent tester can be learned. How you choose to undertake that learning is a personal choice, but there’s really no need to tackle this substantial task as a solo effort – and I would strongly encourage you not to go it alone. The testing community is strong and, in my experience, exceptionally willing to help people on their journey to becoming better testers so utilizing this vast resource should be part of your strategy. There is so much great content online for free and engaging with great testers is straightforward via, most notably in my opinion, Twitter and LinkedIn.

While it’s great to learn the various techniques and approaches to testing, it’s also worth looking more broadly into fields such as psychology and sociology. Becoming an excellent tester requires more than just great testing and technical skills so broadening your learning should be helpful. While I don’t recommend most of the testing books from “experts”, I’ve made a few recommendations in the Resources section of my consultancy website (and you can find a bunch of blogs, articles, etc. as starting points for further reading there too).

The next part of this blog series will cover the topic of certifications, so I won’t discuss this in depth here – but I don’t believe it’s necessary to undertake the most common certifications in our industry, viz. those offered by the ISTQB. The only formal courses around testing that I choose to recommend are Rapid Software Testing (which I’ve personally attended twice, with Michael Bolton and then James Bach) and the great value Black Box Software Testing courses from the Association for Software Testing.

You can certainly learn the skills required to be an excellent tester and there’s simply no need to go it alone in doing so. There is no need to attend expensive training courses or go through certification schemes on your way to becoming excellent, but you will need persistence, a growth mindset and a keen interest in continuous learning. I recommend leveraging the large, strong and helpful testing community in your journey of learning the craft – engaging with this community has helped me tremendously over many years and I try to give back to it in whatever ways I can, hopefully inspiring and helping more people to experience the awesomeness of the craft of software testing.

You might find the following blog posts useful too in terms of guiding your learning process:

To The New Tester (James Bach)
How Can A Trainee Improve His (Her) Skills (Michael Bolton)
Bharani Asks About Daily Practice (James Bach)

You can find the first seven parts of this blog series at:

I’m providing the content in this blog series as part of the “not just for profit” approach of my consultancy business, Dr Lee Consulting. If the way I’m writing about testing resonates with you and you’re looking for help with the testing & quality practices in your organisation, please get in touch and we can discuss whether I’m the right fit for you.

Thanks again to my awesome review team (Paul Seaman and Ky) for their helpful feedback on this post.

Common search engine questions about testing #7: “Is software testing a good career?”

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This is the seventh of a ten-part blog series in which I will answer some of the most common questions asked about software testing, according to search engine autocomplete results (thanks to Answer The Public).

In this post, I answer the question “Is software testing a good career?” (and the related questions, “How is software testing a career?” and “Why choose software testing as a career?”).

Reflecting first on my own experience, software testing ended up being an awesome career. I didn’t set out to become a career software tester, though. After a few years as a developer in the UK, I moved to Australia and started looking for work in the IT industry. Within a couple of weeks of arriving in the country, I landed an interview at Quest Software (then in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne) for a technical writer position. After interviewing for that position, they mentioned that the “QA Manager” was also looking for people and asked whether I’d be interested in chatting with her also. Long story short, I didn’t land the technical writing job but was offered a “Senior Tester” position – and I accepted it without hesitation! I was simply happy to have secured my first job in a new country, never intending it to be a long-term proposition with Quest or the start of a new career in the field of software testing. As it turned out, I stayed with Quest for 21 years in testing/quality related roles from start to finish!

So, there was some luck involved in finding a good company to work for and a job that I found interesting. I’m not sure I’d have stayed in testing, though, had it not been for the revelation that was attending Rapid Software Testing with Michael Bolton in 2007 – that really gave me the motivation to treat software testing more seriously as a long-term career prospect and also marked the time, in my opinion, that I really started to add much more value to Quest as well. The company appreciated the value that good testers were adding to their development teams and I was fortunate to mentor, train, coach and work alongside some great testers, not only in Australia but all over the world. Looking back on my Quest journey, I think it was the clear demonstration of value from testing that led to more and more opportunities for me (and other testers), as predicted by Steve Martin when he said “be so good they can’t ignore you”!

The landscape has changed considerably in the testing industry over the last twenty years, of course. It has to be acknowledged that it’s becoming very difficult to secure testing roles in which you can expect to perform exploratory testing as the mainstay of your working day (and especially so in higher cost locations). I’ve rarely seen an advertisement for such a role in Australia in the last few years, with most employers now also demanding some “automated testing” skills as part of the job. Whether the reality post-employment is that nearly all testers are now performing a mix of testing (be it scripted, exploratory or a combination of both) and automation development, I’m not so sure. If your desire is to become an excellent (exploratory) tester without having some coding knowledge/experience, then I think there are still some limited opportunities out there but seeking them out will most likely require you to be in the network of people in similar positions in companies that understand the value that testing of this kind can bring.

Making the effort to learn some coding skills is likely to be beneficial in terms of getting your resume over the line. I’d recommend not worrying too much about which language(s)/framework(s) you choose to learn, but rather focusing on the fundamentals of good programming. I would also suggest building an understanding of the “why” and “what” in terms of automation (over the “how”, i.e. which language and framework to leverage in a particular context) as this understanding will allow you to quickly add value and not be so vulnerable to the inevitable changes in language and framework preferences over time.

I think customers of the software we build expect that the software has undergone some critical evaluation by humans before they acquire it, so it both intrigues and concerns me that so many big tech companies publicly express their lack of “testers” as some kind of badge of honour. I simply don’t understand why this is seen as a good thing and it seems to me that this trend is likely to come full (or full-ish) circle at some point when the downsides of removing specialists in testing from the development, release and deployment process outweigh the perceived benefits (not that I’m sure what these are, apart from reduced headcount and cost?).

I still believe that software testing is a good career choice. It can be intellectually challenging, varied and stimulating in the right organization. It’s certainly not getting any easier to secure roles in which you’ll spend all of your time performing exploratory testing, though, so broadening your arsenal to include some coding skills and building a good understanding of why and what makes sense to automate are likely to help you along the way to gaining meaningful employment in this industry.

You can find the first six parts of this blog series at:

Thanks again to my erstwhile review team (Paul Seaman and Ky) for their helpful feedback on this post.

Common search engine questions about testing #6: “Is software testing easy?”

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This is the sixth of a ten-part blog series in which I will answer some of the most common questions asked about software testing, according to search engine autocomplete results (thanks to Answer The Public).

In this post, I answer the question “Is software testing easy?” (and the related question, “Why is software testing so hard?”).

There exists a perception that “anyone can test” and, since testing is really just “playing with the software”, it’s therefore easy. By contrast, it seems that programming is universally viewed as being difficult. This reasoning leads people to believe that a good place to start their career in IT is as a tester, with a view to moving “up” to the more hallowed ranks of developers.

My experience suggests that many people often have no issue with trying to tell testers how to do their job, in a way that those same people wouldn’t dream of doing towards developers. This generally seems to be based on some past experience from their career when they considered themselves a tester, even if that experience is now significantly outdated and they didn’t engage in any serious work to advance themselves as testers. Such interactions are a red flag that many in the IT industry view testing as the easy part of the software development process.

The perception that testing is easy is also not helped by the existence and prevalence of the simple and easy to achieve ISTQB Foundation certification. The certification has been achieved by several hundred thousand people worldwide (the ISTQB had issued 721000+ certifications as of May 2020, with the vast majority of those likely to be at Foundation level), so it’s clearly not difficult to obtain (even without study) and has flooded the market with “testers” who have little but this certification behind them.

Thanks to Michael Bolton (via this very recent tweet) for identifying another reason why this perception exists. “Testing” is often conflated with “finding bugs” and we all know how easy it is to find bugs in the software we use every day:

There’s a reason that many people think testing is easy, due to an asymmetry. No one ever fired up a computer and stumbled into creating a slick UI or a sophisticated algorithm, but people stumble into bugs every day. Finding bugs is easy, they think. So testing must be easy.

Another unfortunate side effect of the idea that testing is easy is that testers are viewed as fungible, i.e. any tester can simply be replaced by another one since there’s not much skill required to perform the role. The move to outsource testing capability to lower cost locations then becomes an attractive proposition. I’m not going to discuss test outsourcing and offshoring in any depth here, but I’ve seen a lot of great, high value testers around the world lose their jobs due to this process of offshoring based on the misplaced notion of fungibility of testing resources.

Enough about the obvious downsides of mistakenly viewing testing as easy! I don’t believe good software testing is at all easy and hopefully my reasons for saying this will help you to counter any claims that testing (at least, testing as I talk about it) is easy work and can be performed equally well by anyone.

As a good tester, we are tasked with evaluating a product by learning about it through exploration, experimentation, observation and inference. This requires us to adopt a curious, imaginative and critical thinking mindset, while we constantly make decisions about what’s interesting to investigate further and evaluate the opportunity cost of doing so. We look for inconsistencies by referring to descriptions of the product, claims about it and within the product itself. These are not easy things to do.

We study the product and build models of it to help us make conjectures and design useful experiments. We perform risk analysis, taking into account many different factors to generate a wealth of test ideas. This modelling and risk analysis work is far from easy.

We ask questions and provide information to help our stakeholders understand the product we’ve built so that they can decide if it’s the product they wanted. We identify important problems and inform our stakeholders about them – and this is information they sometimes don’t want to hear. Revealing problems (or what might be problems) in an environment generally focused on proving we built the right thing is not easy and requires emotional intelligence & great communication skills.

We choose, configure and use tools to help us with our work and to question the product in ways we’re incapable of (or inept at) as humans without the assistance of tools. We might also write some code (e.g. code developed specifically for the purpose of exercising other code or implementing algorithmic decision rules against specific observations of the product, “checks”), as well as working closely with developers to help them improve their own test code. Using tooling and test code appropriately is not easy.

(You might want to check out Michael Bolton’s Testing Rap, from which some of the above was inspired, as a fun way to remind people about all the awesome things human testers actually do!)

This heady mix of aspects of art, science, sociology, psychology and more – requiring skills in technology, communication, experiment design, modelling, risk analysis, tooling and more – makes it clear to me why good software testing is hard to do.

In wrapping up, I don’t believe that good software testing is easy. Good testing is challenging to do well, in part due to the broad reach of subject areas it touches on and also the range of different skills required – but this is actually good news. The challenging nature of testing enables a varied and intellectually stimulating job and the skills to do it well can be learned.

It’s not easy, but most worthwhile things in life aren’t!

You can find the first five parts of this blog series at:

Thanks again to my dedicated review team (Paul Seaman and Ky) for their helpful feedback on this post. Paul’s blog, Not Everybody Can Test, is worth a read in relation to the subject matter of this post.

Common search engine questions about testing #5: “Can you automate software testing?”

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This is the fifth of a ten-part blog series in which I will answer some of the most common questions asked about software testing, according to search engine autocomplete results (thanks to Answer The Public).

As I reach the halfway point in this series, I come to the question “Can you automate software testing?” (and the related question, “How can software test automation be done?”).

If you spend any time on Twitter and LinkedIn following threads around testing, this question of whether testing can be automated crops up with monotonous regularity and often seems to result in very heated discussion, with strong opinions from both the “yes” and “no” camps.

As a reminder (from part one of this blog series), my preferred definition of testing comes from Michael Bolton and James Bach, viz.

Testing is the process of evaluating a product by learning about it through experiencing, exploring, and experimenting, which includes to some degree: questioning, study, modelling, observation, inference, etc.

Looking at this definition, testing is clearly a deeply human activity since skills such as learning, exploring, questioning and inferring are not generally those well modelled by machines (even with AI/ML). Humans may or may not be assisted by tools or automated means while exercising these skills, but that doesn’t mean that the performance of testing is itself “automated”.

The distinction drawn between “testing” and “checking” made by James Bach and Michael Bolton has been incredibly helpful for me when talking about automation and countering the idea that testing can be automated (much more so than “validation” and “verification” in my experience). As a refresher, their definition of checking is:

Checking is the process of making evaluations by applying algorithmic decision rules to specific observations of a product.

As Michael says, “We might choose to automate the exercise of some functions in a program, and then automatically compare the output of that program with some value obtained by another program or process. I’d call that a check.” Checking is a valuable component of our overall testing effort and, by this definition, lends itself to be automated. But the binary evaluations resulting from the execution of such checks form only a small part of the testing story and there are many aspects of product quality that are not amenable to such black and white evaluation.

Thinking about checks, there’s a lot that goes into them apart from the actual execution (by a machine or otherwise): someone decided we needed a check (risk analysis), someone designed the check, someone implemented the check (coding), someone decided what to observe and how to observe it, and someone evaluated the results from executing the check. These aspects of the check are testing activities and, importantly, they’re not the aspects that can be given over to a machine, i.e. be automated. There is significant testing skill required in the design, implementation and analysis of the check and its results, the execution (the automated bit) is really the easy part.

To quote Michael again:

A machine producing a bit is not doing the testing; the machine, by performing checks, is accelerating and extending our capacity to perform some action that happens as part of the testing that we humans do. The machinery is invaluable, but it’s important not to be dazzled by it. Instead, pay attention to the purpose that it helps us to fulfill, and to developing the skills required to use tools wisely and effectively.

We also need to be mindful to not conflate automation in testing with “automated checking”. There are many other ways that automation can help us, extending human abilities and enabling testing that humans cannot practically perform. Some examples of applications of automation include test data generation, test environment creation & configuration, software installation & configuration, monitoring & logging, simulating large user loads, repeating actions en masse, etc.

If we make the mistake of allowing ourselves to believe that “automated testing” exists, then we can all too easily fall into the trap of narrowing our thinking about testing to just automated checking, with a resulting focus on the development and execution of more and more automated checks. I’ve seen this problem many times across different teams in different geographies, especially so in terms of regression testing.

I think we are well served to eliminate “automated testing” from our vocabulary, instead talking about “automation in testing” and the valuable role automation can play in both testing & checking. The continued propaganda around “automated testing” as a thing, though, makes this job much harder than it sounds. You don’t have to look too hard to find examples of test tool vendors using this term and making all sorts of bold claims about their “automated testing solutions”. It’s no wonder that so many testers remain confused in answering the question about whether testing can be automated when a quick Google search got me to some of these gems within the top few results: What is automated testing? (SmartBear), Automated software testing (Atlassian) and Test Automation vs. Automated Testing: The Difference Matters (Tricentis).

I’ve only really scratched the surface of this big topic in this blog, but it should be obvious by now that I don’t believe you can automate software testing. There is often value to be gained by automating checks and leveraging automation to assist and extend humans in their testing efforts, but the real testing lies with the humans – and always will.

Some recommended reading related to this question:

The Testing and Checking Refined article by James Bach and Michael Bolton, in which the distinction between testing and checking is discussed in depth, as well as the difference between checks performed by humans and those by machines.
The Automation in Testing (AiT) site by Richard Bradshaw and Mark Winteringham, their six principles of AiT make a lot of sense to me.
Bas Dijkstra’s blog

You can find the first four parts of this blog series at: