Everyone has a career point when they feel burnt out, or their current duties become boring. Personally, I think there is nothing worse than a bored QA at work, the reason is very simple, QA should be inquisitive by nature, it helps to find problems but more importantly, prevents them.
So, how not get bored as QA at work and take care of career development?
If you are a QA that is not programming and doesn’t know basic DevOps things, that is an excellent point to start your development. Manual testers/QAs are needed but the future at some point will require more automation engineers with the QA mindset, and the ability to set up new test environments as well as pipelines. Understanding the programming will open you to new ways of testing as you will start to understand the code written by developers, and you will be able to point to the root cause of the issue.
Bring a new quality to your bug reports, everyone knows what the bug description should look like, but how many QAs are trying to put there more than the template? When you found a bug try to do the previously mentioned root cause analysis and include these details in the report. In that way, you will get extra knowledge about the app you are testing, and for sure developers will love you more.
Make test reports great. Usually, when I see a typical test report, it is so monotonous (unless you will see a prod bug there). Personally, I don’t like when QAs treat the test reports as a document, which is only output from the tests, remember, we are doing it for a purpose. Do you know there are great libraries for the graphical presentation of the data? Why not use them? Add more colors, play with the data, and make sure your team loves test reports.
Did you know that we have so many project patterns which can be used for test automation setup, so you don’t have to stick with one or two for your all projects? We tend to use things we know, which also applies when setting up automation, as a result of that we don’t choose the best option for the project, continuously using the same patterns etc. Next time before you will be designing an automation framework explore what’s in the QA world, maybe in your case a better option will consider two approaches and create something custom, or just pick up a totally new design pattern. Just explore.
Take ownership. Don’t stick with the same things over and over, be proactive and try to put yourself into new initiatives etc., As QAs we have a great opportunity to try something new really often, we are a bridge between product and development teams, which gives a thousand of new challenges.
Analyze the QA process continuously. Let’s say you have a setup of the QA process in your team/company. That’s great, but after some time you start to notice that number of bugs is increasing and work is not going smoothly as previous. What happened then? Maybe some processes have been updated in the meantime, but you didn’t consider how this will impact the current QA process? Maybe the product you are working on just reached the next level? There are so many things that can affect the QA process, trust me, you will never get bored once you realize it. QA process is like a child, it’s changing, needs a lot of attention, your time, and drawing conclusions.
Take a step back, and get rest. Being a QA is not easy, there’s no option that you will be a superhero/bug buster all the time. Even the best need to take a rest, and then read that article again.
As you can see, there are so many ways you can bring yourself to the next QA level and never get bored, just take a chance.
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