Ultimate Learn Guide on How to become an Entry Level Software Tester

Software testing provides the stakeholders with a complete report about the quality of the product or service developed. The primary purpose of testing is to minimize defects to avoid situations such as loss of money, time, and damage to the reputation, thus improving the product's performance. Software testing processes include eight stages: Test Planning, Test Monitoring and Control, Test Analysis, Test Design, Test Implementation, Test Execution, and Test Completion. Quality Assurance is different from testing. Testing is about finding as many defects in a system as possible. QA includes ensuring that the activities and designs match the expectation levels of stakeholders.

Types of Software Testing 
 

Software Testing can be classified into two types:

• Manual Testing: It includes manually testing software, i.e., without utilizing any automation tool or writing. In this type, the tester carries over the part of an end-user and tests the software to determine any unexpected behavior or bug. There are distinct phases for manual testing, such as integration testing, system testing, unit testing, and user acceptance testing. Testers employ test plans, test cases, or test scenarios to test software to assure the completeness of testing. Manual testing contains exploratory testing, as testers explore the software to identify errors.
• Automation Testing: Automation testing, also understood as Test Automation, is when the tester notes scripts and employs another software to test the product. This procedure involves the automation of a manual method. Automation Testing is utilized to re-run the test scenarios fast and is frequently performed manually in manual testing.

While the job profile of a software tester is various, the primary role is to constantly test the software to catch any errors, that is, the existence of bugs, and report them to annihilate poor performance and interface issues. To do this, they have to conduct multiple tests at diverse stages of the software development life cycle. Some elements included in the test are performance, operative scalability, and user performance.

Here are some basic duties for the role: 

• Composing and writing both manual testing and automation testing process.
• Running tests, analyzing results, and reporting on any issues and anomalies.
• Ensure complete testing in all phases of SDLC – Design, Develop, Test, Release and Maintain.
• Analyzing and studying system specifications.
• Reporting technical issues and errors discovered during the exploratory testing.
• Performing regression testing whenever there are any modifications made to the code.
• Cooperate with Developers and other team members and schedule review meetings.
• Assuring comprehensive software quality.

Software Tester Salary & Career Growth

The compensation of a software tester varies from company to company. The average salary range of a software tester in the US is $45,993 – $74,935. The average entry level software testing career package in India is Rs 247,315 – Rs 449,111. The salaries listed above may differ depending on the skills, technical knowledge, and domain. Besides this, your career graph in software testing will go into 5 step hierarchy (but it may vary from company to company); let’s look at them:

• QA Analyst – I (Fresher)
• Sr. QA Analyst – II (Years of experience > 2)
• QA Team Coordinator (Years of experience > 5)
• Manager – QA (Experience > 8y)
• Senior Manager – QA (Experience > 12y)
• Architect – QA (16+ years of experience)
• Principle QA (18+ years of experience)

The ever-evolving digital domain presents bountiful prospects for software testers to thrive in their career. According to the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, the demand for computer system analysts, including software testers and software qa tester, has reached $40 million and is expected to grow by around 9% than the average rate by 2026.

With the rapid increase in digitization, the demand for software testers has risen. Since software testing is used to determine the usability and quality of the final product, the demand is bound to rise in the future too. As a software tester, your job is to identify as many bugs in the system as possible to make it up to the mark.

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