My comeback after a year break!

Its really exciting to me to be back on my blogging track nearly after

year and a half break.

In this 1.5 year, I see remarkable changes in Quality field in general

and overall. Quality has taken a new ride in the market. Its got all

the attention and maturity. During this past 1.5 years, I learned many

things, added many skills to my database, and what I observed out

of my own experience is that

1) I should not have got stuck to the same industry for greater length

unless I was very aware of the current IT trend wrt to QA skill demands
2) I learned that I should not be very narrow minded and specific about

the domain and kind of job which I want to do, once I am active in

expoloring career opportunities.
3) You should have really really very broad view of the entire QA tools

available in the current market and be open to experiment on new things.
4) Its going to be tough life, if you've tagged yourself to "a" particular

role such as just black-box or front-end or general QA or just coding QE

Some of the testing tools which are booming in the current product/

developmental/application/services IT industry are:

* Mostly, open source tools such as JSunit, htmlunit, Selenium, are fast

catching up because of its cost-effective approach and the flexibility to

deal with various new technologies such as AJAX, JS etc.

* First and a still front runner is Mercury/Rational Tools which is

widely accepted.

* Second most is home grown automation methodologies and infracture.

This is more customized because, most of the licensed or open source

tools that are currently available in today's market are very specific in

automating only "a" particular task while organizations or each team's

automation requirement might be oriented in covering a subset of tasks

which would obviously require the QA to come up with or write own

code/script to encapsulate the tasks intended for Automation.

* One has to know some scripting language compulsorily such as

Perl/Python or shell of which Python and shell script are count a lot

and is a big plus to your resume.

So on an ending I would suggest its very important for a QA to be

unbinded any particular role, to know as much tools and automation terms

as possible relating to the industry that they would like to pursue their

career. Be open minded in experimenting new technology and new domain.

Be front runner with on what the current IT market is running.

Make it as an continuous process improvement towards your

tools/scripting/QA knowledge base.

Any additional effort towards certifications such as CSQA/ SQA /

CSQE/ SQE from various and international institutions helps keep

you updated with QA/QE flow. Important part is to re-visit the

portions on a regular basis or regular brush up on the theortical rules.

It comes in handy at times and most of the time during our daily

day-to-day activities where we could adopt theories or experiment them.


Good luck and Happy testing!