You’ve mastered the technical skills, but why aren’t you advancing in your QA career? Joel Montvelisky, a tester, test manager and QA consultant with over 15 years of experience in the field of Quality Assurance, tackles this question in the following guest post. You can read more about Montvelisky’s views on testing, agile, training and more on his blog – QA Intelligence.
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While presenting at a recent training session to a group of testers, one of them asked me what were the most important skills I thought a tester should have in order to advance in his career.
As I had my “mentoring hat” on, I immediately asked the whole group what they thought the most important skills for testers were. They started throwing out all sorts of ideas, like analytical thinking, the ability to “read” code, knowledge of web and mobile technologies, automation, an eye for detail, etc.
I guess I should have expected that. Working as we do around programmers and engineers, the testers focused only on the hard and technical skills. And I don’t blame them either, since these skills are incredibly important. In fact, I even wrote a post about being a technical tester in my QA Blog.
But in a sense, this is also one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a tester; to focus solely on the technical skills and not develop the “softer” skills that are also vital to performing your work well.
If you look at the testers who are the most valued by your company, in addition to technical skills, they also possess a number of other skills that help them to contribute more and to distinguish themselves and their work. These are also the testers with greater chances of advancing to higher managerial positions.
Wouldn’t you want to be one of those people and have those opportunities yourself?
Well, I can’t sell you a potion for that, but I can explain the softer skills that are helping these most valuable testers, and how can you develop them too.
There are many soft skills a tester can acquire or develop, but after interacting with a large number of testing teams and development organizations, I’ve identified three skills that I believe are the most important for a tester. These 3 skills are:
- Communication skills
- Political skills
- Customer-facing skills
Communication skills
Communication skills are the single most important set of skills a tester should have – even more important than any technical skill you can think of.
By communication, I don’t mean only the ability to write a clear test case or an informative bug; it goes much further than that.
Communication starts with the ability to listen to what other people are saying and to translate that information into action.
In a QA Blog post I published in the past called, “Of Testers & Soldiers” I likened the role of testing to that of an intelligence officer’s in the army whose task is to seek information from multiple and scattered sources, and then piece it all together in order to map out a complete plan of risks and actions for his commanders or managers. This can only be done if you are able to both listen and process the information quickly and effectively.
An additional aspect of communication is the ability to transmit your message clearly and in a way that will encourage your audience to listen to what you have to say. As an old colleague of mine once told me, “We are all salespeople. Some of us sell cars, others sell ideas.”
We testers sell ideas – in the form of bugs and testing results that reflect the actual status of our product and our projects. If our audience (the rest of the company) is not willing to listen to what we have to say – or to buy what we have to sell – then we are not doing our jobs effectively.
Political skills
Some people incorrectly believe that saying a person has “political skills” is a polite way of saying he is lazy and devious and always on the lookout for the first opportunity to advance himself on the backs of other people who are doing the real work.
In a way I can understand why they think so (we all read about politics in the government and how “clean” they can be), but these are not the “political skills” I’m referring to.
Let’s start by understanding that every group of people (especially a company) works under formal and informal political norms, and these norms dictate the way the group works, its values and even its objectives.
Political skills help a person understand these norms and how they dynamically influence the priorities of the company and with it, the daily work of the team. Their effective use enables you to make the distinction between things such as what is important to test ASAP in order to provide urgent information, and what is currently less important and should be tested at a later date.
Political skills can also help you get things done “your way.” For example, if you have a number of bugs that you think need to be fixed for the current version, but can’t manage to convince your development to fix them, these skills can be used to find the right person in management who does agree with you about the urgency and also has enough clout to make sure the bugs get fixed in time.
Customer-facing skills
This final soft skill builds on both communication and political skills and allows you to appropriately interact with customers while making sure you still protect the interests of your company in the process (or, in other words, that you don’t mess up while talking to your users…)
It’s well-known that testers are perceived as the customer advocates within the development team, but it is interesting to understand why it’s important to really interact with your users as part of your regular work.
Interacting with customers will help you, as a tester, to do a better job of defining your work based on their real-use cases.
It will also allow you to prioritize your issues by understanding the aspects of your users’ work that are more important, and those that are less so.
Finally, given that you’ll attain a better understanding of how your users actually work when they interact with your product, you’ll also understand risks better and provide feedback on the decisions made as part of your development process.
Unfortunately, many engineers and testers do not know how to effectively communicate and work with real clients, and here is where customer-facing skills come into play.
Working on a balanced skill set
Don’t get me wrong, as I said before technical skills are some of the most important skills you should have as a tester, but I think many young testers underestimate the importance of the softer skills I discuss here.
The key is to work on achieving a balanced mix of all your skills and to focus on developing or strengthening your weaker skills.
Combining technical skills with softer skills will make you a better tester and as a result, you’ll be able to provide even more value to your team, to your project, and to your company.