He worked hard for the money.....

...he worked hard for the money....

Just had a conversation with a fellow-tester the other day around what a tester gets to do for the money.

I was telling him that a friend of mine works as a senior QA and wants to change to a QA lead role because he’s tired of knowing more than most of the managers who’s worked with and not having the authority to take decisions. Another reason was that he would be paid much more money and he thought it was worth it.

Harold told me he is very confident that he will get a QA lead position because his resume is impressive, he’s worked with major financial companies and he also has some experience working as a Business Analyst, which was definitely an asset.

Then my fellow-tester asked me if Harold knew what a QA lead position involved in reality. Project managers will come and haunt him for statuses every morning and afternoon, he would have to write plans and strategies in different formats because one manager likes Visio and another one likes Word; then he would have to justify decisions to people who don’t know anything about testing and sometimes he would even have to do the project manager’s job! Not to mention being a “delivery slave”, meaning being on the barricades, helping with implementations while others have a good night sleep!
…….

I realized that I have to have a discussion with Harold and find out if he knew all this stuff. Did he know what he was getting into?

........
I’ll let you know what Harold did.

Photo Credits: Katie Dureault on flickr.com - thanks!

Course Feedback Part 1

As I was mentioning in the last post, every Friday I will post an entry where I comment the feedback that I got from the participants to my QA course. The course ran for 1 month, 4 consecutive Saturdays, with 18 participants.

Participants were sent a feedback form and asked to return the form by email after the end of the course.

The feedback form included questions from 3 categories:
1. Quality of Instruction
2. Quality of the course materials and value of the course
3. A number of specific questions where participants expressed their opinions freely.

The form was completed using the following scale: from 1 to 5 with 1 being the lowest (not at all) and 5 being the highest (exceptional).

1. Quality of Instruction
This category included questions about the instructor’s level of knowledge, planning, organization and communication of the material, as well as the availability and willingness to help or answer questions.
The feedback was very positive for this category, participants marked Very good (scale 4) and Exceptional (scale 5).

2. Quality of the course materials and value of the course
Here participants were asked to mark effectiveness of the course materials, usefulness of the take-home materials, how much they’ve learned in this course and how they will apply the newly gained knowledge and practical skills in the future.
Lots of people marked Very good and Exceptional and a few marked Satisfactory (scale 3).


The participants to this course had different backgrounds, with the majority having education in Finances and Engineering and some of them already working as QAs/Bas.

The course was designed for those who didn’t have any QA knowledge and the material was presented as such.

Those who were working in the QA field already knew most of the testing concepts presented but they found out new stuff in the workshop/job search skills part of the course.
In the end it got balanced nicely, the discussions generated were great; QAs were sharing their experience and so everybody was happy.

Would you consider a career switch to software testing in the near future?

Photo credits:
eddiehosa on Flickr.com