This article is about career planning software quality control testing, including defining career milestones within software testing. It is a helpful guide for beginners and others working in the field.
About Software Quality Control
Software Quality control is the process of testing the application's output according to the defined inputs and comparing them with the expected results.
The quality control team helps to improve the quality by testing and confirming that all the requirements are fulfilled in the delivered application.
Testing should be done in each phase in the life cycle for any application, testing the requirements, testing the design, testing the code, testing the functionality and finally testing the user acceptance.
The Quality control or verification is the checking or testing of items, for conformance and consistency with the defined specification. While Quality assurance or validation is the process of checking that what has been specified is what is actually wanted.
About Career Planning
Career planning is the process which includes choosing an occupation, getting a job, growing in your job, possible changing careers and eventually retiring.
As a start figuring out who you are will guide you to a better career decision.
Self assessment help figuring out who you are which is the process of gathering information about your self including skills, interests, likes, dislikes, strengths and weaknesses.
The knowledge you gain from the personal interests, attitude and values reports (self assessment) will help you:
- Take control of your decisions, your life direction./li>
- Appreciation of the others.
- Gain flexibility of being able to see life from different view points.
- Increase your satisfaction and fulfillment in life.
- Aiding in setting your career goal.
Other assistances to set your career goal are by listing some of the following:
- What you hope to accomplish
- Aspects of activities you like and dislike
- Skills you have developed through education, jobs, hobbies, volunteer work, clubs and employee organizations.
- Training you had that can be applied to future jobs
- Personal time and effort you are willing to commit to preparing for career advancement
- Supporting courses that are needed
Finally the career planning process can be simplified with an assessment of your own "SWOT":
S: Strengths
W: Weaknesses
O: Opportunities
T: Threats
Inside Quality Control
Within your Quality Control career years, you will gain or improve a lot of skills & techniques. Whatever skills you have born or grow within you, you can learn other skills. Some of the important skills are:
1. Customer Service communication
Learn to deal with all kind of external customers regardless their technical knowledge. Self control against their needs rejects or complaints. Ability to drive technical requirements out of customer needs and desires.
2. Team communication
Learn how to deal within the same team member, member of other teams or leaders. Communicating such things as to provide clear picture of any change happened and sharing the change information with other team members.
3. Technical writing
Ability to effectively present information, write speeches and articles for publication that conform to prescribed style and format. Learning guidelines of how to write a clear, simple and direct writing to all kind of recipients technical or non technical.
4. Time management
The purpose is not to learn to effectively use the official and personal time. Everyone has 24 hours a day. Some can do more things than others within the same time available.
5. Technical knowledge
Even with a non IT background you can learn and start your quality control career path. Essential things to grow faster in your QC career:
- Testing methodologies.
- Testing types.
- Technical knowledge about the application you are working on (web-based, banking...security).
- Standards, methodologies applicable on the application you are working on.
- Creating test plans.
- Develop system document, system architecture.
- Ability to create and read design drawing.
- Familiarity with software programming.
- Software life cycle.
- Testing and developing tools.
- Database and SQL basics.
6. Leadership
As a leader you should have:
- Diplomatic skills to deal with the team which will create a better working environment that will:
- Improve employee creativity.
- Increase their responsibility.
- Comfort employee to give their opinions and discuss them.
- Good judgment for hiring employee and keeping skilled people
- Ability to focus in all system process and details
- Ability to prioritize the working plan
- Control to run meetings and keep attendances focused as cross-functional meetings
- Influencing and persuading skills to drive changes to team member
7. Judgment skills
Used when testing and with defect tracking. Also used by a leader as for assessing high risk areas of an application, time planning, cost effectiveness and production efficiency.
Other personal improvement
In addition to the above skills you can develop:
- Flexibility, openness, ready to give and accept feedback.
- Courage to take decision when there is a critical situation with no time for discussion
- Problem solving, mathematic and statistical skills
- Intellectual stimulation and logical/ lateral thinking methods
About the Author
Sondos Shana'ah is a systems analyst and Taghreed Hajbi is a senior quality analyst with Aspire Services (www.aspire-services.net). You can contact them via email [email protected] or [email protected].
