5 Non-Technical & Technical Skills Required by Every QA

Non-Technical Skills

The following skills are essential to become a good Software quality tester. Compare your skill set against the following checklist to determine whether Software Testing is a reality for you-

Analytical skills

A good software tester should have sharp analytical skills. Analytical skills will help break up a complex software system into smaller units to gain a better understanding and create test cases. Not sure that you have good analytical skills. Refer to this link, if you can solve at least 1 problem, you have excellent analytical skills.

Communication skill

A good software tester must have good verbal and written communication skills. Testing artifacts (like test cases/plans, test strategies, bug reports, etc.) created by the software tester should be easy to read and comprehend. Dealing with developers (in the event of bugs or any other issue) will require a shade of discreetness and diplomacy.

Time Management & Organization Skills

Testing at times could be a demanding job, especially during the release of code. A software tester must efficiently manage workload, have high productivity, exhibit optimal time management, and organization skills

Great Attitude

To be a good software tester, you must have a Great attitude. An attitude to ‘test to break’, detail orientation, willingness to learn, and suggest process improvements. In the software industry, technologies evolve with an overwhelming speed, and a good software tester should upgrade his/her technical Software testing skills with the changing technologies. Your attitude must reflect a certain degree of independence, where you take ownership of the task allocated and complete it without much direct supervision.

Passion

To Excel in any profession or job, one must have a significant degree of passion for it. A software tester must have a passion for his / her field. But how do you determine whether you have a passion for software testing if you have never tested before? Simple, Try it out and if software testing does not excite you, switch to something else that holds your interest.

Technical Skills

This list is long, so please bear with us

Basic knowledge of Database/ SQL

Software Systems have a large amount of data in the background. This data is stored in different types of databases like Oracle, MySQL, etc. in the backend. So, there will be situations when this data needs to be validated. In that case, simple/complex SQL queries can be used to check whether proper data is stored in the backend databases.

Basic knowledge of Linux commands

Most of the software applications like Web-Services, Databases, and Application Servers are deployed on Linux machines. So it is crucial for testers to have knowledge about Linux commands.

Knowledge and hands-on experience of a Test Management Tool

Test Management is an important aspect of Software testing. Without proper test management techniques, the software testing process will fail. Test management is nothing but managing your testing-related artifacts. For example — A tool like Testlink can be used for tracking all the test cases written by your team.

There are other tools available that can be utilized for Test Management. So, it is important to have knowledge and working experience with such tools because they are used in most companies.

Knowledge and hands-on experience of any Defect Tracking tool

Defect Tracking and Defect life cycle are key aspects of software testing. It is extremely critical to manage defects properly and track them systematically. Defect tracking becomes necessary because the entire team should know about the defect, including managers, developers, and testers. Several tools are used to log defects including QC, Bugzilla, Jira, etc.

Knowledge and hands-on experience with Automation tool

If you see yourself as an “Automation tester” after a couple of years of working on manual testing, then you must master a tool and get in-depth, hands-on knowledge of automation tools.

Note — Only knowledge of any Automation tool is not sufficient to crack the interview, you must have good hands-on experience, so practice the tool of your choice to achieve mastery.

Knowledge of any scripting language like VBScript, JavaScript, C# is always helpful as a tester if you are looking for a job in automation. Few companies also use Shell/Perl scripting, and there is a lot of demand for testers with the same knowledge. Again, it will depend on the company and which tools are used by that company.