Some people say: Software testing is the lowest level of work. Some people say: When the salary of testing jobs reaches a certain level, it can only stay where it is and cannot be improved. Others say: Compared with development, the testing industry is very low-tech and can be easily replaced.
This is actually the biggest misunderstanding about the testing industry. Testing can be deep or shallow, narrow or broad. There are very few outstanding tests. Many people who talk about testing can’t actually mention a few bugs.
Zhihu respondent Chen Fuxuan has been working as a tester at Microsoft for six years. He summarized the several stages of testers. You can see which stage you are in.
Although I have switched to development now, I have been in this industry for six years after all, so it seems that I still have the opportunity to speak here.
At first, I came into contact with testing purely by accident. When Microsoft came to our school for interviews, only those who did testing were willing to take me. But after doing it for a while, I gradually fell in love with this position. Let me talk about some of my past experiences.
Just like development, experienced and inexperienced testers play very different roles on the team. Judging from the actions taken when encountering problems during testing, I have observed that the testers can reach roughly the following levels:
1. Open a bug;
2. Find some additional information such as design documents and history to determine whether this is a problem, and then provide detailed steps to reproduce the bug;
3. Refine the reproduction steps and determine the minimum steps that can reproduce the bug; if possible, automate the reproduction steps;
4. Try to identify the problem by studying the code;
5. Try to provide a fix;
6. Analyze the causes of errors and propose some standardized methods to detect similar problems, such as stress, fuzzing, etc.;
7. Being able to define corresponding data analysis methods for standardized testing processes can ensure that developers and project managers can obtain the information they need to control quality status.
So what is our goal as a tester?
My goal for myself is to get from level 1 to level 4 for all the bugs I control, and in at least two cases I've even been able to get to level 6.
I have been at Microsoft for more than six years, and in many departments I have seen tests that always reach level 7. No one dares to say that their skills are incompetent if they can test in this state.
For developers, if you have someone around you who can perform Level 4 testing on most bugs, I believe the development work will be much easier.
Even catching bugs is divided into many types.
Catching a group of monkeys to randomly click twice on the keyboard is a test, and carefully advancing step by step through various technical means (code coverage, stress testing, security analysis, etc.) is also a test.
As a technician, which one do you trust?
I think most people would choose the latter, but I would say that in practice many test teams unknowingly end up doing the former.
Why? Because the testers don’t understand the design of the product, they will instinctively choose the easiest thing to do. But ask them: How many have you tested? How high is your confidence? They were all dumbfounded.
I’m not saying monkey testing is meaningless: on the contrary, it can uncover many blind spots in our thinking. But if your entire team lives entirely on monkey testing, there’s absolutely no way it’s going to give you a result you can trust.
Then the readers will inevitably ask, how many such big-name tests and big-name teams are there?
Unfortunately, speaking from personal experience, the fact is that among the testers I meet, it is not uncommon for testers who can only do level 1 at best.
Testers who can achieve 3 are considered quite good by many people. As for teams with multiple expert testers, it is really rare (the proportion at Microsoft headquarters is much higher).
Yes, don’t be surprised, this is what happens to me at work. But please note that this does not mean that the company is spending money to support waste, but that without professional testing education, it will inevitably lead to the current situation in the early stages of entering the industry. We all start from this state, and we all need time to make progress.
Some people may also ask: Isn’t this to compete with developers for work? Yes, that's right. But why can't we grab it?
What is our purpose? Is it to open bugs or to make better products? If your entire purpose is to open more bugs, it's really simple.
As a real example, I once saw a colleague open a bug in the test automation code as a product bug. His theory is that no matter what the bug is, open it first and then decide whether it is a product problem, a test code problem or even an environmental problem. Any malfunction can be alleviated, and he is not responsible for pointing out the cause anyway.
In fact, it is rude to ask a colleague to do this or that, but this style of doing nothing and opening bugs first is delaying the work of all colleagues.
As a member of the team, the extra time the test spends on the product can sometimes save several days of development work, because the tester is the person most familiar with the bug, while the development needs to analyze it from scratch.
——Of course, development should also try to bring testing into the development process so that everyone knows the details of the progress of various functions. This collaboration can also significantly reduce the time it takes for testers to redesign use cases when product design changes.
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Software Testing Interview Document
We must study to find a high-paying job. The following interview questions are from the latest interview materials from first-tier Internet companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Byte, etc., and some Byte bosses have given authoritative answers. After finishing this set I believe everyone can find a satisfactory job based on the interview information.
