Have your manager or HR told you directly or
indirectly that your performance has problem? That really is a bad news, which
I hope will never happen to me. But if it unfortunately happened, please take
it very seriously as you were being viewed as unqualified to your position.
Maybe things are not going that bad. Let’s
say there is an interview you are to participate. Of course, you want to win
out from all the competitors, so it will definitely help if you know how HR
evaluates a candidate.
Both stories are leading to one same
question. What are the key factors that affect people’s performance?
I had thought into this question, and from my
experiences in software testing I got to a conclusion that there are 3 factors:attitude, knowledge and skill. To my surprise, I found by chance that
the 3 factors are commonly used by HR to analyze people performance as well.
Attitude
Attitude is everything.
Basically, software testing is not a job only
genius can apply for, nor only Doctor or Master. So with a right attitude in
work, very possibly the performance will never be a problem of you. Try
answering questions below.
1.Do you show your passion in work?
2.Are you self-motivated most of the
time?
3.What’s your reaction when meeting with
problems?
4.Do you run a case at the N time with
same patience as the first time you see it?
5.…
The saying “Attitude is everything” cannot be
emphasized too much for a QA engineer, especially for juniors.
Knowledge
Better you understand a product, better you
can test it.
Try to understand the feature and technologies
related to the feature before you start testing it. This not only benefits your
current testing, but also benefits your career as your knowledge base is hence strengthened
and enlarged.
In terms of personal knowledge base, I think
the key point is you have to form. a habit of documenting any valuable thing
into somewhere you can easily look up later, and with your own words. A wiki
system is the best tool you can leverage.
Skill
In my opinion, for software testing, skills
are not essential, that means it’s better to have them so that you can do
faster, but if you haven’t, you can still get your job done. For example,
scripting skill can reduce the time creating 1000 files significantly, but if
you don’t know it, you can still get it done with copy+paste.
To me, the main part of QA engineer’s skill
set is utilizing tools. Shell is a great tool you can utilize if you are doing
testing under linux/unix. Mastering an advanced editor, Vim, Emacs or UE,
sometimes may speed up the operation 10 times over with only pool Notepad. Believe
me, any time you think a tool should be invented to release you out from a
boring work, the exact tool must have been invented out there. All you need to
do is to find it.
