A colleague asked me one morning how his friend could go about getting started in the field of Software testing. Thanks to his astute note taking, here is the list I had apparently provided.
Take the Online courses at the Association of Software Testing:
Testing – Black Box Software testing is approximately $200 course that you can take online that will give you a good overview of the “Context-Driven School of Testing” which is the direction many companies are moving towards.
Start learning these technologies for Automation:
Selenium - http://www.seleniumhq.org/
You can use the Selenium IDE http://www.seleniumhq.org/download/ to record your actions on a web page and it will auto-generate code based off of that. This is just to get started and familiar, then code on your own after that.
WATIR - http://watir.com/
JMeter - http://jmeter.apache.org/ Can be used for performance testing, API testing, and DB testing.
You can use BadBoy http://www.badboy.com.au/ to record your actions in java and it will auto-generate code based off of that that you can use as a base. Note that BadBoy is Windows only and may not currently be maintained
XPath - http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/
For gaining testing experience:
If you want to try testing to see if you would like it, you can sign up at http://www.applause.com/ or http://www.utest.com/ or https://testlio.com/ and get real testing assignments that you can get paid for on the side. A good way to learn testing and see if you enjoy it.
You can also play with some test puzzles at http://www.testing-challenges.org/tiki-index.php
For networking:
There is also this one: http://www.meetup.com/Austin-Software-Test-Automation-Group/
and this one: http://www.meetup.com/Austin-Selenium-Meetup/
There is also one he mentioned that is run by one of the QA leads Ben Rogers - http://www.agileaustin.org/category/agile-austin-events/qa-sig-north/
He did suggest to talk to some people in the industry to see what it is really like and would be more than happy to share the good and the dark side of software testing so you know what it is like before you get into it.
Longer term things:
To Read
Book - Agile Testing
Book - More Agile Testing
Book - Lessons Learned in Software Testing
Book - Perfect Software (and other illusions about testing)
Book - Explore It
Join the JMeter mailing list: http://jmeter.apache.org/mail.html
Join the Selenium mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/selenium-users
Long list of blogs
For training:
Any courses along the lines of Context-Driven School of Testing are good to read
Austin Community College may offer a software testing set of courses (he’s not sure how specific or helpful these may be)
US Military veterans should try the course provided by Bridge360 - http://www.bridge360.com/v4qlanding.shtml
Happy Testing!
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