The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Best Testing Specialists

When introducing a new software product, it’s essential to make it as glitch-free. The applications must deliver high software quality and perform seamlessly to make the customers happy.

However, all of this is difficult unless you have a competent team of testing specialists in your company. Hiring a software testing specialist belonging to a quality assurance company can deliver you the skill and expertise needed to eliminate all underlying issues in software.

The experience of these testing specialists can even outperform your in-house employees. Nevertheless, the software testing market is saturated with thousands of available options and finding the right skilled testing specialist is never easy. In this article, we will discuss some general tips for hiring the best testing specialists and decreasing the risk of software failure.

Table of Contents

1. Who are Testing Specialists?
2. What Skills or Qualities Are Needed to Become a Good Testing Specialist?
3. How to Hire the Best Testers
4. Why It Is Better to Use Outsourcing Testing Specialists
5. How PFLB Testing Specialists Can Help You Maximize Software Quality

Who are Testing Specialists?

As an integral part of the software development process, software testing specialists are responsible for developing test plans, evaluating, and ensuring the quality of software components.

Most of their duty involves detecting major software flaws such as errors, software failures, breakdowns, bugs, and potential risks that may affect software performance in the future. They also inform testing managers regarding any improvements required in the system.

Other times, testing specialists oversee customer sites for identifying functional software defects and even support product documentation through technical support and edit user manuals. This means that they have to edit and support product configuration documents.

Aside from tracking and analyzing issues in the bug tracking system, testing specialists also review reports for accuracy and determine discrepancies. In the end, the insight given by their testing and analysis gives essential guidelines to entire teams of software designers and developers.

Unless testing specialists identify inherent problems in a software product, these issues often seep into the production environment and become a permanent part of the product. Resolving those errors and trying to fix them later results in exponentially high costs and cut the profit of these solutions entirely.

What Skills or Qualities Are Needed to Become a Good Testing Specialist?

A testing specialist needs to have a number of skills to become a good testing specialist. A suitable candidate must excel at both functional and non-functional aspects of testing, have in-depth knowledge of business software, and stay aware of ever-changing trends that drive businesses. Similarly, the personal traits of every candidate are as important as any other thing.

Developing Effective Tests

If a testing specialist does not know how to design effective tests, he or she cannot succeed as a professional. When creating a test, the testing specialist needs to finalize what information he or she will use, how will it be utilized information in the test, and which conditions can cause the test to fail.

Therefore, testing specialists have to be extremely careful in identifying their test goals. They have to keep test concurrency, scheduling, and arrival rates in mind when making tests. Furthermore, it’s also necessary to consider the role of capacity, reliability, scalability in quality assurance.

Technical Knowledge of Complex Systems

Not many people have the ability to accurately understand and interpret how each component of a modern system of software works. Therefore, we have to depend on the abstraction of systems and subject experts to help us interpret complex problems. For testing specialists, the ability to understand complex systems clearly is essential.

They need to learn how to make sense of complex system environments such as shared resources, CPU memory, web components, storage and distributed networks. At the same time, they must have a clear understanding of test and production environments such as cloud, containers, configuration, and virtualization management.

Being Able to Automate Scripts and Tests

Unless you have foundational scripting knowledge, it’s difficult to customize and build effective load tests. Although there are various testing tools that provide rapid test development and reduce the need to code, you must know how to code to tailor the testing procedures according to your needs.

Aside from that, being able to automate scripts and testing procedures helps testing specialists to measure dynamic content and parameters. It also assists them in understanding naming conventions and transaction measurements.

Estimating Load Management

Among various duties of a testing specialist, testing applications for load management is essential. They have to create initial parameters of the load test for the testing procedure. Unless testers they model load test data accurately, the application can crash when exposed to a live environment.

This is why it’s necessary for testing specialists to detect transactions and workloads and calculate a reliable estimation of TPS rates. At the same time, they must know how to monitor production, run queries, and log file analysis.

To model loads precisely testing specialists must understand the estimation of both subject experts and stakeholders. After that, the testing specialist needs to validate these assumptions with the help of data from monitoring systems and logs.

Since it’s impossible to include every activity in your load test, the testing specialist must include the majority of critical and high-volume activities. Doing so is critical for saving the application from crashing in the live environment.

Personal Traits

A Creative Mind

A creative mind helps software testers to consider things beyond what the requirements spelled out. Test professionals must think way beyond what to expect from the software or its users. Having a creative mind will enable tester estimate and test how users might interact with the application. Creativity is an asset when testers need to identify situations where the software may fail and also cases where users can misuse the software.

Intellectual Curiosity

Intellectual curiosity motivates the tester to seek explore different aspects of the software he or she is testing. This helps the testers identify and resolve issues that others may fail to see.

Self-Confidence

Having confidence in oneself is something that fuels Intellectual curiosity and helps testing specialists perform more in-depth testing. Unless you are confident of your abilities, it can be difficult to evaluate untouched aspects of the system and perform tests comprehensively.

Since people in the testing team may have different opinions on which test to prioritize, testing specialists can fail to do their job properly unless they show self-confidence.

Being Adamant

Being adamant is also an important trait of any testing specialist. It helps testers to pursue an error persistently until it is reported, reproduced, and resolved by the developers. Ad hoc tests can be extremely complex given that it’s difficult to reproduce errors occurring without clear instructions. However, a good testing specialist remains adamant and never gives up.

Diplomacy Counts

Being adamant and stubborn will not get you very far unless you have some decent diplomacy skills. Conveying to a client that something couldn’t be done in a certain way or making developers understand where they lagged requires excellent people skills. Unless testing specialist has a shade of diplomacy and discreteness, they cannot succeed much.

How to Hire the Best Testers

Hiring testing specialists helps software teams ensure software quality and performance. However, since the market is saturated with countless testing professionals, it’s often difficult to find the right talent for the job. Here are a few things you can consider consulting the best testers.

ISTQB Certification and Experience

International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) is a certification that validates a candidate’s experience of testing software. Certified testing specialists have a deep knowledge of software development. Therefore, if someone has this qualification chances are that they will be a good match for your company.

Adaptability

When you are looking for an outsourced QA testing service, you need to make sure that they adept at handling unexpected changes. Changing requirements, missing testing records, variations in testing plans, and the management of regression errors can disrupt the flow of work and make testing even harder.

Experienced testing services have the relevant experience and skill to employ automated procedures and deal with these issues expertly. They can use their experience in previous projects to take care of unforeseen problems and continue working in an ever-changing atmosphere.

Experience of Multiple Testing Platforms

The world is becoming mobile-first and software products need to be tested on various platforms and browsers to ensure that they work well in all situations. Your testing team needs to have experience in all testing platforms to perform testing effectively.

Experience in Different Types of Testing

A skilled testing specialist needs to have some sort of experience in different facets of software and its functions. The ideal candidate needs to be familiar with how to test e-commerce websites effectively and even perform localization testing for an application or website.

Apply Best Practices for Security

Security is vital from a business standpoint, and it is a necessary component of software testing. A testing specialist should be aware of all the best practices and data security strategies. A knowledgeable testing specialist is an asset for a software team and hiring such a candidate will give a boost to the testing capabilities of your team.

Why It Is Better to Use Outsourcing Testing Specialists

Experience in the Testing Industry

Software testing is an extremely technical process and needs to be done thoroughly and with great attention to detail. However, if a testing service does not have relevant experience in testing, it is difficult for them to detect all hidden problems comprehensively.

Oftentimes, testing services don’t have the technical experience to back up their expertise. As a result, their inexperience in software testing causes them to overlook certain issues. Ultimately, trusting these services bears a greater risk of software failure.

This is why it is necessary to make sure that the software testing service is proficient and has relevant technical experience. At the same time, you should consider the company’s portfolio and look at how they performed in a similar project. Looking at these factors can give you a fair idea of their experience in a given scenario.

Less Effort Needed in Management

When you opt for an external team for testing, you don’t need to invest time and effort in hiring and training. Furthermore, when the testing phase starts, the testing team will not need your direct supervision to execute critical tasks needed.

Instead, the team will manage the testing procedure on their own and identify bugs independently. As a result, managers have more time to spend on other critical tasks. Therefore, they will be able to address customer requirements more comprehensively.

Efficient Workflow

When you try to merge the development and testing team, it is hard for them to detect problems and address them efficiently. First, developers checking their own code, tend to be lenient on the mistakes they make while coding. Therefore, they can address their problems effectively.

Besides that, if your development has to bear the additional tasks of finding bugs, it is harder for them to concentrate on their core competency. Overburdening programmers like this leads to inefficient codes, which in turn creates more bugs. Outsourcing testing specialists can get rid of this problem and make the testing procedure more efficient.

Lower Infrastructure Costs

To set up a complete software testing environment, you need to invest a significant amount in infrastructure. The capital investment of buying hardware and software testing tools can exponentially increase the overall cost of the project and make it less profitable. On the other hand, outsourcing testing specialist incurs no such costs. The external team is responsible for providing equipment, space and tools for testing to these professionals.

Fewer Conflicts in Internal Teams

Testing is often a source of conflict between teams, especially if developers have to make changes continually in their code. If this happens within your in-house teams, it leads to internal conflicts. Outsourcing testing specialists can resolve this issue as they point out critical problems more accurately and have an added benefit of working independently.

How PFLB Testing Specialists Can Help You Maximize Software Quality

Choosing the right testing service can help you ensure the best quality of software and deliver a product that wins the market. PFLB is a software testing service that has experience of serving over 500 companies across all domains, from finance and healthcare to retail and technology.

With our experienced and dedicated team of 400 testing specialists, we can ensure that your software performs at its maximum capacity and delivers all functionalities needed by your customer.

To learn more about the company feel free to visit our website at PFLB.