The Day To Day Of A Software Test Engineer
Enjoy your career as you wish
I work as a Software Test Engineer in a Customer Experience company. Most of the first few hours are business as usual, except for emergencies.
A Sample Routine
First of all, when I start my working day, the first thing I do is pray. A spiritual prayer? No, I do it as soon as I wake up.
I pray that nothing is broken in production because the QA team is the first to be interrogated and if there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s answering an email interrogation.
I also check my inbox. Yes, it’s important, I often have a lot of articles on software testing, quality assurance or personal development to read.
Thank you medium for always sending me interesting things by email. This is my coffee because I don’t drink coffee or tea.
During the morning
Firstly, participation in upcoming project kick-off meetings, regular meetings on the status of the project.
Clarification of bugs, further investigation, help with root cause analysis. Replying to emails or verbal clarification of reported bugs, and helping to analyze possible causes of the bug.
After the meetings, let’s get to work. The tests of the different functionalities are carried out, be it functional, regression, API, etc. …. It all depends on what is on the agenda and how the team has organized the different activities. Then focus on the high-priority issues. Don’t forget to check the results of automated tests or to run them ourselves if we have them for the project. Bugs during testing? They are reported in our defect tracking tool.
After the morning’s tasks, one of my favorite moments.
Go for lunch. I come back and talk about a lot of things with my manager who is probably the coolest mentor on earth. Thanks for existing Jean Julien.
Afternoon
When I come back from break, I sometimes look at the business and functional requirements documents and provide feedback to my manager.
After that, it is time to prepare the tests, create and/or update the test cases from the documents. Prepare the test data, and checklists if necessary.
All this is ready? Then let’s run our various test cases, asking around for more clarification, reporting defects, updating test cases if necessary, providing a status report. Ah yes, just a few differences from the morning.
Here is a short list of things to do also in the evening, without going into details:
- Provide test results to interested people
- Provide statistics, metrics
- Analyzing test runs
- Analyze reason of test runs failures
- Fix automated test scripts (if any problems found)
- Investigate defects found by tests
- Developing new test scripts
- Demo meetings
- Writing
- Reading
- Learning infrastructure tools like web servers, CI and so on
- Learning test tools
- Learning test approaches
It depends on the day and my mood. Don’t worry, just because I’m enthusiastic about automation doesn’t mean I’m a robot.
Final Thoughts
While all of this is important in the day-to-day life of a software test engineer, how you organize your day depends on you, your team, the projects you are working on, and your priorities.
It was a pleasure to share this with you.
Thanks for Reading!
