If you are one of those people wondering how you can get involved in testing, this article might be of interest to you. I will try to share a few bits about where I think is best to start a testing career.

Company

Obviously one of the first decision you’re gonna face is in which company to start. You might think there’re not many opportunities, but you should consider a wider range of companies than just those that currently have open positions on their website or on some job site. Try to find a company that you’d ideally like to work for.

However, even if you might not be aware of this, the size of the company and the team you’d be working on is crucial. Let’s consider two extreme situations:

1) you start working for a corporation 2) you start working for a startup

Well, what’s better for you at the beginning of your testing career? What I see around me is people like startups more than big companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. Small companies seem a bit more friendly and personal. It all might be true, but I think the most important fact to consider is what you can learn in one or the other.

In a corporation, you, as a novice tester, are usually given all the support you need. You are assigned a mentor, usually another tester, who is there to help you out, show you how to work on a particular project and even teach you how to test (some basic test techniques, how to fill in a bug report, etc.)

When you come to a startup, you are usually met with a bunch of overwhelmed programmers who have been also testing their product(s) because there’s been no tester up until you joined the team now. Everybody on the team is happy because they can finally give some of their workload to you, their new tester. However, you’re a novice tester, you know little about testing and you’re supposed to start doing it right from the first day. You’re usually not given much support because there’s no other tester (don’t expect programmers to show you how to test).

In my view, the decision is easy. Choose a company that has money and people, so they also have time to give you at the beginning. For instance, in my case at the beginning of my testing career, my only 2 tasks during the first 3 months (the probation period) in a corporation were to learn SQL and read the project documentation. Yes, it felt boring at times (even one of the programmers half-jokingly asked me if they’d ever let me test something), but I was also given a lot of time to learn what was necessary. When I later started working for a small company (a little biger than a typical startup I guess), it was all much faster and they all expected me to start testing from the first day. There was only one other tester who has been overwhelmed by the number and scope of all the projects, so he’s not done much on those projects I was taking over. Therefore, he couldn’t really share much with me. Just imagine tha someone who doesn’t have basic skills in testing comes into such an environment. In some cases, it ends in the probation period because the tester either can’t cope or the team is not satisfied (they probably had wrong expectations in the first place).

People

I don’t really think you can choose particular people to work with at the beginning, but if there’s a chance, you should pursue it. What I mean is you might have attended some testing meetups and/or conferences where you might have met some more experienced testers. If you think you’d like to work with them, you might try to get in touch, it might be a good way of getting a job with no involvement of the standard HR processes that in many cases slow the whole thing down.

I also have another, more controversial, suggestion. Try to find an environment where you’ll be one of the youngest on the team and/or in the company. First off, having older colleagues makes it more likely they’ll have much more knowledge and experience than you, which in turn makes it more likely you will learn something. Secondly, older colleagues are usually a bit wiser, calmer, and have better communication skills. I think these are things you need to learn as well, so why not get involved in such a project. A young team, however, likes to go for a pint of beer often, you might find it beneficial, but in the medium to long term time period, not so much :)

Processes

This is a bit related to the first part where I talked about companies. However, try to get yourself involved in an environment where they already “know” how to test. That usually requires some process they follow for testing product(s) on a project. Again, it will become easier for you because they’ll have a “space” for you in the process and they usually think about how to introduce you to the project. The opposite would be an environment of a startup where there’s been only a bunch of developers who has also part-time tested what they have done. You’ll usually be given tasks at the day of a new release and you’ll be supposed to test it in just a few hours. That’s close to impossible if you’re also new to the project and a novice tester. In a corporation, you usually have to hand over a new version of the product a few days before the actual release, so there’s a bit more space and time to solve late bugs and problems.

Product

It’s also important what kind of product you’ll test. First of all, you like some things more than other, so it’s a matter of your own interests. But it’s also a matter of how difficult it would be for you to learn it. If you’re comming into testing as a novice tester and you don’t have much other technical skills either, it might be too overwhelming to start testing things like network protocols, medical devices, etc. It’d probably be a better idea to start with products in e.g. ecommerce, with systems where the customer is a corporate employee, not with products for mass market. Why? Well, the example of network protocols is clear, but why not products for mass market? It boils down to how fast and stressful the whole environment is. Company employees could be treated worse than customers who actually pay for the product, so in a mass-market product, there’ll be higher standards, tighter deadlines, more late requirement changes.

There might be more views to consider. Money comes to mind as well. However, I’ll leave you to it. The obvious takeaway is you should think about where you’re going, know the reasons, and plan it. There’s nothing worse than getting involved in an environment where you can’t succeed and then taking this one experience and apply it to all other examples, get sad and discouraged and end up going into a different field because “well, testing is not for me”. This could be avoided if you think about your first career choices.