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I’m an HR director for a company just outside of Chicago. We are looking for a top notch QA engineer, and I’d like some recommendations for places to post to get qualified candidates with experience.

Thanks,
Marysue

I am new to this community. I apologize if the questions I raise have already been asked and answered.

I also tend to agree with Joe that crowd sourcing might only fill a small niche. I think crowd sourcing falls under test execution phase of the Software Development Life Cycle Quality management. There is a lot more to testing such as:

- Capturing requirements in the form of test cases in a TDD methodology.
- Test data management, for data centric applications and record keeping systems.
- Risk based testing.
- and a lot more.

Once you treat testing as a quality management process and not just kicking the tires at the end, then it becomes complex and interesting enough to absorb top talent who would consider themselves as first class citizens. I come from a development and architecture background, and I am finding out that complexity of testing problems grow exponentially by extending existing apps with simple components. I think testers should have a good understanding of the underlying system and app architecture and internals of the system. So besides process mentoring, deep understanding of the system is necessary too. This cannot be done by someone who views him/herself as a second class citizen. Testing can only be successful by attracting top talent who can discover and mentor at the same time.

On then mentoring, I am surprised about how many testers don’t seek mentors. I know of companies (mine) who have mentoring programs, but without insentives, minimal use is seen. On the industry side, we need to improve too, but it takes effort and again people often don’t extend the effort to find and stay connected, though there are many great forums (like this one).

There’s a lot of training you can do yourselves as well. Try this as an exercise:

Obtain the list of bugs that escaped your test team’s diligence. Maybe these are bugs found by uTest, or in a beta or in your released product. As a group, ask the following questions about each bug:
– What fault caused it (maybe you can invite a dev to help with this one)
– What were the failure symptoms that allowed you to isolate it (the answer to this will build bug spotting skills)
– What was the thought process you used to come up with the test case in the first place (this will allow you to codify your reasoning about making good bug finding test cases)

This exercise when done as a team event can be a huge learning experience that has direct application to your product and your productivity. Try it, you may find that the best education you can treat yourself to is something you don’t need to spend any money on at all.

I think you missed some key points. Particularly the quote “most apps don’t require dedicated QA staff” the word is “won’t” because that is a prediction about a future that has not yet arrived.

I see crowdsourcing as a natural step in the evolution of sourcing. It’s different than a beta and better because it builds community in addition to providing testing services.

I am not sure how you got the idea that there was no mentoring going on at Microsoft. The problem is that MS has 90k employees and mentoring on that scale is a hard problem. Personally, I am doing a lot of mentoring. But we don’t have enough mentors and many qualified ones are too busy or aren’t good at mentoring. It’s a rare skill, I think.

I am also not sure why uTest is unsuitable for mentoring. Certainly it isn’t set up that way now, but there is no reason it couldn’t be and there is no reason to dismiss it so quickly. I think uTest is very innovative and I like seeing people like this actually DO something because the test community is full of people who complain too much about things not getting done. We need more doers in my opinion.

In my six years of experience in this field I have never got the kind of support, guidance and feedback that was provided by Dr. Cem Kaner, Scott Barber and other course instructors during these two AST Training programs attended by me.

James, I feel Dr. Cem Kaner has instilled some qualities from you during your association at Florida Tech and thus you both now seem to be the change agents for software testing profession.

I encourage anyone in the uTest community to sign up for a class. I am about to complete the Foundations class and it is phenomenal. Cem Kaner and James Bach have done a fantastic job of creating a course that is challenging, imformative, and relevant.

Brett

Anita