BPO / Support / Call Center / Homemaker to Software Testing

Over the last few years, I have received at least about 40 emails and a couple of phone calls from people working in tech support, BPO, call center, homemakers asking for my advice to get a job in software testing or to make a career in it. I am tired responding to the same set of queries from different people. Now, that doesn't mean I wouldn't be interested to talk to people. I just hope they read this and have a different question or a situation they'd like me to address. 


However, this post is not just for those who want to change their career from BPO or Tech support to software testing but also to those who are hiring managers, interviewing testers and to all those who are aware that they are a part of the future of software testing.

1: Chasing dream versus chasing a day job

A friend of mine gave my number to his friend who works in a Technical Support job at a reputed organization and wants to move into software testing. So he called me to seek my help. I asked him, "Why software testing and not something else?" and he didn't have an answer. That is perfectly fine. He then said he wanted a day job and found software testing as an easy possibility.

I started to probe his dream of what he wanted to be before he landed up in Tech Support. His dream was to be something else. I then explained that moving to software testing might not help him feel any better than starting to chase the dream. He agreed and is now chasing his dream of photography.

2: Turning lemon to lemonade than faking it as orange

Some people have asked me if it would help to fake their experience of a tester of the product they were providing technical support just to get interview calls. I have helped them understand that there is a lot of value in presenting the truth than trying to show it as something else, get caught someday and be blacklisted by NASSCOM and a whole lot of companies spoiling future growth chances.

Having worked in several product organizations, I realize the importance of interacting and collaborating with support teams. If I were to hire a few testers for my team, I would definitely be interested to talk to a support team member. We did that in one of the product organizations I worked. I have talked to hiring managers of large and small product organizations who have done that. I think most of them are internal hiring and some rare cases of external hiring.


To all those who are considering to hire testers, stop doing what you have been doing all this while - hiring those who have been in testing only. Where were you before you started to do testing?


3: Learning software testing in 10 days OR Crash course about how to crash


With many folks wanting to learn software testing, lots of people are making money out of it. For all those in the world of software testing, do you know how many institutes are there per square inch of Ameerpet in Hyderabad who can teach testing in 5 hours if you'd like so and have enough cash? 


Not just Ameerpet, there are lots of chota Ameerpets that I have come across. These kind of training centers are a huge contribution factor for spoiling young minds in India. If God makes me rich, I shall wipe out each one of them.  These training centers run weekend batches for Tech Support folks and spoil their ability to learn testing. 


So, when folks who work in Tech Support and have attended such draining programs (yes, that was intentional) get in touch with me for seeking advice on job search, I have helped them to pick up two books: Testing Computer Software & Lessons Learned in Software Testing. For the most recent ones, I have also suggested Perfect Software & Other Illusions about Testing.


I also have suggested them to hook up with a tester every weekend and try some hands on testing or participate in open source projects for a while. For just one I have helped by doing a paired exploratory testing. One of my student in the Hands on Software Testing Training - India's first true hands on only testing training I delivered for Edista in 2008 & 2009 was in Support and he demonstrated his testing skills to his employer to be moved to testing.


4: Test Report instead of Resume / Profile


When my father started his first job after his Diploma in Electrical Engineering, he applied to the job with a CV / Resume. So, using a CV / Resume is that old an approach which hasn't changed much, except that he used a typewriter and we use MS Word and a Laserjet Printer. Lets try to change.


In the last 3 months, I have 4 emails from hiring managers in Bangalore, Chennai and a country outside India seeking help to hire skilled testers. One of the things I have suggested to them is to not ask people to send their resume unless it is accompanied with a test report. For hiring managers, it would be easy to see what kind of tester they want by looking at the test report. If the person says, "I am skilled at automating checks", so be it, demonstrate it and attach the scripts along with the resume. Needless to say without violating any Non Disclosure Agreement. Open Source software testing suits best. The interviews are actually discussion around the test report rather than "What is the difference between this and that?"


I am writing a whole big book on software testing interviews. A publisher just rejected the book but that's OK.


BTW, don't send me your resume and ask me to refer to those hiring managers.


5: Why some developer guys from India suck big time?


Nothing about their programming skills. I have done career counselling almost all through my career for others and myself. Hey, its a skill with which we are born, at least that's how we behave when someone approaches us for advice :)


So, having worked with some testing institutes, I volunteered to take up any work I could that would let me to speak with testers and potential testers for my own learning purpose. My blog, as you know, has brought me a lot of people with varied kinds of queries. So, I have some experience dealing with those developer guys who walk in months after their marriage, looking for a job for their wife.


These great developer guys come and ask, "I want my wife to take up a software testing job, do you offer job guarantee courses?". So, to the question, "Why software testing?", they'd without any bit of shame, answer, "I want her to earn and come home on time so that she takes care of office work and home work in a balanced way". 


One guy tried interviewing me to see if I know enough testing to teach his wife and help her learn testing. Not just me, one of my student, Arindam, was inspired to coach testers and works for an institute in Bangalore part time. That institute runs a special batch for home makers. Arindam shared his experience with me about the batch. He too said what I had already experienced. My advice to all housewife / homemakers whoever you want to call yourselves as is to read Parimala Shankaraiah's blog & Meeta's blog. Hey wait, there are quite a few others in India. Read their blogs to understand how passionate they are, how difficult it actually is to be good in testing and how they manage home and office work.


6: A break / sabbatical in career is just fine


Some women testers who take a break or sabbatical, try getting back to the industry but the industry treats them bad. Most hiring managers are blind in noticing people with break. They think they would be at loss of value if they hire them. 


I think stopping someone who is passionate in testing but had no other option than to take a sabbatical or break not getting a job is a big hindrance to the entire software testing industry. If I were Parimala Shankaraiah's employer and she needed a sabbatical, I would welcome her anytime she wants to come back. Not hiring her is like fooling myself and my company HR policies.


7. The actual meaning of "Our company is an equal opportunity employer"


There is a VERY BIG company who has an office even close to my home who has this statement, "We are an equal opportunity employer" in their website but didnt allow me to even apply to an opening just because I didn't have an ISEB/ISTQB certification. Let me tell this to you: I felt blessed by God to be not eligible to even apply to such companies because such company environments wouldn't have made my career strong.


The company which actually is an equal opportunity provider is one that selects its employees based on skills and not if they purchased a certificate. So, if you dont get jobs in such places, feel blessed, you really are. Keep demonstrating your skills and jobs will come to you. 


Santhosh Tuppad, my student with just one year of testing experience (and tons of experience in finding and reporting bugs) got an offer to be a Test Lead for one of the top companies in Asia. Although he couldn't take it up then but I just wonder if he had to be a Test Lead at some of those fake equal opportunity providers, how many white hair he should have had.


So, here are some points to ponder:

• If you choose to be misguided by what others say then you deserve it.
• If you have some other passion and want to be a software tester because you think its an easy job, you are spoiling an opportunity to help your children see you as their inspiration to pursue what they want to be.
• If you are OK to live others dream, don't question, just follow. Never crib / complain in life.
• If you want to test out testing, do so with open source projects and by collaborating with some good testers around you.
• No job is easy but all jobs can be done in an easy way.
• Fakers will get caught.
• Build your testing skills and demonstrate them.
• Attract employers don't always get attracted.
• Build your own brand. Get organizations proud about hiring you and not the other way.
• Many services companies count heads - not brains. Target tech start ups.
• If nothing works out and still you dream to be a tester, start your own testing services.
• Its OK to fail.
• Its important you succeed chasing your dream irrespective of whether your chase was successful or not.
• Chasing your dream is the only way you can know if you can really be successful

As and when I encounter more points or more different questions, I shall update this post.

Are Experienced Software Testers Testing their own CV / Profile / Resume?

Re-written the article on April 20, 2009 & Previous version also available at the bottom

For the question : Are Software Testers Testing their own CV / Profile / Resume?, my answer would be - most of them don't.

What would you think about a tester who hasn't tested whatever he has developed? I think the same way you think about them - they don't know testing or its value.

Over these years, I must have looked into about thousand three hundred testers profiles and only very few of them caught my attention. One of them was my own :)

Need and value of testing your own resume

I have been practicing writing and this blog is an evidence of the same. I think our public writing demonstrates how effectively we can work. For instance, if my resume looks bad then would anyone believe me that I write good bug reports? If they believe that I'd write good bug reports when my resume sucks then what do you think about their communication skills?

I got coached by Mr Ravi Joshi of Bangalore on the aspects of writing a good resume. I probably practiced it enough to match his own writing and then trying to surpass it. All he did was to help me learn how to test my own resume.

I discovered that testing a resume was so similar to testing a software. For instance, our resume is full of claims that we have made. If we dont test for the claims we have made and what we can actually deliver, it costs us an opportunity to get an offer letter.

An example from my life experience is: There was a person who mentioned about Apache Web Server as one of the technologies he had worked on. On questioning him about it, he said, "Sir, it was running in the back end and I used to turn it off and on whenever a crash occurs". Now, is that sufficient to say, "I know Apache Web Server"?

I want you to let me know about it.

Career Objective

Also, most of them steal the Career Objective section and that indicates the person does not have his own great ambitions in life or a vision statement. It is important for anyone to write their own career objective. If you have a typical career objective, "I am looking forward to work in an organization that challenges my abilities and potential", no one would be interested at that.

Here is another interesting thing: A career objective is a long term vision but what most people end up writing is - I need a job to show my potential - which is not a career objective but your immediate objective in life.

At some point of my career, I have even removed that section and yet people kept calling me for interviews. Doesn't it help you understand that people are not calling you based on it because they are already bored reading more or less same stuff?


Projects

This is a very interesting part. Recently, I was interviewing a tester who had a 7 page resume for a 2 year experience. He had detailed out his project on his resume and that's a bad idea. I helped him understand that it was a bad idea and he went ahead arguing with me that he had to mention all details. A question that I asked him was, "How many pages should Hon Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have?"

I hope you understand why I asked him that question and also hope you won't make the mistake. You must note that people who might be looking into your profile might already know about the product or project and don't need super fine details of your project. You can make it to one or two sentences. This gives you a tactical advantage in interviews if you were to explain your project.

Your contribution

It is another common bias to show whatever little stuff you did in the organization as a great one. Again, people are tired of listening to such stuff. You might want to consider elaborating an experience or the challenges you faced and how you fared in it.

For example: When I was a rookie Test Manager, people reporting to me found it hard to digest the fact that I was much younger than them. I had to fight through their ego battle and yet get work done from them. I learnt a lot about managing people, especially when they dont want to listen to you.

Lessons learnt

You could consider jotting down some very quick points of the lessons you learnt from each of the project you worked and that could be an attractive thing for the interviewer. You may consider listing your failures as well although you think listing your failure could cause you lose an opportunity to get an offer. Come on, the whole world understands that every human is fallible and everyone has failed in their life more than a dozen times.

Documentation Guidelines & Crispness

You wont be given a job because your profile looks amazing and it is a booklet of 30 pages of your achievements. So, it means you have to work in an interview to crack the puzzle of getting a job offer from them.

I received one of the worst resume from a software tester who mentioned that he has excellent documentation skills and the word documentation spelling was incorrect. Are you dumb to call him for an interview?

You do not need to search for resume template and fill in because that is a clerical work and I hope you don't want to be a clerk. Clerical type software testers get clerical pay and they are happy with it as well.

Extras and tactical advantage

You could impress the interviewers by testing a web application or an open source project and attaching your test report with it. This gives you a tactical advantage over all other people attending interviews as the interviewers get to see how you can actually test, how you report problems, how you investigate problems, how you can prepare a test report, how good is your writing skills and all that.

Peer Review of your Resume

You might be knowing the value of peer reviews in software engineering. How about bringing that to resume writing? Ask any of your friend's or peers to review your profile and spot problems. As you are the developer, it is likely that you will make mistakes and you might be blind at spotting them.

Progress Report Reference:

I have been compiling my Progress Reports over the last two years and I want you to have a look at it. Search for Progress Report of Pradeep Soundararajan and you will find the PDF files.

Interview skills

This one is quite famous : Yeah this one : The (bad) state of software testing interviews in India

If you are interested in watching my presentation of the same, here is the link to the video

Old version of the same article
( and there are some good points there as well )

So think about these points and also read what I wrote long back when my own English wasn't as good as how it might be now:

Old version of the same article:


Hi Reader,

I would have spent at least 300 hours by now, in this life time, helping out my friends, modifying their CV/Resume. It was interesting initially, especially when I had learnt the art of writing a good CV for myself. Thanks to Ravi Joshi, who spent his valuable time with me, teaching me "The art of writing a wonderful CV" .

I dare to share my learning and would want to provide a template to those sending me CV's to modify. Become an expert by experimenting with your own CV .. after reading this.

__ Are you testing your CV ? __

Trust me, I have modified CV's for developers too but a majority of the CV's I have touched is of a Tester.

Some common stupid mistake I and you make in the CV V/s How better can things be -

Junk Objective - To secure a challenging position in a well established firm and want to develop further as a tester OR Looking for an opportunity that can extract my potential in terms of technical and management OR Seeking a position in your valuable organization to grow in my career.

Clear Objective - Being a passionate Tester for x years and having won ... credits ... , I am looking for an opportunity to augment my career further, since I feel a new environment could make me learn things better and can work towards contributing at higher levels OR Having proved the ability to learn and a developed interest towards Test Engineering, I want to take my career to a stage of delivering high customer satisfaction by joining the services industry yet bringing in the product based company's expertise OR I am a self proclaimed passionate Tester. I want to put myslef to test by taking up challenges that your organization is currently offering and feel satisfied when the work quality meets the claim.

Gyaan -

1. Never copy someone's objective, which is the most stupid thing any person can do.
2. Frame your own objective, what it costs is 100 MIPS for your brain.
3. Your objective should say a) Who you are ? b) What are your skills c) Why are you looking for a job d) What can you bring to their table OR e) What is the value addition if a company hires you ?
4. If you have prepared for GRE_TOEFL like exams but could not get through and the by product is - you become a Indo-US English guy. What it means is, your english is neither as bad as most of the Indian's english nor as good as the true American English. Such people tend to use complicated words. If you do so, the person reading your objective may not even understand it. ( It is truth, if you want to say "No Pradeep, you are wrong" , you better say "Hey Dude, you suck and your english is wrotten kinda stuff", I shall understand the by product you posses.)
Junk Project Explanation -
Bluetooth Audio Product Testing - Bluetooth is a wireless standard given by SIG. It operates in 2.4 GHz ISM band. Bluetooth audio product is to listen audio or music over bleutooth wireless product. Testing is a major phase in Bluetooth Audio products and invlves audio testing abd bluetooth testing.
1. What the hell ? Why should I write about bluetooth technology in describing about the product ?.. ( 10 % of the resumes I have modified, explained the technology of the product ).
2. Although Mircrosoft has given a spell check, most of them do not use it. When you open today's Indian Tester resume, you will see a lot of Red and Green colours. Simple, they think Microsoft is recognizing their resume and by default underlining it to make it colourful.
3. Indents and Formatting.. This was the toughest thing I ever handled. I wonder how people write word documents wherein I try to modify its format but returns to the same when I press and Enter or Backspace at some points.
4. Bold is not beautiful - Janta does not know what to make Bold and what to not. They feel every one word out of 20 should be bold. Italics, at their own will. They draft the CV and see they have not italicised some words and they start doing it.
Let me try to re frame the above project explanation -
Bluetooth Audio Product Testing - A wireless audio solution for people who would want to listen music on the move without getting entangled with the headphone wires. This project was intended to achieve CD quality music while streaming audio over Bluetooth. A broad classification of the testing challenges would be in measuring the scientific quality parameters of the audio, loss of quality in comparision to wired headphones and testing the user friendliness of the whole product apart from testing the product for battery life and other MMI based testing.
Isn't that giving a fantastic view to the person looking at your CV of what project it is and what you could have done in it ?
Client/Customer Name - Everyone of us are happy to mention that we worked for Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Cisco ... not directly but they being the client/customer of the product you were working for.
Ethically, it isnt good. You think a company would hire you just because you worked for the above companies ? What you do not know is you are revealing your customer info to the person looking at your CV.
What if your CV reaches the competitor of your current place of work ?The person interviewing you would be happy and hire you if you say him "Sorry, I cant tell the customer info" , if he asks such a question.
Unwanted Info -What we all should learn is CV/Resume has no standard format and if you can form your resume. You would be amazed to hear that one guy prepared a CV in flash and song a sang ... for it. Can you believe there were companies in queue to hire him ? Want to know who is he ?
Right click and open to CHECK THIS OUT !
Common sense questions you should ask yourself -
When you cannot draft a good CV without spelling mistakes, formatting mistakes, meaningful sentences... Why should I hire you ?
1. You proved you dont have good documentation skills.
2. You proved you will be unable to report a bug you find with non meaningful sentences writing being your flair.Complicated english words, Will the customer understand ? ( All customers are not smart )
3. Client/Customer name... so will you let know my customer details when you look for a job outside my company if I hire you ?Overall, all your claims look false if your CV negates your claims of being a good tester.
4. Does anyone mention Microsoft Excel as a tool they know ? Trust me if a tester knows the full features of MS Excel he can create more wonders. Some secrets better reamin closed unless it reaches people like me who dare to share.
5. False info - We Indians like mentioning lots of tools in our resume to get job. We are least bothered to check with ourselves whether we really know those tools in depth to take up an interview.
6. Did you know that the time required to hire someone will come down by 50% if good , true CV's are prepared by you all ?

"The art of writing good CV should come from the heart"