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.

Traditional Software Testing Process - The cash cow demystified

So, I don't need to tell you that most of the software testing in the world is outsourced. I live in Bangalore and I assume a considerable amount of the world's outsourced testing projects are here. I meet testers from most of these organizations and hear the same process of testing software although called by different names their organization executives named them.

Most testers I meet lament about the process (or sucked within it for survival ) and approach they are forced to follow and try talking to their management about better ideas and better ways to test. Those executives don't seem to listen much nor willing to change.

Wondering why they wouldn't?

They have hit a cash cow.

Mark Crowther and I were discussing about Code Coverage & Requirements Based Testing in Test Republic and some how drove me to write about the way most businessmen are fooling their customers through the process they love to follow.

So, here it goes with editing and expansion. Assuming Mark from UK or maybe even you outsourced a testing project to me:

• I would spend a couple of days analyzing your requirement document and bill you for X hours per person involved in my team.
• I would spend a couple of days writing a test plan document ( but not refer to it ) and bill you for 2X hours per person involved in my team for preparing it.
• I would spend a month or two writing test case document ( and refer only to it ) and bill you for 10X hours per person involved in my team for preparing it.
• I would then again create a traceability matrix ( just to fool you and your boss about our coverage ) and bill you for 5X hours per person involved in my team for preparing it.
• So far, total of 18X hours per person involved in the team is the billing.
• Assuming X is 50 hours and there are about 10 members in my team, that's 18 * 50 * 10 = 9000 hours of billing with no single bug found yet. ( Mark wrote about it, too )
  
• If you are paying $20 an hour per person on an average, you would have actually given me a business of $180,000 without me or my team finding any bug yet.
• So after investing $1,80,000 on me and my team, you would want some benefits of that. So, you wouldn't pull the project out or move it to another vendor because more or less he would do the same and you would end up paying another $180,000
  
• Then comes the test case execution cycles for our documented 10,000 tests out of a possible hundred million tests
  
• For every new bug that you find out of the releases I make, my team would spend documenting the new test case, getting it reviewed and resulting in slower testing for you and more money for me.
• So assuming running 10,000 tests take 2 weeks for a team of 10 members to execute. Also assuming least 50 cycles of testing, you would have paid me about $140,000 for a coverage whose value might be not worth of the money.
• Of course there is additional documentation of missed test cases and other template filling activities that will be billed to you.
• To fool you further, I would instruct my team to use some expensive license based tools ( what else will I do with the money you are pumping in ) to give you a sense of faster testing ( by foolishly comparing it with human speed of testing ) and call it "Automation Testing". It turns out that these tools could have helped me find bugs that are of not a great value to you but hey, we want to see test case pass more than fail.
• Your coverage isn't improving much because we have converted manual tests to automated tests ( although its not the same test ) but to show you the speed of our tools.
  
• So think about adding another $25,000 and giving you an illusion of an ROI of $100,000 while pumping multiples of $100,000 from your bank account to mine.
  
• The CMM, TMM, Six Sigma, ISTQB scams are built around this eco-system to enable more money flow for hardly any value. Who knows there could be a cut for the people who know all this and yet do it.
  

Why wouldn't a businessman be glad about the traditional approaches to test software?

Are you asking about what happens to the users of the product?

• Lets bother about the users of your product later during our maintenance billing phase. Don't you know SDLC ends in Maintenance Phase? If we do everything right in the previous stages then how do we prove we follow SDLC when there is hardly any work in maintenance phase?
  

While you are reading this, you shouldn't be thinking of this happening only in India but in most parts of the world and even within places like United States and Europe. There are smart businessmen everywhere. At one end they pay us but at the other end use us to make more money. We need money and they need us to make that. Don't make smart businessmen exclusive to India and leave your own country out of it.

I hope those who outsource start pushing for services that doesn't fool them. Who would actually listen to this argument is testers turned businessmen and testers turned outsourcing heads and testers turned business leaders.

Whenever I visit a testing services company and see a testimonial of a customer who talks about the great ROI they got and faster testing, I wonder what a heavy price they paid to believe so.

Exploratory Testing ++ , Context Driven Testing ++ , Rapid Software Testing ++ or else YourMoney --

Don't want to be fooled by outsourcing software testing? One of those who could be of help to you among many folks I know, is myself.

Testing Experience Magazine : The voice of ISTQB

I agree you need money to run a business but then...

If you are subscribed to Testing Experience - The magazine for professional testers, you would have got an e-mail recently ( a day or two before this post ) announcing first year anniversary of the magazine. I am subscribed to them from their third issue and in an year they have grown to about 350,000 subscribers ( as per their own website claim )

I congratulated Jose Diaz for running the magazine and for completing one year with it, and offered my respect to him for doing it. I also wrote in the same e-mail to him that I see the magazine becoming too much of ISTQB stuff to which he seemed to disagree with me. I am surprised with that.

I decided to investigate if I could be wrong and presented my findings to Jose over an e-mail:
( modified the construct for your reading and not the content)


Here is my experience of going through Testing Experience magazine

• When I open the website www.testingexperience.com I am forced to look at a pop up ad for ISTQB. Only after closing that I am allowed to browse through the pages. [ As on May 29, 2009 2300 IST ] Do you see anything different?

• Let's look into the latest issue : Security testing: Page: 2 : The opening ad of Testing Experience is ISTQB. It kind of puts in my mind the thing that Testing Experience means ISTQB.

• Page 3: Jose Diaz has personally covered ISTQB in letter from Editor section and he says, "Last but not least, I want you to pay attention to our new e-learning portal www.testingexperience.learntesting.com . You can register for ISTQB Foundation Level and very soon for Advanced Level. Enjoy Learning". When the chief says pay attention to something it indicates to me that Testing Experience is supporting ISTQB because they are feeding Testing Experience with enough money to do that.

• Page 6: Yet another ad of ISTQB in German language or something similar to that. Hey look, before I even get to read the first article in a magazine, I am asked to cross 4-5 instances of ISTQB.
  

• Page 13: Another instance of ISTQB half page attractive ad
  

• Page 21: ISTQB again

• Page 24: Erik Van Veenendaal writes about ISTQB and wooing people to go for it. Here is an excerpt from that article: "The ISTQB Advanced Level scheme offers a complete 5-day module on technical testing which may seem irrelevant to testers today, but I'm convinced will become more and more important to the near future or even already today".
  

• Page 27: Interview with Mike Smith: Yet another ISTQB masala flavor in the form of LearnTesting. 3 pages full of that. As though - Learn Testing means only about learning ISTQB way of testing.

• Page 30: Yet another ad for Learn Testing who in turn promotes ISTQB and run by Testing Experience.
  

• Page36: An article from Rex Black, a popular founder and face of ISTQB. To his credit, he doesn't talk about ISTQB.
  

• In what way is his article on page 66 to 70 that talks about Advanced Software Test Design Techniques is related to Security theme of the magazine? Do we have so less people on Security Testing that we'd have to compensate it by a non security article.

• At least aren't there any other brilliant ISTQB certified testers who can write good articles on Security Testing or maybe even the Advanced Test Case Design Techniques?

• Page 52 & 53 has the ISTQB and information such as "We are the community with 1,10,000 people. Are you on the right side?". Its a Shame. Rex Black speaks against the idea of Schools of Testing but has ads asking testers, Are you on the right side? with a link to ISTQB below it. What is the message?
  

• Page 58: ISTQB in France

• Page 70: Another article from Rex Black
  

• Page 78: RBCS & ISTQB
  

• Page 99: There is ISTQB, yet again and a full fledged article on it for 2 pages.

• Page 103: Is yet another mention about ISTQB being there and being here for those who didn't know it will soon be everywhere .

• Oh and Page 104 also ends with ISTQB training and other details. ( There are only 104 pages of this magazine )
  

• Compare their first edition of magazine and there on, you would see ISTQB increasing with every edition. I wouldn't be surprised that the future editions is only about ISTQB and I see the future in their latest edition.

Testing is Questioning

Where is all the money that many testers across the globe paying to ISTQB certification and training going? Asks Michael Bolton on James Bach's Blog

Is the magazine becoming an official mouth piece of ISTQB or there is so much of bias that it makes me think so?

Whose money is all this? Your money. You didnt know you can make someone as rich as you wanted to be?

I think anyone who is running a business can cling to a brand to build their own brand but not to an extent that the other brand swallows it. If that is the mission, I think Testing Experience is headed on the right track.

I don't know who is in the review board and I suspect that it might not be diversified and have only ISTQB promoters.


What do you think?

• So, you reader of this post - What is your opinion? After seeing all this would you think the magazine is neutral or is serving the purpose of promoting ISTQB?
• Should magazines like these that claim to be for Professional Testers be promoting one kind of stuff or be helpful to the community in allowing different kinds of people to mix with?

Test Republic is a social community for software testers and a not for profit service by Mohan Panguluri, COO, Edista Testing Institute. You can witness that by visiting it. It has events of ISTQB posted in the past, it has CAST conference details and QAI conferences. It has a blend of all kinds of thought process in software testing and arguments. They allow all kinds of information to be posted from all kind of communities and schools. They keep aside their business and do this for benefiting the community. Another example is STC by Rosie Sherry. I think there is lots to learn from people like Mohan Panguluri and Rosie Sherry, for the rest of the world who also claims to be doing it for Professional testers.


The philosophy

Jose seemed to be OK with my above response of facts about ISTQB in Testing Experience's latest issue but wasn't comfortable after I mentioned to him that I plan to blog about it. He cited that his lawyers might have a look into my blog if I do so.

So they might be reading this post along with you. If I question ISTQB, the dynasty of ISTQB will hire lawyers to see if I can be attacked for questioning them?

How cheap? Software Testing is such a nascent field, we haven't even crossed 50 years and already someone is saying "The best practice and right ways of testing" and "we control the field and there is no room for disagreement".

Kudos ISTQB certified testers. You are sinking the field you are working on without knowing you are doing it. Fantastic, go ahead get certified!