Ask HN: What is the best path to become a software tester | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best path to become a software tester

4 pointstinymina3 comments

My name is Mina, I recently moved to London. I have a bachelor in engineering and one in psychology which I soon realized I cannot equate here, so I am now trying to shift careers to become a software tester.

As I have no practical experience in testing and cannot find any entry level jobs, I thought that the most likely path would be to get a ISTQB certification and then try to find a job, however since this involves a financial investment, I wanted to ask if anybody had similar experiences and if the ISTQB helped in their case.

In the meantime I finished the courses on QA Tutor (qatutor.com) and I am currently going through the codeacademy classes to extend my knowledge of python and try to create a portfolio.

Just one datapoint, but I've never heard of ISTQB and have been in industry (primarily information security) for ~10 years with 4 years of CS undergrad before that. I generally see those things as a waste of time and money to get unless you want to work in a very large and very traditional (finance, insurance, etc) company.

Engineering background should give you a good foundation for analytical thought and building testing systems. I'd leverage that as well as you can in interviews. Past that, read up a lot on modern approaches to testing and have a working knowledge of the terminology and approach for a few frameworks for ruby/python/java/c# to cover a fair amount of currently popular development languages.

Learn a scripting language really really well, whether python or ruby.

Best of luck.

After a career that had nothing to do with software or testing, my sister became a software tester by getting hired by a company that put her through training for software testing (after testing her quite thoroughly for analytical ability). She's now a successful software tester at a different company and moving towards analist or something like that.

I'm considering the same thing but I don't know if ISTQB has any value in the real world ? I do have practical experience with Python programming and nosetest framework. I'd suggest trying that too.

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