Skip to main content

Unmentioned skill of any Engineer - Being able to Google!!!

I've blogged elsewhere about what I look for when hiring QA Engineers, and it's full of useful things that I think are important in being a good QA Engineer/Tester.

One thing that is often overlooked and probably not really spoken off much, especially when hiring or looking for a new job, is something that is potentially extremely important when it comes to being a successful Engineer, and that is the ability to find out information. For most people this is being able to "Google" for something, or use Stack Overflow to find out a solution to a problem.


You could argue (and rightly so) that the ability to Problem Solve is what we are talking about, and you'd be right, but this is specifically really about being able to use Google effectively to find the answer you are looking for.

Why is being able to Google important?

There are a number of reasons for this:

1- Being able to structure your search query appropriately is important and can save time sifting through results

2- Once you have your search query nailed, there is no point reworking something that has already been done, there may be a library available that you can reuse, there may be examples that you hadn't thought of, there are a whole plethora of testing cheat sheets out there for example that if you can google can aid you in your testing efforts!

Here are some simple tips for Googling more efficiently:

1. Use "Quotes"- If you want to search for a term of more than one word, you can use quotes to tie words together. For example if you wanted to search for Test Strategy rather than searching for Test Strategy you might want to search for "Test Strategy"

2. Use - to exclude words - For instance if you wanted to search for Test Strategy but wanted to exclude for instance Waterfall you could search for "Test Strategy" -Waterfall

3. Make use of the OR key word - If you wanted to search for 2 things, you could use the OR key word, and by using quotes again we can search for "Newcastle relegated" OR "Sunderland staying up" This would get you results for both search terms...

4. Location is useful - You can search for something nearby and Google (providing it has access to your location) can search for things nearby which is pretty useful! Especially if you don't know where you are! So a useful search term might be "Testing meetups" nearby







Comments

  1. Ajay13 July 2016 at 01:10

    https://coursebuilder.withgoogle.com/sample/preview is so useful w.r.t this post. "Power Searching With Google" course.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jai Technomind4 April 2017 at 21:41

    It is useful tips for beginner,


    Devops Training in Chennai

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alex moner26 October 2017 at 01:45

    I cannot explain the feelings I had while reading this blog. I was completely fascinated.apdm

    ReplyDelete
  4. Alex moner30 October 2017 at 01:52

    Cool website buddy I am gona suggest this to all my list of contacts.diploma of supply chain management

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hazid Kalem13 June 2018 at 14:45

    https://www.cracksmalta.com/
    https://crackslust.com/

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coding something simple.... or not! Taking a screenshot on error using Selenium WebDriver

I recently wrote a little function that takes a screenshot at the end of a test if it has errored. What sounded very simple at the start turned out to be quite a bit of work, and quite a few lines of code to handle certain scenarios! It's now over 50 lines of code! I'll start with what I had at the beginning, this was to simply take a screenshot in the working directory, we are using SpecFlow and Selenium to run the tests, so we are going to check if the ScenarioContext.Current.TestError isn't null, if it is, then using Selenium, take a screenshot (note the below code is a simplified version of what I had at the beginning). [AfterScenario]         public static void TakeScreenShotOnError()         {             if (ScenarioContext.Current.TestError == null) return;             var screenshotDriver = Driver as ITakesScreenshot;             if (screenshotD...
15 comments
Read more

How to manage resources within new teams?

Working where I work we are constantly spinning up new teams to take on new workloads as business come up with new demands and new features they want developed and tested. The problem with this is how do we ensure the work of the newly spun up team is of sufficient quality. One method is by taking people from other established teams and placing them on the new team. This works great for the new team, but unfortunately it will oftenl eave the established team lacking in a resource whilst they try and fill the gap left by the person who has left. We are seeing this often with our offshore teams, it can be damaging to the team structure and the teams velocity, but try as I might, I can't think of another way around it. It's far easier to take 1 person from a team that is established than it is to build a whole new team from scratch. At least by leaving the core of a team in place, you should be guaranteeing that the new team are aware of any coding standards or any QA standard...
Post a Comment
Read more

Considerations when creating automated tests

We recently released to a number of teams our automated regression pack that has been worked on over the past few months. This regression pack tests legacy code, but contains a large number of tests.  As a bit of background, a number of teams are working on new solutions whilst some are still working on legacy code. With this in mind we constructed an email with a list of guidelines when creating new tests that need to be added to this regression pack.  I figured that these can be quite broad so should apply for any organisation, so thought it would make an interesting blog post...  So here goes,  when creating automated tests, it's important to consider and adhere to the following: - Think about data . The tests need to retrieve or set the data they need without any manual intervention - This should help them be more robust and easier to run without manual intervention. - The tests need to be idempotent - By making it so that each test is standalone and does...
Post a Comment
Read more