Testing the Waterhouse

I've recently been asked to help devise a mentoring plan for a new QA associate. I sat down and thought about it, and thought it would make a half decent blog post, so here goes! In order to come up with a plan, I needed to identify key areas of QA that as a new QA I would appreciate. I came up with the below areas that I feel would benefit most new QA members: - Automation Selenium IDE moving onto Selenium WebDriver perhaps SoapUI Pro Obviously these will be domain specific, so if you're using QTP for automation, then obviously try mentoring in that etc... In fact this can be applied to much of the below. - SQL - C#/Programming Language - Writing Manual Test Cases - Exploratory Testing - Writing Bug Reports - Testing Tools Fiddler Browser AddOns Test Case Management/Defect Management (Be it Microsoft Test Manager, Quality Center etc) -Performance Testing -Cross Site Scripting/Security Testing -Breaking down a PBI  COAs GWTs - Release testing - Involved i...

I've had people ask me in the past that they are trying to get into QA, but don't really know how, so I thought I'd write a quick post on what I would do if I wanted to get into QA now... This post is going to slightly contradict my previous post, in that I recommend at least getting qualified, I would recommend ISEB Foundation qualification, whilst in that post I argued against the qualification route...  However, let me explain myself a little, the ISEB qualification, rightly or wrongly, is required by a lot of employers who wish to get into QA, and whilst it does teach you the basics, being a QA is a lot more than that. It's about having a passion for it, about having the correct skills and technical knowledge. So whilst I do recommend the ISEB qualification, this is only the start of things. One thing that employers love, and rightly so, is passion. A passion to be the best in your field, a passion to find bugs and break things definitely helps. But how can yo...