I love to break things – that’s what makes me a great software tester
Priti Padmawar describes her job as Symbiote’s Quality Assurance analyst: try to break things so our developers can fix them to deliver a high quality product.
My job as a software tester is to find anything that’s broken or not quite right
A great example of what my job involves was the time I was part of the Symbiote team testing improvements we made to the myki card website used by travellers on Victoria’s public transport system.
Our project made it even easier for people to add credit to their myki card, manage their online accounts and enjoy extra convenient features like setting up favourites for the things they do often.
As a tester, it was my job to use the website and apps the way a customer would, trying to do the tasks they want to do and finding anything that didn’t work the way they’d expect. My job was to find anything that’s broken or not quite right, so we could fix it and deliver a high quality, user-friendly product.
I step through everything a user would try to do
I worked with our business analyst to look at and test each flow that described what people who used the system should be able to do. For example, if you wanted to add credit to your myki card, you should be able to do this in several ways. It was my job to step through every possible way you could do this task, and make sure each method worked from beginning to end.
Automation is great for routine testing, but human testers look at the entire experience
Accessibility is an important part of our products. We want everyone to be able to get the information they need from the website or the app. One part of my accessibility testing uses screen reader technology to read out all the relevant information on a page, so I can test whether users can complete all the required tasks using the site or app that way.
I test for logic, accessibility and usability and also keep a keen eye on the look and feel of the application and complex scenarios such as CAPTCHA and visual testing.
These kinds of things don’t get picked up by automation testing.
Manual testing allows me to experience every aspect of the product the way a customer would. I pick up things that aren’t possible through automated testing. Automated testing skills are also important, because that method’s essential to quickly test any new releases for a wide range of use cases and making sure each release does everything previous releases could do. There’s a place for both methods.
Testing enables me to be learning constantly
I like variety in my tasks but I also enjoy deep-diving to learn things quickly. It’s very stimulating to multi-task and work on different projects at the same time. Agile development keeps everything interesting.
As I know how challenging it can be to learn things by yourself, I’d like to move into a team leadership role to help people in this industry to develop their technical testing skills. We all learn so much more when we’re teaching others.