 Welcome to Smita Mishra's session on careers in testing identify your super power. We're glad you could join us today. All right Smita over to you to save us all yours. Okay thank you everyone for joining me here and I'm Smita Mishra and I work for QA zone info systems and which is a software testing consulting and based sort of New Delhi and besides that I'm also a sustainability enthusiast so I also am building a SaaS platform on helping out enterprises to work on their sustainability related risks and opportunities and prior to starting these businesses and I was actually working in various organizations as a testing person professional starting from software engineer to test engineer to member technical staff to senior member technical staff to project lead project manager and all this while when I was growing it was project lead bracket testing for project manager bracket testing so how it's dropped it got dropped when I became a program manager but that's how it went on and ever since I mean starting off my career I've been into testing and no I did not think of becoming a tester when I started my career in my college I did not even know there was a job called a tester and I joined in my default I fell into testing as I'm going to talk about it and that was in 2001 almost 19 years back and in these 19 years I have been into testing throughout I've been into software testing all my life almost all my working life so I'm going to take you through some of my thoughts and experiences and insights and originally when we kind of made this abstract and when I had submitted this thought this paper the talk was about we were going to have it live with you all and we were going to have many people around and the idea was that we would also have some people here who would share their insights into their jobs for very popular designations or things that you really like and we are going to talk more about it as to how we have I have therefore kind of pivoted a little bit from my original thought because we can't do that live here but thank you for joining and let's see how it goes and please keep sharing your questions and your thoughts and we'll see how many I can answer if I can't I will come back to you with responses all right people who can respond so let me share my screen and see if we can okay so this as I mentioned that the original idea was to hear from you what are the career designations or roles you are into and see if you would like to either improve there or you would like to jump on to something new and if you wanted to what where you're what where you're coveted or dream jobs and how we can actually help you do that and the idea was to have many more people with those designations around to tell you what their day-to-day roles were and also to help you the second part of it is to help you identify your superpowers so that how you can utilize them or build on them to become somebody that you really want to in terms of your career moving on how did you start your testing career now while you may put it in chat and please do like I mentioned I just fell into testing and I know of so many people so many I think maximum people they just fell into testing because somehow testing wasn't a career per se when we started testing I'm sure I don't know maybe recent years maybe it's a it's a job that people are looking forward to but most people have just either fell into testing or they have come from development so sometimes and I you know in initial years testing was not the most preferred job I don't again like I said that in some places they are so there are always exceptions but when I started people used to look at testing is something that those who cannot do development should go into testing so those who cannot program should be into testing and it actually happened like that a lot of people who couldn't perform well in development they were moved into testing that was one thing and there is a lot of people bear into development but they really like the business side of it or the user perspectives or they actually got passionate about solving the issues for customers and really writing programs even they moved on from development into testing then there were a lot of customer care people have seen people come into testing people who have read user manuals people who have understood the product people who have been into the job of explaining it to others they have come into testing and then technical writers again technical writers I wouldn't say they have I have seen many successful ones but I've seen many many many of them a few of them have been successful too but I do see that that's a trend technical writers in development teams they somehow happen to have a connector happen to testing and where do these testers go so this is I talked about where the testers come from and let's see where the testers go so what happens to those people who don't want to do any more testing or who have gone from testing quite a few of them go to development so now that's a trend that I see people who understand programming people who understand or are more passionate about the automation side or the programming side of it they definitely want to some of them want to try development and they move into that a lot of them develop very intensive understanding of the product or the program and they actually move into product management or program management and a lot of them move into business analysis again because of their understanding and their perspective and their job role their role they kind of have that knack to understand the product and therefore moving to business analysis and then there is others so we lose testers to entrepreneurship we lose testers to investors we lose testers to becoming a lot of different things data scientists we lose testers to a lot of different roles beyond just development program management and business analysis but what happens to those testers who stay so those testers who are staying here what happens to them is they eventually choose and I hear all the things that you are seeing firstly these are not 100% these are things that I could think on top of my mind and research it out but surely there are more than this and so this is a disclaimer for all 12 my slides that anything I say it's not like a 100% thing it's something which is like a heuristic it's 80% of the thing it's the mass thing that I could think of but there are things which have exceptions then each one of them would have exception and these are not designations why things I'm showing you right now here are more like this the rules the actual job on hand people move into specialized testing people move into security testing user experience testing accessibility performance or they pick up mobile testing and then move into IOT which is software plus hardware and then more of software less of hardware testing and then they move into medical devices or some kind of devices which is more of hardware and less of software testing and then they move into purely hardware testing so doesn't have to be linear a progression but people do move into different kinds of testing they become technical there are people who like to do technical testing which is like unit testing integration testing or at the data and how to test particular scenarios the API's and the microservices those people move into a thorough technical testing line and then there are testers who have moved on from the waterfall model to the agile model to the DevOps model and they find their own places there they becomes from masters and the trial coaches or they take more interest in the logs and operation sites and move into the infrastructure parts and while they're continuing to do their testing part they do this they test infrastructure part too some of them become quality coaches test coaches quality advocates these are again roles not designations so and we're going to talk a little bit more about these samples move here to the next slide these are the designations so interestingly like I said that when I started as a software engineer there was no mention of testing or development there it was just software engineer however that entire batch of people that we were recruited were for testing so we all went into testing as software engineers and which was perfectly okay for us and then throughout my career I have made progress with somehow as common designations always having testing as a bracketed one but now there are more defined roles and more defined responsibilities for testing people and again these are the designations that I could think of mostly we could have many more so I'll just move on from this yeah so now when I actually looked at so many designations I wanted to hear from people as to what is it that they really wanted to like there's so many designations so I I just wanted to know what is really core a key to people in testing what is it that is their dream job what is it that they really want to move on to and I sent out a mentee meter request to a lot of my friends and if you can see there is this number 55 at the right bottom which is actually the number of people who responded to this one an equal number of people respond not equal but we are roughly about 35 odd people responded to me personally because mentee has a character limit of 25 characters so they were like why is that a limit I said I don't have that limit that mentee has it so they just wrote to me get directly about a lot of their roles but the end of it at the end of it the what I realized was that very rightly test architect was something that most of them wanted to be which which was very likely shown which is likely shown in this world cloud test manager test coach director faulty coach all of these words that you can see in bigger fonts are those where they have got most votes if you see in detail if you would have time to look through these while I'm talking through my slide you will also see that somebody here wanted to be an apple and orange and appear I see was somebody mentioned that and I'm okay with that so looking at these the idea was that then I do this I will get to know which are the most popular careers which are which are the most popular careers for testers that people want to be here and let's discuss that so ideally I would have loved to have somebody here as a test architect or a qi architect who would tell their daily job but since we don't have that here right now I can I'll just talk to you about the roles so I picked up a test architect and the coach and test manager and in my personal conversations I heard a lot about as did so I picked up that but if there is anything that you would like to know more about you can please just write it down in the chat and we will come back and discuss that so are in your Q&A if you want to know more about a certain role so let's talk about test architect quickly to me all the different organizations again will have different definitions the test architect is a person who understands testing at a very in-depth level and is responsible for things like say designing the test frameworks for test automation and testing in general or directing and coordinating the implementation of test automation and other tools designing the test environments providing guidance on the selection of the most effective test design techniques or the test tools to be used in a certain situation what should be the technical types of testing so all kinds of designing including designing methods for the creation of test data or coordinating with the release processes all of this is done by a test architect and generally she is the big picture person so she's somebody who understands software development and can and we can also work with developers to ensure that the development is that the test approaches align with the development approaches or the vice versa so both the approaches should align together so she overlooks that and the test architect should be able to understand various project life cycles and these days of course all kind of technologies also whether it is cloud mobile or social and social media all of this they should understand that part too and let me move on to another one which is after test architect I see test coach so test coach is let me so if any one of you has done mountaineering or likes hiking not hiking per se but probably proper mountaineering where you prepare for days and months to go to a summit summit is the top like the peak where you have to reach typically such climbs or such journeys start with the uphill journey starts with the base camp so you may be coming from all over you all come together at the base camp and from there you go towards the summit the uphill climb starts and the person who's actually so if you look at the test coaches role it's in these senses it would be to help the testers reach that summit and typically how I look at the summit is a domain-oriented quality focused organization so if somebody is a tester it's the test coaches role to actually help the tester become a domain-oriented and quality focused besides in addition to the automation testing culture that the tester carries the coach should be able to take them to that summit so even teams that are writing user stories and acceptance tests often don't realize that they are not yet at the summit therefore getting to explore error conditions in depth a good test coach spends a lot of time listening and adapting the process to the project and can learn as much from them as they can from the test coach it's a give and take mutual thing mutual learning happens with the coach yes because I just want to discuss two three roles here so sorry guys this is the one slide I'm gonna talk about a couple of roles here and then we will move on to the next one so the test coach role is demanding and requires a broad set of skills ranging from the programmer and tester to people's person and a child coach even sales person so there's there's a lot of it that you do here it's actually the fundamental part of a test coach is a fundamental part of the domain-oriented testing and their core job is to actually instill into the team a sense of product quality pride in their code combined with a particular way of working that results in a system that's more in tune with the business domain and requirements let me quickly discuss test manager or is that what should I discuss let me see if the chat says what is quality coach we just discussed an apple orange pure yes their need just fell into testing a lot of them in a race is I was building neural networks great okay yes so there is no ask for other titles I'll just quickly be done with let's say the test manager because that role has really changed a lot and that role a lot of people say you don't need test managers anymore so let me just give a quick clarification on at that end so the basic role of a test manager from how I see it is to understand the testing effort I mean the traditional used to be a list of activities and I'm going to quickly call out couple of those items and then tell you how it has changed traditionally the test manager was supposed to understand the testing effort by analyzing the requirements of the project they were supposed to estimate and obtain management support for the time resources budget required to perform the testing they were supposed to organize the testing kickoff meetings define the strategy develop the test plans identify training requirements find out find all those testing team of professionals with appropriate skills and attitude and motivation and somehow arrange the hardware and software requirement assigned tasks to the test team and then also review their reports review all their documentation make sure that all the content and structure of the testing documents and artifacts is maintained in a standard way and so there was a lot of these checks and reviews of test cases and the people and he was also or she was also the point of single point of contact for the management for the team for the testing team and she used to his escalation about the issues about project requirements or any of them so this was the traditional role and also the single point of contact for the client for this team however what we have seen is that today it's not just about ensuring the timely delivery of different testing milestones or tracking and preparing reports of testing activities why because today in an agile world in a DevOps world teams are very self-organized and teams are it's no more a separate team of testing you are all part of one team developers testers product owners all are working towards quality it's no more a test manager's responsibility alone and therefore the test manager's role has evolved a bit it's changed from one who used to manage the testing team to one who now enables the test team a test manager that works outside of the self-organized teams she has a critical role in coaching and test the testers to perform better in an agile way of testing the test manager has to support the purpose of testing and at times transition into the roles of an agile coach and scrum master something we talked about earlier that testers transition into agile coach and scrum master yes they do mostly the test managers take up that role and in agile the test manager would rather be managing the tests than the testers so that's something you might have heard quite often and the focus is not on documentation as much as it is on developing a good strategy I mean of course it was always the focus to have a good strategy for testing but the focus on documentation maintaining a lot of them and having a proper standardization and all of that that has lessened the test manager needs to have a broad understanding and a deep knowledge of testing to make a fail-safe testing strategy and that's what it is about so what I'm going to do now is I want to talk about test it but I'll only do it if we have that request on chat because I want to move forward so let me quickly take you to the next one can you please go to mentee and use this code and respond to what is your dream job and roles and designations to open up that browser so this is what people want to be I again see test architect coming up big I see as debt coming up bigger okay and alright so pretty much okay we'll still change it so we'll pretty much stop here and so this is what it looks like so test architect we have discussed technical test manager we've discussed as debt we should quickly talk about the role and we will move further then great thank you for sharing and you can keep sharing it after the conference also it will only help us to understand where all your dreams lie alright so we're going to go back to our slides okay so we've done this as debt I'll quickly then talk about in layman terms as debt is a developer who instead of working in the product development team works as part of the test team in a sense as debts are responsible not only for writing code but are required to test the code as well they are required to continuously write test and fix so they're right quotes they test quotes and they also fix their quotes the written quotes and their roles and responsibilities are typically based on the agile life cycle model if I may just list out a few tasks that an as-debt does usually so like it's they build robust scalable and high-quality test automation solutions for functional regression and performance testing they develop code for quality automation and ensure extensive unit test coverage of the code they are building customizing and deploying and managing their test environment and test automation frameworks they check for products scalability reliability consistency and performance they participate in design and architectural discussions and they do some good high-class debugging also and they prepare test reports in short there are I would say customer advocates who influence product design by understanding end user expectations and well functional and automation testers will always be required as states are more like an all-rounder that most organizations are looking for they're supposed to deep dive into the code and examine if it aligns with the overall objectives or not and the way it interacts with the various components of an application so that's what this is that if you want to know more about any particular role please feel free to put it in a Q&A or chat and we'll take it take them up later. Now yeah so like I mentioned earlier that the first half was part of the designations the roles and the jobs the second half is about identifying your superpower and why we need to do this is see if you have a dream job or if you have certain aspirations to do you should and if let's say you already know that X company has this Y rule that I want to do and you are already clear on the mapping as to what the Y role requires and you know that you your strengths are there in that space you have some experience built on it I think then this session is not very helpful to you but if you are somebody who is looking at the Y role but not sure if you are a good fit there if you are not sure what your skill sets with respect to your superpowers are like what is it that you would be doing better than others and how you should take how you should leverage that how you should make the best of it for yourself and your career then maybe I can help you a little bit in understanding that so and that's what your superpower is like to me it's a skill that you are so good at and better than others that it becomes an advantage of yours or others and this could be a naturally acquired gift or built with effort and when I say naturally acquired gift it's not something you're born with it's you something you acquire naturally because of your circumstances and situations that you grow up in there's a Forbes definition for superpower there is an Oxford definition for superpower and mostly very certain I mean not not surprisingly superpowers are mostly mentioned in terms of either the nations which are super power or the characters which are who are who can become invisible or who can see through the walls or something to that tune those are considered to be superpowers so we feel that as humans we may never have those kind of superpowers of just seeing through the walls or becoming invisible but let's see what I have here and so this is I ask a lot of our tester friends that do you believe people should have fun or people have fun I explored because I believe that people should do have superpowers and I would have my own superpowers others have their own and so I wanted to hear it from others and if you can see the screen Melissa Tondi says yes yes I mean most of them said yes of course there are people who said no and will quickly I'll show you who they were and why because and they have very solid reason for it and their logic was just equal equally strong and which made me think that yes it's you know you may believe in superpowers or not it's just as equal but those who believe in superpowers they said that so I asked Melissa what's her superpower she says it's she can make decisions lightning fast and I asked Jason Huggins and he says curiosity is his superpower I asked Mike Lyles and he says I'm able to build connections and relate to people well very similar to what Maria Kadimo says that I'm good at listening and guiding people in solving problems. Ashley says her superpower is empathy very similar to what Paul Gerserff he says that he thinks he has empathy he just doesn't always know how to turn that into help and his other superpower is being able to turn complex situations or problems into the simpler ones and that is true similarly so Lisa Crispin says her superpower is getting the right people to have conversation and sorry to skip this part but yeah the questions I asked them was question one do you think people have superpowers question but two was what is your superpower if you think yes question three was what would you be doing if not testing and you have all kinds of answers here that if they were not testing they would be already doing management consulting or if they would be writing books they would be educating people they would be working on robots so all kinds of responses are there and the final question that I asked them was what is your next move do you want to continue in testing or do you want to move on to something else so again mixed responses quite a few of them were already working in aspects of testing for example focusing on process engineering for example focusing on moving on to development leadership role are focusing more on doing something for testing people from outside of the testing world also so a lot of them gives some responses to that tune then of course Curtis and James and Greg said no there are no superpowers we don't believe in that and they decided not to respond to that they were like yes there could be but we don't believe in it now the most interesting response I had actually got was from James Bob and I will tell you why because that's not single conversation actually made me think of superpower in a little different way than what I was originally thinking and he says that he would be a defense lawyer which I think is very very appropriate to his attitude so okay moving on let me just quickly take you to this and we'll talk more about superpowers that what it really is and how you should look at yours but before that do you think people have superpowers and if you do what are your superpowers oh patience comes first thank you for patiently going through the presentation finisher very nice troubleshooting listening empathy people skills mentoring a time deficiency okay okay mind reading superb listening continues to be the lead finisher great okay so we are going to okay so let's uh let's move on to the slides back and yes clearly designing and finisher and listening and empathy patients pledge to complete work smart work enthusiasm improvisation beautiful so yes these are all bonding with people these are indeed huge superpowers and I hope you all put at least two to three options here because okay so thank you all for putting in your details and for sharing with me about the superpowers that you believe you have I will quickly probably share my perspective and let me first share this superpowers perspectives in terms of our daily life and then we'll move on to testing so what is super power let's say it's a unique ability to do something unique meaning either absolutely unique so you are literally the only one who does it are relatively unique so there are remarkably few people who have it are functionally unique which is I would say other people have may have it but do not use it so consider the scope you may be unique in the world or maybe locally you might have a super power within your own family and you know I don't know how many of you actually have know the story of Ram but okay before I go there so let's say we had to say who has the power to make the strongest warrior in the world surrender that would be his mom right we can say that she has that super power so that's one way of looking at it and based on that we all I think we all have superpowers some sort of superpowers in some situation or other that may come up and so even if you have literal superpowers you may grant someone power over you which gives them a superpower so that's that's from the life's perspective but let me translate that into you the classic tester superpowers for you some people are socially gifted so add her to any team and everyone wants to work together instead of fighting some people are super analysts give them anything to study and they'll break it down and make six models from it some people are amazing at getting things finished so super finishes they just get it done and delivered some people are warriors defending the team from people who put unfair pressure on them some people are super empathic they feel what the other users want some people are super talkers they can explain just anything and help people understand it and experiences give you the power of memory and being very experienced can make you be able to predict the outcome of things that no one else sees coming so that's also a superpower so while we're talking about superpowers I would not want you to look at it as just one superpower I mean think of it like a combination of you know if you're I don't know how many of you know combination locks they are used for safes and lockers and why if you look at one layer of it or one level of it it's just a lock just another lock what makes it stronger is the combination of different locks that open a different layer and it kind of reinforces builds itself on one each one of them on top of each other that kind of strength comes in because they're reinforcing their strengths from each level of law so but a quick warning here sometimes I don't know if you've heard of case of 10x engineer in our VC circles the virtual capital circles sorry not made a virtual capital venture capitalist circle people and start people talk about 10x engineer an engineer who does so much work that it's almost equal into 10 engineers that one person is equal to 10 persons work and he's so good at it so good at it but maybe that person is not culturally a fit maybe that person is not a team player they believe in being a single man army there are situations where it may work but not in all situations organizations need team player so that's one way to look at it that while you may have a superpower it might not be sufficient for you to progress consider for example I talk about diversity a lot and how important it is for organizations now let's say that someone who focuses on their superpowers might be insufficiently diverse within themselves so again that's going to someday fail them and here I put a picture of sustainability like I'm a sustainable enthusiast as I mentioned so I'm putting a picture of chimneys who are blasting away so much of emissions into the air and the fact is they are running at their full power they're doing so much they're building profits but at the same time they're making a long-term they're building a long-term deficit with the climate which means that you may have a strong superpower which you are working on and it's giving you an immediate profit right now but if you have to have a long-term career then I think it's more important to make sure that you develop sustainably if you it's not sustainable it's not development because then you are headed towards failure even if you don't see it so make sure that your superpowers are such which reinforce each other and to put that in perspective sometimes what happens is if I were to also say to you that okay what is your superpower and if you are able to identify it and if you are able to build on it you will be like okay I don't know I'm good at this maybe at that and maybe at that also but I just don't know how to put them all together and become somebody who is really exceptional I would say find a mirror when I say find a mirror what it means is find somebody who has similar powers as you and is you can you can see them and relate to them and see that okay they may be some person who's getting crowded by people or who is always supported by people or the moment the person walks into the room people always want to talk to them or want to take their help in solving the problems you know what kind of person that is and if you see the same traits in yourself then you know that this is your superpower also you need to build on it so it's always it's sometimes easier to identify other superpowers than your own than your own and then kind of map yours to them that's one approach and there is if this also doesn't work if you're not able to get it how to do it and if you're you see people with some similar traits but you are still not sure then I would definitely recommend you find a mentor quickly coaching is different it's more about performance driven and designed to improve the professionals on the job performance but mentoring is more about development driven looking not just at the professionals current job function but beyond that I'm taking a more holistic approach to career development so having said that I would highly recommend you to find a mentor or finds or look around and see people and that's why you need to network and meet more people and talk to more people not just in your organization not just in your friend circle but also beyond and see the traits that people carry and see if you carry any of those traits and if you see them as their superpowers then maybe you also have those superpowers and you need to leverage them put them together and again at the end find a mentor if that doesn't work and if you need mentor for career growth professional growth building I can help you I may not be knowing all skills in depth but I'm sure I know a lot of people who can help so if you have questions I'm going to stop screen sharing and come back to you this was an amazing session I can see a lot of going up so I'm sure everybody enjoyed as well we actually running out of time but since we started your session a little late I will let one question be taken up right now one question the popular question here is who is a software quality evangelist software quality evangelist okay so software quality is understood but an evangelist is somebody who is you know kind of a trailblazer kind of somebody who's who does it first and who does or I wouldn't even say does it first but does it so well something to the tune of I would say innovative at the same time doing some new work and then making it popular so it's like product building and marketing of it both put together about software quality so you bring up new ways of working you bring up more innovative ways of working you bring out more depth into that subject so since we're talking about software quality software quality person like you may say I think I was hearing about Jim yesterday Jim is certainly a software quality evangelist finding out new ways of working on it bringing out in depth into the subject and then also making it popular with the people helping them grow with it so an evangelist is somebody who does this and builds out stuff and then helps them helps the community grow with it if that makes sense and I can certainly list out the tasks for you if you want thank you and enjoy the rest of you thank you so much everyone