The Qualities that A Good Test Engineer should Possesses

People are the most valuable and important resources in testing, the testing cannot be implemented without a qualified and active testing group. However, there is a very common phenonmenon in the software development industry, which is to transfer people who are lack of experience, inefficient in development or not suitable for other work to do the testing work. This is a short-sighted behavior as the skills needed for an effective system test are not less than those of software development. In fact, the testers will get a wide range of experience, and they will encounter more problems than many developers.

1. Communication Skills
A good tester must be able to communicate with all those involved persons. He should not only be able to communicate with the users, but also the developers. But it is unfortunate that there is no common language between the two groups of people. So the testers must be able to communicate with the users and developers equally.

2. Technical Capacities
Generally, developers hold a belittling attitude to those who do not know technologies. Once a member of the tester group made a wrong judgement, then their credibility will immediately be put across to the public. The testers must understand the concept of tested software system, and they need to use those tools as well.

3. Self-confidence
It is a common view that developers accuse testers when thing goes wrong; testers must have sufficient self-confidence on their views, because they cannot do more things if they are always accused by others.

4. Diplomatic Skills
When you want to tell a person he made a mistake, it is necessary to use some diplomatic methods. The witty and sophisticated diplomacy contributes to maintain the cooperative relations with developers. If the testers adopt an uncompromising method, it will be “won the war but lost the battle" situation in the cooperation with the development sector.

5. Sense of Humor
Under the sophistry circumstances, a humorous criticism will be very helpful.

6. Strong Memory
An ideal tester should have the ability to pick up the similar mistakes previously encountered from their memories, which is valuable in the course of testing. Because many emerging issues are similar with the problems they have found.

7. Patience
Some quality assurance job requires incredible patience. Sometimes you need to spend much time to separate, identify and assign a mistake. This is not the work for the people who cannot sit still.

8. Suspecting Spirit
It can be expected that developers will try their every efforts to explain the errors. Testers must listen to each person, but they must remain the suspect until pass the testing by themselves.

9. Self-supervision
The testing work can easily make you become lazy. Only those capable of self-supervising can do the normal daily work.

10. Insight
A good test engineers have the view of "test is to destroy”, the ability to capture users’ perspectives, the strong pursuit of quality, and the attention to details.