Two years and seven months. How time flies ! I had managed to get my first job at India’s biggest IT organization, but to be honest, at that time I was a little skeptical about my survival in this industry for long, especially after having had “not so good” engineering days academically, except for my final year. In spite of this, I decided to take up the gauntlet,all guns blazing, wanting to show it to the world – I am here to stay !. From the engineering days, programming was something I was always scared of, maybe it was the atmosphere which was created at college to segregate the “expert programmers” from the rest. I almost believed that programming isn’t my piece of cake, but I have shut the fear in a closet, thrown the keys never to find it again.
Training days were tough but an amazing learning experience. I was involved in developing a web application from the scratch using J2EE. This really helped me to improve on my technical skills to some extent. Desire to pursue my career as a Software Developer was very much on cards. But then came a twist in the tale, I was assigned to a project as a Software Tester. The project belonged to the Investment Banking Domain, where I was responsible to perform manual tests on a web application which was used by one of the world’s leading Clearing House. The application or the clearing system as it is called, is leveraged to perform clearing activities on Cash and Derivatives products trades on European markets. I was afraid, started to research whether Testing would be the right stream for me, some surfing on the internet and I learnt that the stream too had a lot to offer on technical side. But I wasn’t convinced because my job had nothing to offer on the technical front, but domain wise I knew there was lot to learn. Nevertheless, I had already decided to give my best in whatever I get to do and took up it up as a challenge, waiting for the day where I get to showcase my technical skills. It was a long wait ahead.
As time went by, I started to enjoy what I was doing. I was a self proclaimed “Passionate Software Tester” now. I remember the day when I tasted success in detecting my first ever defect, it was celebrated with some high fives and greetings from my team members, a small GUI bug though but no less to bring it to notice. After all, the intention was to improve the quality of the end product keeping the needs of the customer on priority. Just to add, the team with which I worked with all these years has always been high on spirits, very supportive and fun to work with. Yet, somewhere down in my heart, I wanted to be on technical side of things, so as to keep my computers degree relevant. By the grace of Allah, I started working towards learning skills required for Automation Testing. I was absolutely delighted when I got to work on Automation, because it opened the doors for me to explore new areas in Testing and Automation seems to be really cool out of them all, it brings me back at war with programming. Mobility and Cloud are the other branches I am looking forward to work on in the future, and who knows if there is something even more interesting in store for me, I hope I grab it. Not long ago, I managed to achieve ISTQB Advanced Level – Technical Test Analyst and Foundation level certifications on Testing. Anticipating a great career ahead. Insha Allah !
I have attached a video here on “Becoming a Software Testing Expert” – By James Bach. I hope this motivates you. 😀
So am I a Tester By Choice ? Yes.
Shahir Ahmed 