The Day To Day Of A Software Test Engineer
By: Jolivé Hodehou
Tags: Testing, Test Automation, Software Testing, Quality Assurance, Software Development

The Day To Day Of A Software Test Engineer

Photo by wayhomestudio on Freepik

I work as a Software Test Engineer in a Customer Experience company. Most of the first few hours are business as usual, except for emergencies.

A Sample Routine

First of all, when I start my working day, the first thing I do is pray. A spiritual prayer? No, I do it as soon as I wake up.

I pray that nothing is broken in production because the QA team is the first to be interrogated and if there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s answering an email interrogation.

I also check my inbox. Yes, it’s important, I often have a lot of articles on software testing, quality assurance or personal development to read.

Thank you medium for always sending me interesting things by email. This is my coffee because I don’t drink coffee or tea.

During the morning

Firstly, participation in upcoming project kick-off meetings, regular meetings on the status of the project.

Clarification of bugs, further investigation, help with root cause analysis. Replying to emails or verbal clarification of reported bugs, and helping to analyze possible causes of the bug.

After the meetings, let’s get to work. The tests of the different functionalities are carried out, be it functional, regression, API, etc. …. It all depends on what is on the agenda and how the team has organized the different activities. Then focus on the high-priority issues. Don’t forget to check the results of automated tests or to run them ourselves if we have them for the project. Bugs during testing? They are reported in our defect tracking tool.

After the morning’s tasks, one of my favorite moments.

Go for lunch. I come back and talk about a lot of things with my manager who is probably the coolest mentor on earth. Thanks for existing Jean Julien.

Afternoon

When I come back from break, I sometimes look at the business and functional requirements documents and provide feedback to my manager.

After that, it is time to prepare the tests, create and/or update the test cases from the documents. Prepare the test data, and checklists if necessary.

All this is ready? Then let’s run our various test cases, asking around for more clarification, reporting defects, updating test cases if necessary, providing a status report. Ah yes, just a few differences from the morning.

Here is a short list of things to do also in the evening, without going into details:

Provide test results to interested people

Provide statistics, metrics

Analyzing test runs

Analyze reason of test runs failures

Fix automated test scripts (if any problems found)

Investigate defects found by tests

Developing new test scripts

Demo meetings

Writing

Reading

Learning infrastructure tools like web servers, CI and so on

Learning test tools

Learning test approaches

It depends on the day and my mood. Don’t worry, just because I’m enthusiastic about automation doesn’t mean I’m a robot.

Final Thoughts

While all of this is important in the day-to-day life of a software test engineer, how you organize your day depends on you, your team, the projects you are working on, and your priorities.

It was a pleasure to share this with you.

Thanks for Reading!