The Software Testing Engineer: An Essential Part of the Software Development Team

A Software Test Engineer is involved in the testing of software and is generally a member of the software quality assurance team. Software QA Engineers may test software, but are not always expert Test Engineers. The software testing engineer tests the software for performance, functionality, usability, portability, efficiency, compatibility, scalability, resource usage, security etc.

Two of the most important types of testing are black box testing and white box testing. The black box testing requires no knowledge of internal logic or code structure and is mainly focused on the testing for requirements and functionality of the product/ software application. In this the software tester will input the data and see the correctness of the output data. He is not concerned with the internal operations which make the data do what it does. The white box testing deals with the internal logic and structure of the code. The tests written based on the white box testing strategy incorporate coverage of the code written, branches, paths, statements and internal logic of the code etc. Both these tests are performed by the software testing engineer and are equally important. They serve different purposes.

The software testing is done at various stages. Tests carried out on software are black box/ white box/ gray box testing, unit/ integration/ system testing and alpha testing/ beta/ acceptance testing, functional/ non-functional testing and verification and validation. Some of these tests are manual and some are automatic. Some are tested using both the methods. All technical tests on the software are conducted by the software testing engineers.

Anyone interested in taking up the career path of a software testing engineer should possess an educational qualification and training. Some of the engineers go to schools awarding Computer science degree. It is not mandatory that the Software Testers should have Computer Science degree. There are many accredited schools which award certificates for software testing. Some schools are also conducting online courses for this. Top schools awarding software testing training are American Society for Quality (ASQ), Quality assurance International, and International institute for software testing.

There are certain companies which recruit persons who do not have software testing qualifications for lower level jobs in the computer department. Such people can come up from ranks to become a software testing engineer. Alternately they may get assistance from the company for getting training and becoming certified. The more the experience of the software testing engineer, the more will be his efficiency in testing. He will also be able to set up simple tests right up to writing the test codes and doing the white box testing. The software testing profession offers challenges for people having knowledge and aptitude for problem solving and compensates them well.