10 Bad Habits Limiting Your Career as a QA Engineer/Software Tester

and how to turn them into strengths

To become successful in any career you need to hone your skills. Your skills usually come naturally to you so it is rather easy to do so. It becomes harder when it comes to your weaknesses. Nobody likes their weaknesses. Unfortunately, those are to be worked on too. The first step to being successful in improving one’s weaknesses is to realize them. The second is to make a plan on how to make strengths out of them.

I have been working for some time now albeit in different careers. I could say that I know myself quite well, including my weaknesses. However, as a QA I need to have certain strengths to get the job done well. That means, I now have to focus on my weakness which would hinder me to become a great QA software tester. I try to be aware and notice my bad habits. I also have an amazing dev coach at work. She points out to me my weaknesses so that I can get better at what I do. And lastly, since I started doing interviews with QA Leads on my blog, I have been noticing what they mention as needed strengths.

So today, I have prepared a list of weaknesses or bad habits that in my opinion will limit you and me in having a successful career as a QA engineer/software tester.

1) Being scattered

One of the secrets of a successful life is to be able to hold all of our energies upon one point, to focus all of the scattered rays of the mind upon one place or thing.

– Orison Swett Marden

I used to be able to focus my mind for hours at a time. But that was before social media became mainstream. Constant reminders and messages from people from all over the globe made me scattered and I was not able to do anything well. I had to relearn how to focus again. I switched off all social notifications, I left my cell phone in the kitchen on purpose, I put alpha waves music on and I dove into work. That worked when I was coding for a small startup as we were only 4 people on the team.

When I started to work for a bigger company as a QA and PO assistant, constant messages started to come in. And I felt the need to answer all of them right away. I would be jumping from one thing to the other and not doing anything properly. Again, I had to learn how to focus on this kind of job.

Now I have a system in place. I read emails in the morning, around lunch, and towards the end of the day. Then I answer slack messages only if they are about something critical, pertain to something I am working on at the exact moment, or they come in the email reading time blocks. I work on one thing first and when I finish it I move to the other one. If I am not able to finish a certain task, I make a note of what is missing and send a message to whoever needs to continue working on that. Then and only then I move over to the next one.

2) Giving up too early

Out greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to try just one more time.

– Thomas A. Edison

Giving up too early is never good. Throughout my life, I gave up some careers, businesses, and even relationships when they started to get rough. I had to learn to stop doing that otherwise, I would end up being always a starter and not a finisher.

Funny thing is that my dev coach pointed this weakness of mine to me at work recently when I tried to configure a new testing environment and it was not working. I asked a couple of people what to do with it and they did it for me but they did not explain to me what was I doing wrong. Since I do this configuration only occasionally, I let it be something I will figure out next time. And it was again my weakness of giving up too early. Being meticulous in everything I do will be a strength that helps me to have a successful QA career as well victorious life. So now, whenever things in my life or career get tough, I try to stick with them and get through.

3) Being scared to ask

A lot of us are secretly scared, for whatever reason, and so we get in our own way. But if you really want something you have to ask for it.

– Paul Downs Colaizzo

Recently, I was listening to a podcast where they mentioned that kids from rich families get ahead because they are not scared to ask. They have this sense of privilege that everybody should answer their questions. The rest of us commoners were raised in a different way and we have to learn how to ask. I am actually thankful to my grandfather who was not raised with a sense of privilege but was never afraid to ask. Thanks to that our family had good connection to medical doctors a tradespeople even during communism. When I started my first legal job after university, I did not have much self-esteem and was scared to ask. I had to learn the hard way but it paid off. Thanks to losing the fear of asking, I received a great recommendation for a Fulbright scholarship, great references for jobs, higher salaries, and so on.

The power of ask came in handy even when I started working as a QA software tester. I was not scared to ask my colleagues how to do certain things to do them right. I asked to be shown how to write cypress tests in our projects so that I can write my own. When I inquired about mentorship, I received it and that allowed me to grow in my career. I reached out to random QA leads on LinkedIn to answer my questions about whether a technical degree is necessary to become a QA software tester. I get “no” occasionally. But “yes” comes more often and that counts.

4) Not having empathy

Empathy is about finding echo of another person in yourself

– Mohsin Hamid

When I wrote my article about 10 essential skills for successful QA somebody pointed out in a comment that I should have included empathy. And he was right. Empathy is very important in career and life. As QA you need to have a lot of empathy because you will be working with people who might not share your views.

Not all developers and QA software testers work as a real team. They might be blaming each other for bugs in production and unfinished work. It is easy to get into arguments in such a situation. However, if your mode operandi is empathy you will understand that it is not a competition. You will try to put yourself in the shoes of the developers, product owner, scrum master and see the issue through their eyes. You won’t take their blame personally but will try to find a common solution that will work for everybody. Such a skill will pay of thousand times back in your career. I still sometimes get my ego in the game but I am now able to catch it more often.

5) Not learning the basic methodologies

Learning never exhausts the mind.

– Leonardo da Vinci

When you start working as a QA software tester without any tech background you have to learn the basic methodologies of testing. Methodologies were made to provide a common framework for testing. They offer you a recipe on how to do your job well. If you did not have any methodologies you might not know how, when, why, and what to test. However, you should always use your critical thinking when it comes to testing methodologies. You need to approach testing as a curious child. You can’t take the methodologies as a single truth but more as a guide who will help you in your QA career. On the other hand, refusing to learn basic methodologies will lead you to be scattered and missing defects in your project at work. The methodologies were really made for a reason.

6) Thinking too much in the box

I want to stay ahead and to stay ahead you have to be thinking out of the box.

– Adriano Zumbo

Unless you landed your QA software testing job by accident, you probably went into testing because you like quality: quality of products, systems, work, life. And you enjoy assuring such quality. Because why otherwise would you be doing such a job?

And if you do like what you do day in day out, then why not do it in an innovative way. Sure enough, innovativeness needs to include effectiveness and efficiency. If you think out of the box, you will bring new tools into testing and teamwork. Then you prove the concept and the entire team (and hopefully the boss) will notice. Especially, if you will help them save time. You can bring innovation to JIRA by using plugins for writing test cases or by writing better bug tickets. You can improve your team’s meeting with the client. The sky is the limit. Get creative.

7) Not having a plan for your career growth

There is always room for growth. I feel like I will never get to the point where I am 100 percent happy with where I am in my career.

– Normani Kordei

If you do not know where you are going then you will never know how to get there. Today’s world is full of amazing opportunities, especially in tech. When I first decided to join IT, I wanted to be a developer. It was not because I liked coding that much, although I don’t mind it. It was because I did not know how many other interesting positions there are.

Now, having an understanding of how agile teams work, I want to become a great QA software tester. I want to get decent in automation. I would also enjoy being a QA lead at some point and/or move over to product management/ownership as I enjoy talking with stakeholders. This is just a general idea and it might change and evolve as I progress in my QA career. I believe careers and jobs are like a river they take you from point A to point B. It is always good to know what pitstops are available along the river.

8) Focusing too much on the theory and not being hands-on

It does not matter how beautiful your theory is, it does not matter how smart you are. If it does not agree with the experiment, it is wrong.

– Richard P. Feynman

Understanding the theory of something can be helpful. But it can’t be viewed as the alpha and omega of things. The hands-on approach is what matters in a job. I don’t have a tech degree so I never learned all the theories of computer science. But I learned the theory of law and it was kinda useless when I started my first legal job. That is why I believe that not having a tech degree but rather a different background can be actually useful when switching a career to a QA software tester. Theories have a place in research and generalization but a workplace has a specific setup and flow. Not every theory will fit. Critical thinking, street smart, and hands-on approach will get you much farther in your QA software tester career, in my opinion.

9) Not learning leadership and communication skills

Communication – the human connection – is the key to personal and career success.

– Paul J. Meyer

Soft skills are needed in any profession but more so in tech where there are a lot of highly introverted geniuses. Not improving your leadership and communication skills might put a stop on your career growth. Maybe you do not want to be a manager, but you should at least strive to be a leader. You should help others to growth career wise and personally. And you should always communicate your needs and wants while actively listening to others.

In my past, I used to be quite selfish. I thought that the world revolves around me and other people should yield. I learned my lesson. Now, I try to understand. I communicate what I am looking for. Active listening helps me to understand what my teammates are really saying and why they behave a certain way. I try to not take things personally, although I still sometimes do. It is not my fault if a developer thinks I am his/her rival as a QA software tester. On the other hand, I won’t let him/her talk down to me or call me out at the meetings. I will give him/her proper feedback.

10) Becoming a victim

I was raised to be an independent woman, not a victim of anything.

– Kamala Harris

QA software tester job can be tough. You might feel under-appreciated by your colleagues or client and not get the space to talk at the meetings because you are not a developer. You might be paid less than the developers too. This all can weigh on you and you might lose your drive.

Not all teams and all companies are the same. And that applies to other positions in tech as well. If you are not happy about how the developers treat you, talk to them and demand better treatment. If you want to have more input at the client’s meetings, find what needs to be improved and make a presentation about it. And if your boss pays you less than the developers, ask for a raise. Make a good case of why you think you should be paid a certain salary. And if you do everything but still not win, then change your job. Thankfully, there is a lot of work in tech right now.

Just please don’t become a sour and negative victim. That will certainly limit your successful career as well as content life.

If you feel like I left something out, please let me know in the comments.