Basic Skills That Every Tester Should Have

1. Documentation:

Documentation is necessary to testing. Also, ensure that you see the value of the documentation process. The benefits of documentation are, it will help you to track requirement changes, track down the test steps, log your work, etc.

2. Test Preparation:

It includes the following documents which are the most common documents for test preparation and it will link the developer and tester understanding.

a) Test Plan: Graph the flow of testing from start to finish. Test plan is created by the QA lead and the team participated in it to stay updated for the plan. It includes the scope and activities.

A test plan must have:

• Project Name and version
• Test plan identifiers
• Introduction
• References
• Test items
• Features to be tested
• Features not to be tested
• Approach
• Pass/ Fail item criteria
• Suspension & Resumption criteria
• Test deliverables
• Test environment details
• Test Estimates
• Schedule
• Staffing & Training Needs
• Responsibilities
• Risks
• Assumptions and Dependencies
• Approvals

For more details regarding "Test Plan", please visit: http://findnerd.com/list/view/TEST-PLAN-Fundamentals/22346/

b) Test scenarios:

Test scenarios are ‘what to test’ which depends on the requirement and usually documented. Most of them contain:

• Module Name (eg. login, registration, etc.)
• Scenario ID which is used for reference
• Scenario Description
• Scenario Importance (Priority)
• Requirement ID – For traceability

c) Test cases:

Test case has been created on the basis of requirement document. Tester should be expert in writing the productive test cases for the project. They should include the positive as well as negative test cases.

Test Cases includes the following:

• Scenario ID
• Test case ID
• Test description
• Steps to execute
• Test data
• Expected result
• Actual result
• Status
• Comments
• Executed by
• Executed date
• Defect ID
• Configuration details

3. Test Process:

There are many types of testing which can be done but it depends on the time, budget and client's choice which decides what type of testing should be performed.

Some of the test types are:

• Black box testing
• Grey box testing
• Unit testing (If applicable)
• Integration testing
• Incremental integration testing
• Regression testing
• Functional testing
• Retesting
• Sanity Testing
• Smoke testing
• Acceptance testing
• Usability testing
• Compatibility testing
• End to End testing
• Alpha testing
• Beta testing

4. Testing at the partial development stage:

In some companies, there may be less time and resources. Due to this, testing process started before the module integration which leads to inaccurate output. So testers should do complete functional testing before the release.

5. Bug report document:

This is the most important QA document. The following are the fields a good bug report must have:

• Defect ID
• Defect description
• Location
• Build number
• Steps to reproduce
• Severity
• Priority
• Assigned to
• Reported by
• Status
• New
• Open
• Assigned
• In Progress/Work in Progress
• Fixed/Resolved
• Verified/Closed
• Retest
• Duplicate
• Deferred
• Invalid

6. Sign-off process:

QA lead sign-off the process. Then, they'll send the final document.