Scripting – the essential skillset for a Quality Engineer – Part 1
Why a QA Engineer should learn Scripting?
As a QA engineer have you ever felt that you have been just writing test cases, executing them, logging or closing defects while validating and maintaining the quality of the product being delivered release after release?
Have you ever thought that a couple of areas where if it was automated it could have helped you being productive, identify issues early and help debug faster?
What if I say that if you learnt scripting, any type of scripting it will come of use to you in your day-to-day tasks also helping you step back from the mundane testing work that one does release after release. Then it’s time to gain a belief in this idea and motivate yourself to learn the art of scripting to make your life a little more interesting.
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Where can you use Scripting?
Test Data Creation:
In the blog my colleague Harikrishnan speaks on ‘How to address customer issues with better test data?’ and also discusses the advantages of using ‘TestData’ in your testing lifecycle.
In most cases the data required to prepare is enormously huge and grabbing on the source of the test data may require talking to multiple systems, or a complicated jumbled data set. To solve this problem of generating test data you can leverage your scripting knowledge to generate ‘Test Data’ using automation. Depending on the system under test you may follow a scripting or a programming language to generate test data. Automation Testing is a technique which uses an application to implement the entire lifecycle of the process in less time and more accuracy. Here the tester writes a script and uses suitable softwares to the test the working module.
Log Analysis:
It is imperative that a Test Engineer must add as much information as possible to a test report and; one of the most critical components of a test report that helps a developer to understand the issue’s quicker is ‘Logs’. While it may be easier to analyse a log from a simple system, in case of a Microservice architecture or a production server, it sometimes gets too heavy for a developer / tester to manually find it . In short analysing the logs is like finding needle in a haystack. Scripting, especially Shell Scripting often helps in identifying the contents of a log that helps you in your debugging. So i would recommend the reader to certainly start to build up skills on Shell Programming as it does not require any programming knowledge.
By:
Shushma Amarnath
Coviam Technologies
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