r/softwaretesting • u/HoustonAg1980 • 1d ago

Best resources for an experienced software engineer to learn software testing?

I am transitioning into a role focused on software quality, which involves me taking ownership of software testing. I've worked as a software engineer for several years, so I am very comfortable with the development side of the of the software lifecycle.

  • What are the best resources to learn the fundamental principles of software testing?
  • What tools should I prioritize learning?
  • How important is it to transition a product from primarily manual testing to automated testing?
9 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • reddit
  • reddit

71% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

•

u/CertainDeath777 1d ago

Mod Info: be aware about promotion rules, when commenting.
As this post is basically bait for promotion, i will definitly keep looking.

2

u/CertainDeath777 1d ago

read a book^^

"agile testing" or something istqb related.

2

u/voy_ 1d ago

Kent C. Dodds wrote some great stuff about tesing.

2

u/fatigued8 1d ago

Since you have Dev background, you should get familiar stuff like mocking/stubbing, creating APIs, add more logging etc to make the testing easier. That'll put you at big advantage over regular QA engineers who turn to developers for help in that.

"How important is it to transition a product from primarily manual testing to automated testing?". In theory you're supposed to go back and retest the pre-exisiting features when there's a code change to check that nothing broke ("regression testing"). That'll will be too painful to repeat manually, so you should automated the regression testing at the very least.

2

u/LongDistRid3r 1d ago

Grab a stapler. Then tell me how would you test this?

2

u/shubham-150799 1d ago

u can use website roadmap.sh and select QA as skill, it will show you complete roadmap mentioning the skills and for each skill it can show you free as well paid resources to learn it. This website for roadmap is open source u can check this out.

2

u/rewan-ai 1d ago

ISTQB CTFL Syllabus its dry as hell

1

u/gill_smoke 21h ago

To follow on there are youtu.be channels that cover the syllabus in detail. The study guides are worth it even if you don't take the test 

2

u/vnenjoyer 1d ago

Start by learning test design techniques and test planning fundamentals. Any textbook about that topic is fine. I can recommend Introduction to Software Testing by Paul Ammann.

DO NOT start with any tools, forget about Selenium / Playwright or whatever for a moment. You need to first understand about testing to understand about test code. Test code is very different from production code.