Career Track: Quality Assurance (Testing)

  Article: Quality Assurance Professionals, also known as Quality Assurance Engineers, Testers or Specialists are responsible for testing IT systems such as software or Internet applications to ensure the technical and business requirements have been fulfilled.

Primary functions include executing the actual testing, analyzing test results, and in some cases, defining the original process to manage potential bugs. Quality Assurance Professionals may be responsible for developing and implementing testing strategies and automated scripts while reviewing test designs and software tools. They may also be required to delver software releases.

Educational Requirements:

While a college degree is required for most testing positions, there aren't any degree programs that specifically target QA. Normally 1-2 year's experience is required in a software-related discipline but quite often people find themselves in this position by default. Testing does require a certain personality type and if you're it - you'll be in heaven. If not, you won't last very long before moving on. In some cases knowledge of HTML is a requirement and C++ might crop up as well. Other popular languages in which to have fundamental knowledge are C, Java and Visual Basic. Some testers are required to write their own testing programs and therefore may need programming skills as well.

Salary Potential:

(As reported by the U.S. Dept. of Labor)

Average salaries (nationwide):

Entry (less than 1 year of experience): $45,172

Junior (1-2 years of experience): $49,266

Emerging (3-5 years of experience): $56,171

Experienced (6-9 years of experience): $60,649

Advanced (10+ years of experience): $65,623

Industry Certifications:

Although there are two organizations that offer certification for Quality Assurance Professionals, very few industry professionals actually take the time to attain these. If you're serious about a position in the Quality Assurance field, having these certifications on your resume will definitely put you ahead of the majority of your competitors.

The Quality Assurance Institute offers the following certifications:

Certified Software Quality Analyst (CSQA)

Certified Software Tester (CSTE)

Certified Software Project Manager (CSPM).

The American Society for Quality offers the certification for Software Quality Engineer. For more information please visit the following link.

http://www.asq .org/cert/types/csqe/index.html

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About the author:

Exforsys is a community of developers specializing in C, C++, C#, Java, J2EE, .NET, PeopleSoft, SAP, Siebel, Oracle Apps., Data warehousing, Oracle/SQL Server/DB2 and Testing. Please visit http://www.exforsys.com for more tutorials and for IT Interview questions http://www.geekinterview.com is an open database.

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