What are different kinds of soft skills to be a successful tester / test manager?

Soft skill can be defined as a sociological term that plays a very important role in the success and personality development of an individual and can be related to his/ her following aspects:

1. Emotional intelligence quotient
2. Personality traits
3. Communication
4. Languages
5. Social graces
6. Friendliness
7. Attitude (whether pessimistic or optimistic) and
8. Personal habits and so on.

Why Soft Skills important?

- Soft skills in a way complement the IQ i.e., intelligence quotient of a person.

- IQ is included in the hard skills of a person.

- All these skills form an essential part of the occupational requirements for a job.

- A tester or test manager also needs to incorporate all these attributes in himself/ herself in order to be successful and enhance his interactions with the fellow team members, career prospects and also the job performance.

- The soft skills of a tester/ test manager can be related to his/ her ability of interacting effectively with the clients, customers and co workers.

- The soft skills of each and every individual combined together contribute to the success of the organization which can’t be ignored.

- This is the reason why the soft skills are being focussed up on as equally as the hard skills.

Soft skills are considered to be as the behavioural competencies and are more commonly known as the interpersonal skills and include:
1. Conflict resolution
2. Conflict negotiation
3. Communication skills
4. Creative problem solving
5. Selling skills
6. Strategic thing
7. Influencing skills
8. Team building etc.

Another Soft Skill

- Ability to participate actively in the group discussions is also an essential soft skill that companies seek in the testers and test managers.
- It is often the first criteria for the selection.
- Good communication and group discussion skills are the must software skills for the testers.
- The best thing about the soft skills is that they are honed for the professional needs but they eventually affect ones personal life in all the aspects.

So instead of just honing the technical skills, the testers require to focus up on building up their soft skills. But here we do not mean to say that the hard skills should be undermined. A tester cannot survive his job if he is not good at his technical skills. You need to strike a balance between both the hard and soft skills to make yourself a successful tester.

Some Important Soft Skills
Here are some important soft skills:

1. Discipline and perseverance
These two soft skills are psychological tools to persevere and make your efforts more productive. It increases the quality of your work and helps you focus well.

2. Reading skills
Reading skill may sound odd here but its importance will be realised as you deal on with the large amount of specifications and information every day. Testers have to deal with large chunks of information and a hell lot of documentations every day and so honing this soft skill becomes apparently necessary.

3. Negative thinking
Now you must be wondering what this is for. Well, negative thinking though works badly for the real aspects of life but it really helps a lot in testing while using tactics like negative testing, exploratory testing, fault injection techniques etc, since in such testing techniques, the tester to consider all the things by which the program can be affected.

4. Communication and interpersonal skills

5. Time management skills
These are needed since you need to make most of your time.

6. Effort prioritization
This is needed to assign importance to the tasks so that you an finish up all of them efficiently without messing up.

7. Attitude

How to test real-time systems?

Real time applications are time dependent and asynchronous in nature. Time is the new factor that adds complication in testing real time systems. The test cases should be designed so that they consider event handling, timing of data and parallelism of tasks handling the data. Also, the relationship that exists between real time software and hardware can cause testing problems.

An effective strategy for testing a real time system are:
- One should test each task independently and tests are designed and executed for each task. This task testing uncovers errors in logic and function but not timing or behavior.
- The behavior of real time system can be simulated by using system models and this behavior can be examined and it can be served as a basis for test case design.
- Testing shifts to time related errors once errors in individual tasks and in system behavior have been isolated. Asynchronous tasks are tested with different data rates and load to test whether inter task synchronization errors will occur.
- System tests are done to uncover errors at the interface. Generally, real time systems process interrupts therefore, testing and handling of boolean events is essential.

How to create a behavioral model in software engineering?

While other analysis modeling elements provides a static view of the software, behavioral modeling depicts the dynamic behavior. The behavioral model uses input from scenario based, flow oriented and class based elements to represent the states of analysis classes and the system as a whole. To accomplish this, states are identified, the events that cause a class to make a transition from one state to another are defined, and the actions that occur as transition is accomplished are also identified. State diagrams and sequence diagrams are the UML notation used for behavioral modeling.

The behavioral model is an indication showing how a software responds to external event. Steps to be followed are:
- All use cases are evaluated.
- Events are identified and their relation to classes are identified.
An event occurs whenever the system and an user exchange information. An event is not the information that is exchanged but a fact that information has been exchanged.

- A sequence is created for use-case.
- A state diagram is built.
There are two different characterizations of states in behavioral modeling : state of class as system performs its function and the state of the system as seen from outside. The system has states that represent specific externally observable behavior whereas a class has states that represent its behavior as the system performs its functions.
- Behavioral model is reviewed for accuracy and consistency.

What is Software Architecture ? What are subsystems and interfaces?

Software architecture defines a set of decisions about the organization. It includes:
- how to select structural elements.
- how to select their interfaces.
- how to select the behavior.
- how to select the composition of these structural and behavioral elements into larger subsystems.
- architectural style that guides this organization.
A software architecture is a description of the sub-systems and components of a software system and the relationships between them.
Software architecture is layered structure of software components and the manner in which these components interact.
A software architecture is modeled using package diagram of UML. A package is a model element that can contain other elements.
A subsystem is a combination of package and class. The advantages of defining subsystem are:
- Development of smaller units is possible.
- Re-usability increases.
- Handling complexity is managed properly.
- Maintainability eases.
- Supports portability.

An interface is a set of operations.
- Allows the separation of the declaration of behavior from the realization of the behavior.
- Serves as a contract to help in the independent development of the components by the development team, and ensures that the components can work together.
- There are two styles of communication subsystems use: client-server and peer-to-peer communication.

What is Black box testing and what are its advantages and disadvantages ?

Black box testing is a test design method. It treats the system as a "black-box" so it does not explicitly use the knowledge of the internal structure. In other words, the test engineer does not require to know the internal working of the black box. Black box testing focuses on the functionality part of the module. Black box testing is also known as opaque box and closed box testing. While the term black box testing is more commonly, many people prefer the terms "behavioral" and "structural" for black-box and white-box respectively.
There are bugs that cannot be found using only black box testing or only white box testing. If the test cases are extensive and the test inputs are also from a large sample space then it is always possible to find majority of the bugs through black box testing.

The basic functional or regression testing tools capture the results of black box tests in a script format. Once captured, these scripts can be executed against future builds of an application to verify that new functionality has not disabled previous functionality.

Advantages of Black Box Testing
- It is not important for the tester to be technical. He can be a non-technical person.
- This testing is most likely to find those bugs as the user would have found.
- Testing helps to identify the vagueness and contradiction in functional specifications.
- Test cases can be designed as soon as the functional specifications are complete.

Disadvantages of Black Box Testing
- There are chances of repetition of tests that are already done by the programmer.
- The test inputs needs to be from large sample space.
- It is difficult to identify all possible inputs in limited testing time. So, writing test cases is slow and difficult.
- There are chances of having unidentified paths during testing.