Career challenges and problems are quite natural and useful things. A specialist can deal with it quickly and effectively only when he/she takes it as a matter of course and opportunity to succeed through the ranks.
All the IT specialists in their work face various challenges and difficulties which results in gaining the new latest informational knowledge and skills.
Some challenges are connected with a particular profession and some of them are common for the whole IT community. The most important and widespread of them can form a list of top 10 problems faced by any tester on projects anyway.
1. Company Culture
It is the most general and the most important item on our list. That’s because any IT profession makes a human to interact with different departments, workers from other offices, and clients. After some time, the employee has his/her own opinion about the enterprise environment. Thus, he/she can easily distinguish 2 kinds of people:
- Someone who is pleasant and interesting to work with;
- Someone he/she worked a few times with but doesn’t want such an experience anymore.
IT group’s commonality can be only in the wish to achieve some goal. But their daily graft can be completely different.
Let’s imagine such a situation. One company stands for strict adherence to the work schedule, and the second boss does not mind arranging for employees 20-minute breaks during the day. The first ones can create strict rules to limit the use of social networks during working hours.
But the second one does not mind making a special leisure room in the office with beautiful flowers, sofas, and calm relaxing music. Some are in favor of strict discipline, while others do not use corporate restrictions in communication between bosses and employees.
And you don’t need to look for a golden mean here: both the strictest corporate order and the moderate permissiveness have the right to exist. In any case, over some time, employees will simply adapt to the rules and regulations surrounding them, trying to comply with established standards and, bring their ideas and suggestions, if possible.
2. Different Time Zones
You must admit that you or some your colleague-freelancer where in a situation when you had to sit at the laptop at 11 pm or 4 am and agree about some work-related issues with a team that lives in another time zone. We think that many have faced such a situation.
And you cannot avoid these inconveniences (only strong coffee can help you with it). But still you may try to use one effective advice: agree some convenient time for everybody. That will help to deal with all problems and work as productive as possible.
3. Cross-Cultural Differences
Work in IT sphere (especially being a QA specialist) in the USA or in Europe is completely different. At first blush, it might seem that company culture is one thing and ethnic specifics is entirely different. In fact, they fully implement our behavioral peculiarities while interacting.
A simple example. In the USA somebody asks you – Hi, how are you? It doesn’t mean that this person wants to know your current mood or health conditions. He/she needs to get information about some business issue.
But if you are a new hire and just moved to a new country, then this question can confuse you. That’s because if you have just seen this person, you will not see at once what exactly he/she wants from you.
There is nothing to do but adapt and try to do this sort of thing.
And one more thing. Some cultures believe that short conversation is effective enough while solving some issue. Others felt that if you talk too much, you have nothing to say in fact.
Understanding of such details allows you to notice unique peculiarities of different cultures, as well as to work better with people from these regions.
It was widespread problems of all the IT specialists. Further, we will talk about QA problems which have their own peculiarities and critical moments.4. No documentation on a project
This is a common thing. There are some companies and departments which prefer only verbal communication. They are not interested in saving the background information in certain physical or digital format.
On the other hand, this is the situation when the problem can be transferred into a set of useful capabilities.
Try to stay close to your colleagues, business analytics or engineering experts. You may explore the product by yourself: make some standards for your software, define the perspectives of a final user.
Run all the stages of exploratory testing and make your own universal documentation for future tasks.
5. Changeable Environment
As a rule, most QA departments suffer from a bad organization of their working environment. However, you always need to get the maximum profit from the things you have at some particular moment.
For example, we have a server that’s overloaded with data and someone must constantly watch on its technical state. What can a tester do about it? He/she can only perform a load test on this server. In result, this QA specialist gets fixed server and some new skills.
Also, you should try to propose for consideration some actual problems and suggest your solutions to some situations. Create a block of technical documentation for common cases. Moreover, this block can be used as a universal template.
6. Irrelevant Tools
Often, during the software testing process, the QA department faced with the need to use outdated and inefficient tools. They have no choice but to use them because the management has already bought software licenses, and the client wants to build and test the web product with the already purchased interactive tools.
Yes, it is unfortunate, especially in the time of daily developing technologies. But there is nothing to be done, and it remains only to accept such events as a given and look for alternatives, if possible.
On the other hand, after some time, you will have the opportunity to visually convince management that the alternatives used in project X were very effective than product Y, which the company has been using for a couple of years.
7. Ineffective Software
Probably, one in three testers has ever wondered: how can “this” be released under the guise of new software, despite the fact it is full of bugs? When you work on similar projects, you often ask yourself, if there is any reason to test the product that will never be an example of safety and easiness.
You have only 2 ways: get used to this or make a point. You can refuse to test and reason that the user shouldn’t get the software which doesn’t have any positive aspect (from the technical side).
8. No Feedback
Sometimes you work on some part of the software that was not approved by the client two days ago but you don’t know that (especially it concerns outsourcing testing companies).
A sense of isolation often appears not only if you are on another continent, but even if several city streets separate you from the client.
9. Prejudiced Attitude
Everybody knows that most companies have their own prejudices about nationality, gender or religion. You do not have to enter into controversy and reason about who is right and who is wrong.
Advice! You should see the world as one big family where everybody is equal and engaged in helpful and profitable processes.
10. Behavioral Oddity
All people are different personalities. That’s why they can react to the same information in different ways. Do not stick labels or make some biases on your colleagues in the office.
There should not be an escalation of the situation because your coworker is too emotional when he/she talks to administration. Sticking the labels and making negative assessments is a duty of nonprofessionals and mean people. We should get on well with everybody and try to communicate on equal terms.
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