I love quality. I love things that work well, I expect perfection from people, especially if they are providing a service to me. I do not understand when someone cannot do their job. I am a critical and sometimes persimisstic person. I’ve always thought these were my vices, but after reading a certain book by James Bach, I’m starting to reconsider. Apparently these are just the qualities that are needed to be successful in software testing.
I love code, I like the rush I get when I debug (my simple) programs and manage to get them to work.This has got me to really consider a career in Software Testing or Quality Assurance. The testing work I do for Mozilla is sporadic and I havent done that much to consider myself a Software Tester yet, this is mostly due to schedule conflicts, lack of an active Internet connection at home and of course lack of finances.
Don’t get me wrong, I love volunteering and I dedicate a lot of my time and energy towards the OpenSource movement but money is important too. I have not done as much testing for Mozilla as I’d like because there is no immediate financial gain, so I usually end up working on other things (that pay) that aren’t related to what I do. For instance, for the past three months, I’ve been tutoring at a local College. This leaves me with little or no time to test Firefox and/or the Mozilla Websites.
I recently joined another Organisation that does Software Testing called uTest. uTest crowd sources testers from all over the world to perform Functional, Security,Load,Usability and Localisation testing on all sorts of applications from Web to mobile.uTest provides a service to its customers by crowd sourcing testers and payes them based on the quality of their work(Base pay + tester ranking + bug bonuses). Gold ranked testers get anything between $1000 and $10000 per project (That got your attention didn’t it?).I haven’t been rated yet and I certainly hope to get to be Gold rated one day.
As a new tester, I had to attend a Sandbox testing week , where I had to test a Website, follow the test cases and submit up to two bugs.
To pass the sandbox, I needed to do the above and be in the top 30% of my class. I failed to find any bugs on the test-site but only managed to complete the testcases. I’m worried about how this will affect my performance. According to the uTest website, failing to pass the sandbox test means you cannot be invited to paid projects(or test cycles as they call them).
I should get an email response with feedback and next steps next week. I’ll put up another blog post about how that goes.
That said, I think uTest is a great opportunity to anyone who wants to apply their knowledge, learn a thing or two and make a quick buck while they are at it.