My Path to Testing. Comparison of Two Courses
The great art of learning much is to take on little at once. John Locke
My Path to Testing. Comparison of Two Courses
Introduction.
Hello, my name is Vitaly and I would like to share my experience of studying on various online platforms. I will not write the names of the schools here, so as not to engage in advertising and anti-advertising, but for simplicity I will call one school “First” and the other “Second”.
So, after 20 years of working in the communications and telecommunications industry, I decided to change my profession. Why, what for? This is a question that goes beyond the scope of this article, in which I want to compare two different online courses on software testing training. They are so different in their approaches to training and in the organization of the training process itself that I think readers, especially those who are thinking about acquiring the profession of “QA engineer”, will be interested in comparing the different approaches.
I was lucky enough to study at both, and if at the First School I completed the course “Web Application Testing” (one of three courses that were in the curriculum), then at the Second I only came to the end of my studies. Yes, I did not complete the curriculum at the First School and transferred to the Second, and there were both objective and subjective reasons for this. Without going into detail, after completing the course “Web Application Testing” I should have become a competent manual QA engineer at the “Junior” level, but… The knowledge and skills I gained on the course were enough for me to say on occasion: “Testing?! Yes, I know what you mean. It is a complex and labor-intensive process.” At the interviews I attended, nothing I learned during the course helped me, I had to take information from free third-party sources on the Internet (the place of testing in development; a detailed description of the software life cycle; the role and place of a QA engineer on a project; the difference between manual and automated testing teams; what literature is there on testing theory, etc., etc.). And so, while studying and selecting literature on testing on https://habr.com, I found a link to a textbook for self-study of testing, written by a group of active testers with extensive practical experience. The authors distribute the textbook itself for free, but they also organized a school where you can learn manual testing. This is the Second School, where I went to study after studying their website and talking with the administrative director of the school.
Orientation of schools (what they study, what areas)
A little about the schools themselves. For ease of comparison, we will describe each point by point:
School fame, advertising.
Type of school (offline, online, etc.)
Founders, school leaders.
Number of areas of study.
First school
I am sure that you have heard about it more than once, since the advertising of this school is very broad and in all possible directions.
This is not a school or a course as such, it is a digital platform that provides access to pre-recorded short videos (usually 5-8 minutes, but no more than 13 minutes).
The School's directors and founders had and do not have any relation to IT. The student does not encounter them.
The School offers a variety of programs, from pastry chef, screenwriter and director to project manager and, of course, “Test Engineer” with mandatory employment.
Second school
I'm not sure if non-specialists know or have heard of it. I haven't seen any advertisements for the school online, but it is mentioned in the Manifesto of Professional IT Education (Manifestus.Pro), the composition of whose supervisory board inspires respect.
These are courses with online classes that position themselves as professional education in the field of QA.
Manager and creator in the IT industry since 2001 with experience in QA in various positions from Junior to leading the testing team. Constantly in touch with students, ready to discuss the formats of conducting classes, the quality of the material, the possibility of conducting and the topics of additional classes.
The School has only one direction, “Software Testing,” in Russian and English (the School is not limited to the Russian job market).
Teaching Staff
First school
The teaching staff can be divided into 2 categories: those who read the material in the videos, and those who check the homework (reviewer). It is difficult to doubt the professionalism of the former, but there are certain questions about the latter. My reviewer once wrote in the chat that he was having trouble with the Java PL course, and this message was dated a year earlier. That is, the reviewer is either still a student at the School or graduated from it only a year ago.
Second school
Here is 1 category: who conducts classes, checks homework and communicates with students. Classes are conducted by active specialists in large companies in the industry with at least 10 years of experience each and who have reached certain heights and positions.
Training program, type of training
First school
The school offers an asynchronous learning format, meaning there is no schedule or classes as such, and no deadlines. The “student” watches a video, then does his homework (hereinafter – HOW) and sends it for checking. The curator (reviewer) assigned to him checks the HOW and gives feedback. The student corrects the HOW and sends it for checking, and so on until the reviewer accepts his work. How long it will take is not important, it can be one day, or a year. In fact, the speed of learning depends on the desire and resources of the student: you can complete the course for a lifetime, or in a few months. I read messages in the chat from students who studied in the same course for more than one year.
Communication with the school, reviewers and other students takes place in chats. There were more than 3.5 thousand students in our telegram chat “Test Engineer”.
The training program includes:
Main courses: “Testing web applications”, “Manual testing of mobile applications”, “Basics of one of the 3rd PL (Java, Python, JS)” “Autotests”;
Additional courses: “Fundamentals of web layout”, “Fundamentals of SQL”;
Bonus courses: “GIT version control system”.
The program itself, according to the School, is designed for 10 months with classes no more than 20 hours per week.
What I liked when I first got acquainted with the program was its richness and the ability to take classes without being tied to a specific time. In the latter lies, in my opinion, the main drawback of the training: the student is separated from the team, or rather, there is no team as such. He is alone in his desire to become a tester… Even the final projects that he can add to his portfolio are done alone by the student. It seems to me that a tester is first and foremost a team player and he must understand how his work is structured in a development team.
The next drawback of the training program, I would say, oddly enough, is its content. Yes, what I liked at first turned into unsolvable problems later, namely the content of each course and each lesson. The course had many subtopics: test design techniques, field testing, test documentation; DevTools, API, UI/UX testing; security testing. But their content… Well, in the course I learned that there are equivalence classes, boundary values, pairwise testing, I kind of tried how they work, even understood, successfully did and submitted the homework. But the fact that they are related to test design, why they are needed and that equivalence classes are not just numbers, I learned from other sources.
Second school
The school offers only a synchronous format of training, 2.5-hour classes twice a week with deadlines for homework and grades. Yes. There are grades here!!! There are no more than 15 people in a group, a huge plus is that teachers give practical tasks to students during classes, dividing them into teams in advance. Thus, communication between team members occurs within the teams, and skills for working together are developed. By the way, the teachers who conduct classes also check homework. They are ready and give feedback on all issues related to training and more. Communication with the school, with teachers and other students occurs in the chat, it is possible to organize an online call.
The training program includes one course: “Manual testing” with topics:
– RELATIONAL DATABASES; LINUX; NETWORKS; SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE; REST & AP; WEB UI; TEST DESIGN; AUTOMATION BASICS (without fanaticism, only the basics for understanding how it works); SOFTWARE LIFE CYCLE AND DEVELOPMENT PROCESS.
A separate section is devoted to topics on organizing the learning process, finding your first job, the benefits of which are hard to overestimate. They explain very clearly how to CORRECTLY choose a learning format and how to build it yourself. This is not an advertisement for some product, course or learning format. It is rather about what questions you need to ask yourself, how not to get lost in the wealth of choice, what you should think about and most importantly: IS IT WORTH STARTING. At least, understanding this material allowed me to better understand myself, to understand what work rhythm is most interesting to me, and also that I do not want to LIVE in such a rhythm. A paradox that I still have to figure out.
In addition, as a bonus, there is an Internship (2 months) in a real company on a real project in a real team (design, development, DevOps, etc.) under the supervision of the head of the School. So that you understand, the School agrees with one of the companies operating in the market that its students will build quality assurance processes for them from scratch and turnkey. This project can then be included in your portfolio as a short-term employment contract.
Differences in course admissions and courses' approaches to student recruitment
First school
If the payment is successful, everyone is credited. And they can't help but credit, since the connection to the digital platform is being sold here. Accordingly, they can't deduct either.
Second school
But here everything is more complicated.
Let's start with the fact that a mandatory condition for enrollment in the School is career guidance and passing the entrance exam. No specific knowledge is required to successfully pass the exam (they provide material for study in advance). What is important here is motivation and a mindset that is suitable for this profession. This is how the entrance control takes place.
The midterm control is organized by control of the homework submission. Those who fail to submit several times without good reason are expelled from the course.
The training ends with an exit test – the FINAL EXAM.
To be continued….
