Are you a software tester? Do you want a different path in your career? Software development seems like the natural next step. But is this possible? It might be, if you invest a lot of effort and have the full support from your company and colleagues.
Here, at Infobest, we are always open to help our colleagues learning and developing new skills that would be useful in their careers. From our internship programs to internal training sessions, we are always eager to put our knowledge to good use. With more than 20 years in the business, Infobest is a software development company that has successfully managed to guide and support their employees, either to grow and expand their knowledge in their original career choice, or to start their journey into a different role.
To better understand Infobest’s role in supporting an important change such as changing one’s career path, we invited our colleague Alex to talk about his own journey from a manual testing position, to automatic testing and finally to software development.
Tell us a little bit about your experience as a tester.
I was hired by Infobest right out of college, more than two years ago. Having in mind that it was my first job, and I did not have a lot of experience, I was a little bit nervous about how I would integrate into the team. But my concerns were unfounded. The team welcomed me with open arms and helped me develop my hard and soft skills. In my first year with the company, I was focused on manual testing, and in my second year at Infobest, I started automated testing.
When did you decide that you want a change in your career?
I love testing but I believe that there is always room for developing and improving your skills. Also, I think that it is very important to take advantage of the opportunities that may appear in your life. So, when the management team at Infobest asked me if I was interested in a change in my career path, I was on board!
Tell us a little bit about how you started the journey to become a software developer.
With a smile on my face! As I told you at the beginning, I have a great team beside me. They helped me transition from manual testing to automated testing easily. I could always count on the support of my team and that single fact made the transition fun and easy.
The second transition in my career path, from tester to software developer, started at the beginning of 2021. For this intense training session, I had the assistance of the most experienced developers in our company. The management team was also directly involved in providing all the tools we needed as well as assisting us on different tasks.
Can you share with us how the training sessions unfolded?
I was not alone in my journey to become a software developer. My fellow colleague David and I started our training session in January 2021. In the first month, we took some courses on Udemy (for introduction to programming, programming fundamentals, C, C ++, SQL databases). After a couple of weeks of classes, we started with exercises in C / C ++, being supported and guided by Cami, our dear colleague and teacher, to whom I am grateful not only for the lessons and explanations, but also for her patience. The exercises continued for another month.
Usually, we received the tasks according to our schedule, and we had a few days to solve them (without deadline or pressure). Of course, if we got stuck in the meantime, we asked for help or clarifications. I also received support from my colleague Ralf, for example, when I got stuck sometimes.
The most interesting part of the training was when David and I made an application (Win32 application in C ++). Cami gave us the idea: let us make an application called “Family Budget” – a kind of application that allows the user to enter their expenses and income, depending on their types, so that later they can see how much money they spent and on what. I think that this was a very inspired approach. We not only got to create a complete application from scratch, but this application covered all the important technical components that we needed for our first official project: a user management module, a significant database component, but also a non-trivial GUI.
How did you feel about the transition from testing to development? Was it hard?
Well, the transition just started. This was the first step towards becoming a developer and I know that I have a lot more to learn. This being said, I do not really know what to say, if it was easy or hard, given that I wanted to get here anyway. It is true that it was not the easiest thing, but it was not a burden. I would rather say that it was super interesting and satisfying, especially since we are on the practical side where we work to create something from scratch, which is very nice. It is not easy making the jump from a tester to a software developer but with the help of my colleagues and the support of the company we managed to make this start of the transition easy and fun.
What is the next step for you?
Now I am all invested in learning a lot more about software development and growing the new set of skills that I managed to gather from my training sessions. This month, David and I started working alongside our colleagues on an ongoing project. So, as we just joined this team, I think that the next couple of months will be very challenging and interesting. In the future, I would like to expand my skill set and start learning front-end development.
All in all, no matter what career path I will follow in the future, one thing is certain for me: Infobest and my colleagues will be there to support me in my quest.
Are you a tester who is thinking about making the transition to a developer role? Do you already have some programming experience from past studies or hobbies? Build on that!
You already have an entry into the tech world. Your knowledge of software testing will be of direct value to you when you work as a developer. However, software development requires an important set of skills and knowledge, and to acquire these requires a lot of effort from your side. Nevertheless, a combination of hard work and having very skilled people helping you, makes it definitely possible, as our colleague Alex has proven.