What is a software tester?

[undeterred]

?

[Deja Q]

1. Someone who tests software?

[undeterred]

2. by jumping on it?

or by installing it on 5 million different systems and seeing if it really does everything the company says it does without erroring out...

[seemunkee]

3. That would be load testing

and one aspect of software testing. Testing against the specifications is another aspect.

[undeterred]

4. Someone is asking me to interview for this

I've never done it. But they may want me to be the person who builds the machine/network environments in which the software is run. I think this is a company that tests other people software... not sure, I guess I will find out more tomorrow.

[Writer]

5. This is what my husband does...

Testing is a function of quality assurance. For software engineers, part of the art of writing worthy code is writing scripts (tests) that attempt to break the code being tested. Ironically, if the software tester fails in his or her mission, the code can be released. Typically software testers aim for testing 80% of the total code released to a client.

I hope that helps. :)

[undeterred]

10. thanks it does

[nini]

6. You run/play software to find bugs

You run the software on multiple system configurations with different operating systems, video cards, sound cards, amounts of memory etc. - that system testing.

Then there's functionality testing where you make sure the program works as designed - this is where you try and break the program. Things as basic as making sure all menu items work correctly to going in and out of different activities in different ways to see if the code is functioning as designed.

Testing can be monotonous and tedious, but if you're good at it you can do well in the industry as a lead tester or supervisor.

It's a thankless job in some ways - your job is to find others mistakes - they're annoyed if you do and if you don't there's hell to pay if the program was released with things you didn't find.

[undeterred]

8. Well, I think this is a small company that tests other companies

software. Not quite sure how interesting my role would be, but it could be interesting.

I did work for a software company once that didn't do enough testing- you could say we tested a little bit at the company and a lot at the customer site, and we were constantly releasing fixes and patches. I guess it costs a lot to really test something well. Our software was supposed to interface with fetal monitors and we didn't have enough of them to simulate a whole unit so things never worked as well in the real situation as they did at the company.

But we sure weren't trying to break the software... if something didn't go quite right we called it a "feature". ;-)

[Maineiac]

7. Apatrently anyone who buys something with the Microsoft logo on it.

They tend to push product out the door and use service packs and updates to fix it on the fly afterwards

[undeterred]

9. But the thing is at least with Microsoft the

"known problems" become known fairly quickly because there are thousands of users. You can google it and find out you're not the only one. With more specialized software it can take a long time to find an answer...

And the Microsoft Service Packs and Updates are better than they used to be! (They used to be pretty awful.)

[UncleSepp]

11. A heart attack waiting to happen?

A person who gets paid the medium sized bucks to try to break stuff for a living, and then try to convince the project managers that the broken stuff needs fixing?

(Former Microsoft software tester, checking in...)