How to Hire Good QA People for Web Applications

A veteran software manager recently gave me same valuable insights on finding highly productive and effective QA people.

These two questions reveal a great deal about someone’s mindset and approach to software testing:

1. How do you generate large amounts of test data?
2. What are the pitfalls of automated Web testing and how do you get around them?

Unfortunately, the people running many QA organizations don’t understand these things themselves and wonder why their automated testing efforts repeatedly fail. Those rare few who do and ’splain it to them are prone to get fired because it’s not safe to be smarter than the boss.Almost any programmer can tell you what you need to do to deep testing of a system: how to test each subsystem, how to generate meaningful test data that will really exercise the system, how to do positive and negative (no side effects) testing directly in the database vs. relying solely on what shows up on the screen, etc. In other words, the programmer knows more ways the system can (and can’t) fail because of their knowledge of how it works.

QA and Development should talk more often.