So you have a solid resume and LinkedIn profile, and you’re ready to get a new software testing QA job. How do you find QA jobs, what do you apply for, and how do you follow job application best practices?

Where to Look For QA Jobs

In this day and age, there are dozens of major job sites. On one hand, it’s great to have so many resources. But on the other, it can be difficult to cut through the noise. You also don’t want to end up wasting time.

Some of the best sites for finding QA jobs include:

• Indeed
• Hired
• Vettery
• LinkedIn
• Dice
• AngelList
• Jooble

Interested in working from home? If you’re located in America, Mindful QA is often hiring for remote QA jobs, including remote manual testing jobs and remote QA automation jobs. If you’re just looking to pick up extra hours on the side, we also have work for part-time freelance QA testers.

Indeed QA Jobs

Indeed has two main options: Indeed Prime and an online job board. If using the latter, you can filter and save searches by location, job title (for example, QA analyst or QA engineer jobs), experience level, salary, and more. You can also read reviews of the employer posting the position.

Indeed Prime is a free service that lets you post your resume Continue reading →

Smoke testing is one of the most common terms in a QA vocabulary. It involves doing light (and often ad-hoc) tests of major features, typically right before or after a release. While smoke testing is one of the quickest and most basic forms of QA testing, it’s also one of the most important when time is tight.

To understand the purpose, it can be helpful to think of the phrase, “when there’s smoke, there’s fire.” A big part of smoke testing is keeping an eye out for red flags, which could indicate other instabilities in the software.

Smoke Testing Examples

Ideally, a mobile app or website will have also gone through more rigorous testing in other QA phases. But smoke testing is used as a back-up, to be extra cautious, or when there’s not enough time for the ideal level of QA testing.

For example, say that you’re about to launch a new version of an app. It already passed QA, but you want some quick last-minute testing done before you publish to the App Store, just to be safe. If you ask QA to smoke test the login feature, they might check that logging in with valid credentials works. They would also likely verify that attempting to log in with an incorrect password brings up an error message.

However, with smoke testing, QA would not be nearly as thorough as other types of testing. Regression testing, on the other hand, would likely incorporate testing case sensitivity, switching between different users, etc. (Learn more about how to do regression testing.) Continue reading →

User experience. You’ve probably heard the term many times, but it’s often used in different ways. Whether you’ve worked in tech for 20 years or just downloaded your first mobile app, user experience (or “UX”) can have a big impact on your day-to-day life. Let’s talk about what exactly “user experience” is, with some real world examples.

What is user experience? It’s actually pretty simple:

The overall experience of a person using a website or app, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.

As you may have guessed, some aspects of user experience can be subjective. Maybe you think hamburger menu icons are elegant and helpful, while others find them inconvenient. Perhaps you find it annoying when sites require complex passwords, while others might appreciate the added security. Continue reading →