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Originally Posted by Chrisb3  Thinking about perhaps being a tester first, and perhaps working on a codeportfolio while I gain some experience. Anyone have any experiences doing that? |
Alright this is exactly what I did so I can help out a bit.
My degree required a mandatory year of co/op education. Basically getting an internship. For 3 quarters I did not attend school, I just went to work. My job was as an
automated software tester. Here is the trick though, if you are just simply doing non-automated software testing you probably won't touch code very often. I can break it down how it was at my place:
Automated Software Testers: We leveraged a (now) IBM program called Rational Functional Tester (RFT.) We were somewhat early adopters of this software, which was originally called XDE tester, so there were some growing pains. At the core of it you would write scripts in Java to automatically click on either a Java application window or an internet browser (IE & Firefox were supported.) This allowed me to write tons of lines of Java using RFT's classes. This is what I did for a while. After being there for about 2 years I moved in more towards the back-end and this is where I really learned my Java.
RFT is a good program, at its core. However, there are alot of things that could be made easier for "scripters" if they just made some back-end modifications. So me and one other intern did these changes for RFT. We had about an 1800 line class we'd import to every single script to make it's life easier. Well, technically we JAR'd all the files so we had an 1800 line class and about 12 or so 150-200 line classes to "help out" with RFT's short comings. We would reflect methods, we'd thread when needed and we'd condense RFT's verbose syntax down. It was ALOT of back-end Java programming work but it gave me many lessons learned.
After this my company was bought out and I stopped getting much work to do. The program we were required to automate was fully automated for every scenario possible. The database was fully normalized and followed all relational concepts. This is when I started to make my code portfolio. I'd assign myself various tasks to write. Mostly applications with a Swing interface (so I could leverage MVC) and doing some tasks. I'd try to incorporate OOD patterns into all of them and make sure the code was elegant. I'd spend maybe 1.5-2weeks per task then log the code in my portfolio.
Manual Software Testers: These guys did nothing in Java. I was never one so I can't say exactly what they did but I worked with my fair share. For the most part instead of writing scripts to automatically click on things these guys just click on them themselves. It is literally clicking on a window for 8hours a day and filling out bug reports. You never see the program you're working on's source code nor do you worry about the automated source code. Sometimes they would run my automated test suites and tell me if things were not working in my code and I'd fix it. For the most part these guys required no programming knowledge nor did they gain any from the position. The only knowledge they'd gain is if they would bounce some ideas or gain some insight from some of the seasoned automated testers. I know I had to explain what an interface is and why you'd use it at least 5 times at the job haha.
Anyways I hope that helped. I was an automated tester for about 4 years and it was a great experience. Getting paid nearly $15 an hour throughout all of college helped a ton with the bills as well. Since you're already graduated I guess that doesn't matter too much now, though!
You may not be afforded this luxery. I was lucky to get paid to create my portfolio. Howvever, every line of source was written by me and nothing was "trade secret" things. They were simply just helper programs. You may need to learn a language better then write it in your spare time.