1. The shift-left/more technical requirements in testing does not have to be intimidating for manual testers.
2. Some inspirational ideas on how to become more technical as a tester.
3. Becoming more technical does not always mean learning to code.

Ali Hill has been a software tester for over three and a half years. Starting off as a games tester, he then moved into a more traditional software testing role at Craneware testing a web application produced for the U.S. healthcare industry. Ali graduated with a History degree from the University of Edinburgh but has since developed a passion for software development and is interested in all things DevOps, performance testing and automation.

With the current ‘shift-left’ focus in software testing, there is an idea that testers need to become more technical. This can be an intimidating challenge for mainly manual testers.

As a History graduate who fell into testing, with no coding experience, this discussion used to intimidate me as I never regarded myself as technical. This talk covers how I have been dealing with this challenge.

I began to focus on what I was passionate about within testing. There is a perception that learning to code is the only way to assist in becoming more technical, I believe this is wrong.

I’ll discuss how I began a journey on becoming more technical with some tools and methodologies and how I applied this to my work – including any mistakes that I made! I’ll be discussing writing automated checks and learning to code, following continuous delivery/integration best practices and performance testing and more!