Tester Skills Program Foundation: Introduction

Introducing your tutor and the Testing Skills Programme

Tester Skills Program - Foundation

The Tester Skills Program or TSP is a community-driven initiative aimed at addressing some of the key challenges faced by employers of testers. The key challenges revolve around the recruitment, development and retention of junior testers - usually new graduates and often, computer science majors. The TSP is designed to provide a more in-depth, insightful and useful learning experience than training geared towards certification.

Certified schemes focus primarily on logistics, or one way of implementing testing, the TSP focuses on thinking  to encourage and enable testers to make informed choices on HOW  they implement testing. The TSP encourages testers to think for themselves.

It does this by broadening the syllabus to include professional and personal skills such as collaboration and team-working. But it also provides a deeper insight into the job of testing by including modules on Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking and the New Model for Testing which is a framework for exploring the local and logistical aspects of the testing mission.

The development goal of the TSP  is to pose assignments that trigger the student to explore their local practices (logistics) with their peers and leadership.

The TSP is intended to be a Learning and Development Program, not just classroom or online lectures. These introductory lessons provide background to the scheme and how it should be used from a student and an employer perspective.

Lesson Plan

Paul Gerrard

Paul Gerrard is a consultant, teacher, author, webmaster, programmer, tester, conference speaker, rowing coach and publisher. He has conducted consulting assignments in all aspects of software testing and quality assurance, specialising in test assurance. He has presented keynote talks and tutorials at testing conferences across Europe, the USA, Australia, South Africa and occasionally won awards for them.

Educated at the universities of Oxford and Imperial College London, he is a Principal of Gerrard Consulting Limited, the host of the UK Test Management Forum and the Programme Chair for the 2014 EuroSTAR testing conference.

In 2010 he won the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award and in 2013 he won the inaugural TESTA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018 he won the ISTQB Testing Excellence award.

He's been programming since the mid-1970s and loves using the Python programming language.

John Smith

Developer

Highly Recommended Course. Easy to Understand, Informative, Very Well Organized. The Course is Full of Practical and Valuable for Anyone who wants to Enhance their Skills. Really Enjoyed it. Thank you!!

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    Tester Skills Program - Introduction
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    A short series of videos introducing the Tester Skills Program. We introduce Paul your tutor and describe how the program works.

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