Become a Better QA

What do you do to become a better QA?

It is easy to get distracted by the rush of every day work as a tester. Over time, you get practice and your skills develop and you progress. But it seems such a passive way to go about improving yourself and your career. There are numerous books and blogs and communities out there, not to mention whatever is available locally in your area. So how do you chose?

When I started at my current job, I made it an ongoing personal goal to learn as much as I could about testing and related technologies that will make my job easier, make my team stronger and help our testing efforts go further.

In the last year, I have met a lot of mini-goals along that path- becoming  more comfortable with shell scripting, starting to learn ruby, reading at least two testing books per quarter – but I still feel like I have a lot to do! It is both exciting and overwhelming to dive into open-ended self education.

I frequent blogs that put out fresh new ideas and share experiences, I follow groups online and attended an awesome conference. I’ve considered taking evening classes at a community college (I loved my evening ruby class last spring) and trying to get more involved with the local community. I think both of those may come into play next year. My focus for the next year is both on strengthening my agile testing skills as we have teams switching over to SCRUM, as well as to continue learning Ruby and of course, reading about new QA techniques and approaches.

But where do you turn to become a better tester? How do you decide what to work on and where to improve your skills?