How to make a powerful CV for a Software QA Professional
The CV is the first impression about you to a potential employer. Hence, making a solid first impression via a well-written CV is crucial.
Shortlisting a CV
You need to know that the hiring manager only spends a few seconds shortlisting a few CVs out of hundreds of CVs. You must write your CV to catch the hiring manager’s attention in 20-30 seconds. If the hiring manager is impressed with your CV, they may spend a few minutes reading more details.
In this article, I will not discuss CV formats; instead, I will discuss points that a QA can include in their CV to make it more impressive.
I believe the QA’s role extends beyond simply testing the product. Quality assurance professionals must implement effective processes in the organization to reduce service costs by avoiding error-cost and rework-cost etc. Hence, introducing new processes while testing the product is part of the QA’s responsibility.
The points which I am sharing here are not only related to testing the product but also improving the process as well.
A CV should consist of more results-oriented information rather than generic information. Let me give you some examples.
GUI Automation
- Automated all the automatable GUI test cases of a web application using Selenium with Java and reduced the manual test execution effort by 70% within six months
- Introduced and added “selenium-data” attribute to all web elements to identify web elements uniquely and avoid test failures 100% due to XPath/CSS issues
- By making automation code available when development was completed using the test first approach and maintaining 0 ideal times between development and testing
- Initiated a process in automation to generate manual test cases automatically via automation code and saved 30% of test case management time
Backend Automation
- Improved the backend automation framework by adding more reusable helper methods, which reduced 50% of code lines/time to add component and integration tests
- Increased service level e2e automation coverage using Rest Assured and improved the automated test execution time by more than 50%
- Reviewed unit test and component test files in the developer’s pull requests and added missing unit/component tests, and contributed to maintaining over 95% of code coverage
Process
- Promoted shift-left process, facilitated early testing within the project, and reduced defect leakage to staging by 30% compared to the previous levels.
- Improved project documentation, including training videos, and cut down the effort needed to train a new resource by 80% – 90%
Non-functional Testing
- Conducted performance tests in all crucial APIs, identified performance bottlenecks and finetuned the response time by 25% with the help of developers.
Continuous Integration
- Configured component and integration tests to run against all dev commits via CI to get early feedback on the quality within 3 mins.
- Configured all UI tests to run nightly and automatically shared test results via email/slack among internal stakeholders to make them aware of the quality of components they own
Team Leading
- Led the QA team to push a few critical features to production on time with the highest quality, which generated over US $2M per month of revenue without any major prod issues over three months.
- Promoted and provided necessary training and resources to the QA engineers in the organization and made 40% of them ISTQB-certified testers.
- Initiated a fully automated screening test to filter candidates for new hiring and reduced application to offer time by 20%
Please note that the points and numbers mentioned above are just samples. This article aims to give some ideas for you to think of to improve your CV. I strongly recommend not copying and pasting any points to your CV. Instead, try to write your role in a result-oriented way.
That’s it for today, guys. Thank You for Reading! I hope you found this article informative and useful.
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